The importance of social media when looking for candidates to fill your roles

When it comes to screening candidates for a role, social media allows you to gain a deeper insight into who the candidate is, beyond their CV. You can also use social media to make company and candidate comparisons whilst assessing company culture fit.

Here are some ways you can use social media to screen candidates:

Do they follow or engage in industry trends?

Although being interested in work in your spare time isn’t a necessity, it will put a candidate in good stead if they are interested in the industry they work for and showcase this on their social media channels.

How do they talk about former employers?

A good way to understand what kind of candidate someone is, is by looking at how they talk about former employers and colleagues. Depending on how someone talks about a previous employer, tells you a lot about them and understand what their experience was like and how they portray themselves.

Illegal or offensive behaviour

By screening someone’s behaviour on social media, you can really see what kind of language they use and how they behave towards others. This is a good way to see a candidate in a non professional setting and can make it clear on whether they would be a good fit for your company or not.

Although there are many different ways to screen a candidate outside of their CV and application, social media is a realistic view to what a candidate is like outside of work, and therefore may be a useful tool to use when shortlisting people for a role.