When I talk with talent leaders at different companies, one of the hottest topics on their minds is social recruiting. While most leaders know that social needs to be a critical part of their recruiting efforts, many are struggling with how to optimize the strategy and select tools that will help them meet their goals. The first step for me is that we need to think of social recruiting as a conversation with candidates and future candidates. Once we get our followers engaged in a conversation, we are moving in the right direction toward brand awareness and candidates. Engagement is the key.

Most leaders I speak with are able to tell me exactly how many followers they have or how many people have liked their pages, but aren’t seeing the results that they were hoping for. It’s nice to have followers and likes, but we need to go further and engage our audience as candidates or ambassadors for our brand. That’s where the magic happens. Getting your audience engaged means they’re commenting, retweeting, resharing, replying, or providing votes on your blog content. They are actively participating in the conversation with you. This is how you know that they are actually reading your content, thinking about your brand, and giving you the opportunity to share with them. Once you are truly engaging people, you can share all kinds of content to help them understand your company, its people, and its culture.

Whether you’re looking to get started in social recruiting or need to engage people around employment branding, social sourcing, and candidate experience, the Social Recruiting Strategies Conference 2015 San Francisco (#SRSC) is the conference that is fully dedicated to helping you optimize your social recruiting. SRSC showcases industry leaders from companies like Rolls Royce, Zappos, and Informatica and includes four new session tracks: Niche Recruiting, Social Sourcing & Branding, Mobile Recruiting, and Strategy & Tools. You’ll hear brand experts share their best practices, case studies, and lessons learned and learn new ways to transform your recruiting practices.

I’m excited to be speaking at SRSC 2015 about what the best companies do differently to drive high levels of engagement with their social recruiting. I’ll share ideas and examples that you can leverage, even on a limited budget. This presentation will be all about real world, practical steps you can take when you get back to the office.

If you want to optimize your social recruiting strategy, SRSC is for you. Check out the full agenda and speaker line-up at http://socialrecruitingstrategies.com and you’ll see why this is an event that you don’t want to miss.