Most of us will agree that the most talented people are already in good jobs and doing well. Passive job seekers are just that, passive and not actively looking, that is why sources like Linkedin are such good sources to find talent but just because I can find someone on Linkedin doesn’t mean I can covince them to come and work at the company where I work.

Many recruiters receive training on how to source or find candidates but the sourcing bit is the less difficult part in our opinion. Selection and filtering out the most appropriate person is easier than convincing them to work for you or a third party.

3 Ways to Use Social Media to Source Quality Candidates

That is often the trickier part of the process. But for the sake of this post let’s look at three ways in which we can effectively source talent using social media and in a future post we wll look at convincing them.

Listen to relevant conversations.

Identify the topics that your target talent are discussing in the real world and search online for the places where those topics are being discussed. Ifyou find relevant conversations you often find relevant talent. Good people can be found talking online or offline about what matters to them. There are very cheap or even free tools like Netvibes, Sprout Social or Google Blogsearch that will allow you to find the conversations and where you find the right conversations you will often find the right people.

Talent Communities

If you find that the conversations your target talent are interested in are not being facilitated online, then it may well be worth your time facilitating a space for those conversations to happen online. Set up an online space like a blog or talent community hub and also set up the relevant social channels. Incentivise your existing talent to supply relevant content to the online group. Regular and relevant content can help generate conversations and conversations are a critical component of a community. Building a community is a skill that requires an appropriate plan and process, so do seek out a good online community builder for some advice before going down this path. If you can get this right then it’s like having the goose that lays the golden egg from a candidate perspective.

Online word of mouth referrals

We all know that from a performance and length of service perspective the best hires often come from recommendations and referrals from your existing performers. If you put online referral tools in place that allow existing talent to share job opportunities then this is a much cheaper way for direct and agency recruiters to source talent. Use Add This or Share It buttons to your jobs on your site or use more advanced tools like Select Minds, Rolepoint or Jobvite for a more structured and measurable way of sharing jobs online. Betfair, the UK head quartered online betting company, use this method for hiring staff and as a result they have dramatically improved their referral scheme and allowed them to source cheaper yet higher quality candidates by leveraging their existing talent and their contacts.

Colm Hannon is a guest blogger for Blogging4Jobs and is also the Managing Director of eSocialMediaUK. You can contact him On Twitter at  @ColmHannon or colm.hannon@esocialmedia.co.uk