The 7 Secrets of World-Class Recruiting Organizations (Part 4 of 7): Give Candidates a Strong Reason to Engage with Your Company

December 6, 2012 at 5:15 AM by Vivek Reddy

This is the fourth post in a seven-part series entitled "The 7 Secrets of World-Class Recruiting Organizations" covering some subtle tactics for how to use social media to recruit candidates. You can read the previous posts in the series here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Secret #4: Give candidates a strong reason to engage with your company. This is where a lot of companies fall down. Heck, we’ve fallen down there. Heck, if we’re being honest we’re probably falling down there right now :) We’re working on so much cool technology here at Entelo and our Jobs page doesn’t really do justice to what we’re doing (please don’t fault us, we’ve been so focused on building you a great product!).

But you can do better. You can check out Dropbox’s quirky jobs page and think about how it appeals to the very engineers who they are trying to recruit. Or think about how Asana offers an incredible $10K to people to pimp out their work set-up. Or how companies like Google do Tech Talks to allow their employees access to some of the brightest minds in the world. And it’s not just Google doing this! Lots of startups are as well. Even Entelo has Brown Bag Lunches where we host amazing engineers and entrepreneurs in our offices for a chat and some tasty eats.

At the War for Talent conference we referenced in Part 1, Jeff Lawson, the CEO and Cofounder of Twilio, said it best: “When a candidate walks into your office your goal should be to make sure their mind is blown.” We’d take it a step further. They should have that same feeling when they hit your Careers Page, and when they come across your company’s Github page (your company does have a Github page right?).

And speaking of Github, there’s another reason to engage with your company: A strong open source presence. Want to see what an amazing open source presence looks like? Check out our friend Rafael’s company LearnBoost. LearnBoost has invested in open source and, besides being the right thing to do, it has paid off in dividends from a recruiting standpoint. In fact, according to this answer Rafael gave on Quora, LearnBoost now has the 2nd highest number of project followers on Github after Facebook (and incredibly, ahead of Github itself!). That’s phenomenal for a company that, according to LinkedIn, has less than 10 employees. Who says the little guys can’t compete?

Your goal? It’s the same as any world-class recruiting organization. Be the kind of company that friends can’t wait to tell others that they work for. This could be for any of a variety of reasons. Figure out what yours are.

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