Recently eMarketer published the report What Marketers Can Learn from Consumers’ Sharing Habits. I think HR can learn from this as well to encourage visitors to their career site to share job openings.
Paul Adams, global brand experience manager at Facebook, said that the average person has four different friend or influence groups. Each has an average of 10 people and they are based around life stages, experiences or hobbies.
“We are highly influenced by people who are up to three degrees away from us,” he said, which presents a tremendous word-of-mouth marketing opportunity via social sharing.
In other words, sharing is important because people trust more that a job opportunity is right for them if it’s been sent by a friend than if they see it on a job board. Favoring sharing helps to attract both active and passive job seekers.
It’s time for HR managers to ask themselves, what are we doing to encourage sharing?
Who are they sharing with?
The study found that email is still the number one way users share content online. By digging deeper into the eMarketer stats we can see that social networks are the top way of sharing info with friends, but email is the the number one way of sharing information with family and colleagues. Sharing content with the general public is done through message boards and blogs. We can also notice that regardless of how they share, by far consumers prefer sharing with friends, followed by family and colleagues and finally sharing with the general public.
What are they sharing?
Who they are sharing with is only part of the equation. What they share is also important. 60% of US internet users share a URL to published content and 36% share embedded content. Only 4% share a URL to a brand or corporate website.
What can you do about it?
If internet users by far prefer to share useful content with friends, there are two things to consider. First if your visitors want to share material of value, it might be time to start thinking about creating that valuable content. Stuff like blog posts, videos, podcasts and especially making your job postings shareable. Your visitors want to share information that will be valuable to their friends. For example, “what does it mean to work at our company”, “Top CV writing mistakes,” “How to nail an interview,” etc.
Second, to encourage sharing with friends, strong call to actions should be implemented — “Share this job posting with your friends” with large sharing icons. Don’t forget large email share options as well. If I know someone who’d be good for an opening at my company, I might prefer sending that privately.
Users want to share content, have you implemented sharing on your career site?
(Photo credit: Howard Dickins)
