Business Social Media Recruitment and Retention Techniques We Can Use
Social media has proven to be very valuable in the business community to recruit and retain staff and we in the emergency service community can learn from them, particularly regarding potential and current member/employee engagement.
Businesses have realized that they can no longer recruit good people by just posting a job or relying on word of mouth or traditional sources. Even our competitors for volunteers have realized this and both have begun using social media techniques to accomplish recruiting members and employees. For example, your social media sites can be used for
- Posts and messages about your meetings, training, incidents, fundraisers, etc.
- Informal networking, where you are simply posting stories about your organization or its people
- mining for talent of simply posting for openings – asking openly “Are you interested in supporting your community?” “Want to learn some live saving skills?”.
Also have a method to get interested persons to your website, which MUST have, a recruitment page, a link to your application (preferably fillable), and information about benefits and value of joining. Another consideration is posting stories about your members – anniversary announcements, promotion announcements, what else they do in the community, their full time job, etc.; all make excellent posts.
Employees and members tend to feel more engaged if they are informed and feel as though they contribute. Communication can be to the members and about those members. Social medial enables timely communication of key information and member engagement. Recent published items include news articles and social media posts about
Clearly, we in the fire and EMS community can learn a lot from the business community about successful social media techniques to recruit and retain people. Here’s an idea – reach out to a business (or college) in your area that uses social media for recruiting and retaining personnel and ask them for some assistance!