The Coronavirus Pandemic has turned around the social lives of everyone. The social distancing norms, extended long periods of lockdown has prevented everyone from any physical social contact. Schools are closed, offices are closed, and as a result, from education to recruiting, everything has become virtual. Everything is undergoing unprecedented changes during this time, except for one: The role of social media in our lives. If anything, social media has only become a more integral part of our lives. Talking about recruiting, social media has been a part of recruiters’ talent acquisition strategies for a long time now. So, in this article, we are going to talk more about and explore the scopes of social media recruiting.
Modernization has turned our lives around in every aspect. From having just a better life, to significantly making everything easy and automatic, we have come a long way. The recruitment scenario has been under a continuous state of evolvement, all thanks to the advancements in technology. Technology has reshaped the world of technology over the last decade. With this advancement, the recruitment world has become extremely competitive too. Meanwhile, social media sites have also seen phenomenal growth in recent years. It’s where today’s talent pool exists. So, to survive and succeed, companies eyeing for top talents deploy and leverage different social media channels to tap into the top talent pools.
What Is Social Media Recruiting?
Social media recruiting refers to the process of recruiting talents using various social media channels. These channels also include online forums, job boards, blogs, and other tools and technologies. It is also referred to as social recruiting, social hiring, or social recruitment. Recruiters can proactively reach out to their prospective employees through their social media handles. This not only gives them a wider reach, but also a better understanding and perspective about the candidate. Social hiring is a trend that has widely gained popularity over the years and is still growing.
Why Is Social Media Recruitment Important For You?
There are a number of reasons why social media is important and should be a critical part of your hiring strategies. But as of now, let’s take enlist the most important ones. For starters, social media is a part of everyone’s social life now. So, recruiters can get a huge exposure by using social media recruiting. By using social media as a hiring tool, you can get to know your candidates better, about their backgrounds, their preferences, everything. Also, you can instantly connect with your prospective employees and engage them. That’s why including social media in your recruiting process is a win-win for both you, as well as, your potential candidates.
Coming back to the current situation, social media is our only link to the world right now. COVID 19 has forced us to spend most of our time online. Whether we’re communicating with our family or office colleagues and superiors, we do it using social media channels. According to a study, people are spending 20% more time in apps during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hiring has been full of challenges during the current pandemic. While some industries are under a hiring freeze, others are in need of mass hires. So, there’s no better time than this crisis for recruiters to level up their social media recruiting game. Here’s all that you need to know about social media recruitment and how to make the best out of it.
Some Awesome Tips To Hire On Social Media
Many recruiters from around the globe are using Social Media as a recruitment tool for their hiring. According to a survey, around 94% of recruiters use social media for hiring. Let’s take a look at a few tips to successfully hire awesome people using Social media.
Determine Your Goals
Social media is a great platform for hiring, indeed. But it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to set goals. including social media in your recruiting process is a win-win for both you, as well as, your potential candidates. It’s a fact, that all the paths to success always need to have a solid foundation. And in this case, this solid foundation is setting clear and specific goals. A great social media hiring strategy is only helpful if it is perfectly aligned with your hiring goals. If your social media followers don’t become converting applicants, then the number of followers you have is just a mere number. You need to have clear goals about what you want to achieve from various social media channels. Dividing your attention between dozens of sites without any pre-set ambitions won’t get you anywhere. Your social media plans should also change as your goals change.
Advertise Your Job Openings
One of the greatest advantages of social media is its huge potential reach for an affordable cost. Your potential candidates are definitely most active on social media. So, posting your job openings on social media is a great way to gain huge exposure. There’s another great perk of doing this, and it is the low cost. Advertising on social media is very affordable. So, while we’re all inside spending more and more time online, you’ll get a wide reach for building your talent pool, at a very pocket-friendly budget. Social media also has tremendous capabilities of limiting your ads viewing audience. So, you’ll be able to limit who sees your ads and get a better Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
Choose The Right Platform
Once you figured out your right hiring goals, the next big thing to do is to choose the right social media platform. It is usually a common opinion that the best and only platform to post job ads is LinkedIn. Indeed you are right, LinkedIn is one of the best platforms. However, it is not the only platform. LinkedIn currently has about 675 million active users, which is far less than 1 billion users of Instagram and 2.5 billion users of Facebook. So, promoting your jobs on more platforms than LinkedIn will give you an expansive reach to both active and passive job seekers. You need to be proactive and agile in figuring out what is the best platform to tap into for great talents.
Strengthen Your Online Presence
To get great talents to recognize you, you need to have a solid online presence. Usually, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are considered the strongest platforms for social media recruiting. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore other platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Amidst this global emergency and extended lockdown, there’s a good chance that people spend their free time on these social media channels. So, by having a strong presence on various platforms, you can attract and engage talents who are not even looking for a job. This will boost your brand and more and more people will know about your company. Make sure you have a strong page with great content on all of these social networking platforms. Create great platform-specific content, like a catchy graphic for Instagram and Facebook, and text content for LinkedIn and Twitter. This will help you engage and retain all the passive viewers.
Make Your Employees Your Advocates
In today’s era of the dominant role of social media, you definitely may have a social media enthusiast or even an influencer in your team. So, you can use their powerful presence on social media for your recruiting strategies too. Encourage your complete staff to be an evangelist for your brand on social media. It is a fact, that the people who are already a part of your team are in the best place to share your company culture and brand. Create an effective social media policy to help them get comfortable talking about your brand. Using employee advocacy for social recruiting will definitely widen your reach and hire the top talents.