The Power Of Social Recruiting

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Social media platforms provide a wide range of opportunities for companies and recruiters to engage potential candidates for positions—and at this point, most companies have determined that recruitment entails much more than posting positions to their careers page and waiting for the candidates to bite. Connecting with top talent means meeting them where they are—and today, that’s on social media. With the numerous platforms now in operation and the array of audiences to whom they cater, those courting talent are limited only by their imaginations and willingness to do the necessary work.

Given the success that so many organizations have seen using social media to date, having a sound social media recruitment strategy has become an imperative for any company that has significant hiring volume. Such strategies must be continuously-evolving as well, because social trends and norms can change frequently and it’s important to stay up-to-date. 

Learn more about methods companies can use social media to keep potential candidates engaged, and foster a culture of healthy communication between themselves and those they’re looking to hire—long before they’re hired.

Knowing Your Market

One thing that’s important to realize is that each social media platform does have a distinct audience and culture. Your company may see fit to engage both LinkedIn and TikTok for recruitment, but their cultures and audiences couldn’t be farther apart in many ways. What this means is that you’ll have to develop a feel for each social media platform you’re planning to use, and make sure that your voice has coherence with their audiences.

Which means you’ll have to get creative. 

Another thing to remember is that the social media recruiting boom isn’t just a function of younger workers in the talent pool. While younger workers do tend to engage with a wider selection of social media and more esoteric forms of social media (i.e. TikTok), pretty much every candidate who is serious about finding a good position is looking to social media these days. Additionally, candidates who are doing so have become more savvy; not only tech-savvy, but better educated on how to vet companies using online resources, including social media itself.

According to BuiltIn, an online community for startups and tech companies:

  • 73% of Millennials found their last job on a social network
  • The average Generation Z’er (a group representing 61 million employees in the years to come) maintains seven social media profiles
  • 82% of companies attract passive candidates by recruiting through social media
  • Companies using social media for recruiting have reported a 50% increase in the quality of candidates

These statistics pretty much make the case for the necessity of having a robust social media recruiting strategy.

Laying the Groundwork

As we’ve established, relying on job postings alone isn’t a winning recruitment strategy. Similarly, posting job notices to your company’s social media pages alone isn’t a winning strategy either. Since this is marketing, you’ll need to think of it that way. Thus, the idea is to create a buzz about your company, to be relatable, and to cultivate top-of-mind awareness in the minds of potential candidates.

The question then becomes how to accomplish this using your resources coupled with all of the available tools within the environment of a given social media platform.

On most social media platforms, the first step will be in creating an engaging company page and making sure that all of your content remains relevant and up-to-date. While a platform such as Twitter may be a bit more limited than some due to its format (e.g., limited characters per post), its hashtag feature (e.g., #jobs, #hiring, #careers) ensures that targeted audiences will view your posts when used properly.

Companies have more latitude with a platform like Facebook, which is all about broad engagement. Facebook has been extremely innovative regarding job seekers and their interactions with prospective employers. It also has very high user retention. Also, Facebook’s employer-friendly “Job Openings” tab allows candidates to navigate directly to a company’s open positions.

With Facebook and platforms like LinkedIn, companies can encourage their employees to engage with the company page via their own profiles, post comments and enhance their own professional standing and can help position themselves as industry experts.

Social Media Groups and Communities

As you no doubt know—or certainly should by now—many social media platforms facilitate the creation of communities and/or groups within their environments. Through these, individuals and organizations with similar interests can establish micro-platforms to discuss said interests. Among some of the more well-known providers here are LinkedIn and Facebook. While Facebook has had a massive impact across all demographics and is widely used by individuals and organizations of every stripe, LinkedIn hosts LinkedIn Groups, which are communities of professionals who are in the same industry or have similar interests.

Obviously, the upside to LinkedIn Groups is that LinkedIn is a professional platform to start with; unlike Facebook, a preponderance of users are there expressly for the purpose of professional networking. LinkedIn also promotes LinkedIn Groups in order to foster just the type of engagement a recruiter is looking for, as well as providing resources for how recruiters can optimize their use of this utility.

Since job seekers already look to LinkedIn to identify and contact decision-makers within an organization, those decision-makers can create groups or maintain their profiles and engage through existing groups, starting relevant discussions and fostering engagement with potential candidates.

One of the most important things to be mindful of when you’re engaging in groups and communities for these purposes is that you’re looking to build networks and communities. This means consistent engagement, and as such, you actually don’t want to focus exclusively on job postings or hiring. You should seek to initiate conversations that engage different groups of people within the talent pool and share useful insights and resources. Talent—whether seeking a job or not—should want to engage with your brand simply because you’re relatable.

Multimedia: A Must

If you have the internal resources or the requisite budget, there’s no reason that your multimedia shouldn’t spill over into your social media recruitment strategy. Pretty much all of the social media platforms include video these days, with YouTube (for example) being completely dedicated to that medium. A good recruiting video or video campaign can be shared across many social media platforms, as well as on community and group pages.

The caveat here is that you don’t want to simply blanket all social media platforms with one good video or campaign you’re really proud of. If you use the same video on TikTok that you used on LinkedIn, you’ve dropped the ball because of the difference in culture between the two platforms. You may want to use some of the same video elements, but the narration and soundtrack could be tweaked to accommodate the different audiences.

Moving Forward

Here are a few things to keep in mind when implementing this side of your social media recruitment strategy that will help to keep your brand relevant and relatable in the eyes of potential candidates. 

There are a few basic tenets of social media recruiting that can make or break your success in recruitment marketing:

Target the Right Platforms

Who are you looking to hire? If you’re Amazon (for example) and you have campaigns seeking both executive talent and warehouse personnel, you won’t be looking for them in the same places—nor would you be using the same media or messaging. For the former, LinkedIn or Facebook might be considered the go-to platforms, while YouTube, TikTok or Instagram might be best for the latter. Remember that each platform you engage will require a different approach for candidate sourcing.

Represent Your Brand Faithfully

Company culture is an important factor for 46% of job seekers, and 86% of job seekers avoid companies with a bad reputation. This means that optics carry a lot of weight, even with passive job seekers. A Glassdoor study revealed that 75% of active job seekers are likely to apply to a job if the employer actively manages its employer brand. Highlighting company values or differentiators can make a huge difference when it comes to attracting top talent. Also, when showcasing members of your team and sharing their personal stories about working at the company, candidates will get a behind-the-scenes look at what it would be like for them if they join your team.

Involve Current Employees

This is different than showcasing employees in video or other media; here, you are actively involving employees in promoting your brand—and there are no better advocates for you as an employer than people who already work for you! This is a component of social media recruiting known as employee advocacy, and it dramatically increases your recruitment reach. Here, surveying employees and integrating their responses into your social recruitment strategy is a great idea.

Also, ask your teammates to spread the word about your company culture on their own social networks. It’s been shown that employee social media content is shared 25 times more frequently than when the same content is shared by brands. And it’s a low cost proposition—all you have to do is pass the information on and ask that your employees share. This way, your teammates will become champions of your brand and draw a bigger audience back to your company – which can help when building a community.

Finally, in your social recruiting efforts, it’s important to remember to keep it, well, social. This isn’t a hard sell—your job is to engage people by appealing to their interests and values. Despite the effort that goes into it on your end, bear in mind that this milieu is passive by its nature, and that relationships take time to cultivate.

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