What is Social Media Recruiting?
Social media recruiting is a type of recruitment strategy that is made up of employer branding and recruitment marketing elements to connect, engage, and hire passive talent on social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Hiring the best talent needs some proactive approach, you can’t solely rely on posting jobs on your careers page and wait for them to come and apply. To reach them you first need to know where they are which simply translates to social media networks in this age.
Apart from recruiting, social media can also be used for employer branding. Utilizing this effective medium to communicate your company’s employer value proposition and to improve inbound recruitment will be beneficial for your overall recruiting efforts.
How to Build a Successful Social Media Recruiting Strategy?
The next major step is to build a social media recruiting strategy that works. You don’t need to worry about getting it perfect on the first attempt, your strategy will improve over time as you learn and practice more. So now let’s build a successful recruitment strategy!
Start With Competitor & Candidate Research
To begin with, you need to study and ascertain who your competitors are and which platforms they prefer, the type of content they form, specifically for each platform, and also how it matches up to audience engagement.
At the same time, you also need to figure out where your candidates are and it would be brilliant if you can tap a completely new resource for talent acquisition altogether.
Prepare Ideal Candidate Personas
Establishing your candidate persona is a needed step you shouldn’t skip before you hire for any role. Figure out which personality traits will be a add great addition to your culture and balance the same with the needed for the role.
Additionally, look at the areas of recruitment where your organization struggles the most and give them priority in your strategy.
Set Measurable Goals
Now it’s time to set measurable goals so you can easily benchmark and bring optimizations to your recruiting strategy as time progress. Find out what you wish to achieve with social media strategy for recruitment that you were unable to do with traditional hiring.
Define Metrics & Start Measuring
Tracking your recruitment metrics will let you decide which platforms and strategies are providing candidates of the highest quality in the shortest time period.
Choose the metrics that directly relate to your goals and have the knowledge of how to effectively measure them. Here are some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you can consider:
- Time, cost, and source of hire
- Offer acceptance rate
- Social engagement
- Referral rate
Pick The Right Social Platform
To reach the right talent you may require to branch out to more niche social platforms depending on your industry and target candidate personas. Additionally, to organize your process and make your analysis simple you may consider employing a social media management tool.
Include Company People in the Process
You don’t need to do it all alone. A company is built by its people who define its culture and employer brand, hence they can be your potential brand ambassadors. You need to prepare a calendar and assign different people for creating content and connecting with prospective talent.
Make Your Team Ready
Before going live with the voice of your employees, it’s crucial to make sure everyone uses a cohesive voice that is an actual reflection of the brand and mission of the company. As social media is used by people for various purposes, that’s why you need to make some guidelines so the employees will create content keeping in mind the goal in mind.
Bring Improvement Over Time
To do that, set up meeting with your teammates occasionally to review the metrics, goals, and results of social media recruiting. With this, finding the strengths and weaknesses of your program becomes easy. Thereafter, you can make adjustments to your resources and processes to get better results in the future.
Why Does Social Media Recruiting Matter?
Now let’s understand the importance of why you should employ social media recruitment in your hiring strategy with the below points we’ve broken down for you:
Enhance Your Recruitment Marketing Efforts
For your recruitment marketing efforts, there is n number of mediums and sources available at your disposal. However, social media has the power to step up your recruitment marketing game, allowing you to reach millions of qualified candidates worldwide in one go.
Billboards, newspapers, events, and other kinds of traditional mediums offer neither immediacy nor scalability at the same level as social media offers. You also can’t track the data you might be interested in the most because it simply doesn’t offer built-in tracking.
With social resources, you can also determine which platforms are performing well so you can focus more on the best-performing ones and optimize your social media recruitment efforts.
Produces a Combination of Content
Since there is no hard rule for the type of content you need to create for social media. You can create anything including plainly written words, videos, interactive content any other type of content for your recruiting marketing.
But one thing you need to remember is that different content performs better on a specific platform, therefore researching to find out what resonates with your target audience is crucial.
You also need to note that you can easily repurpose the content you’ve created for one platform for the other ones just by making minor changes. E.g., if you’ve made an amazing video for Youtube or Facebook, you can use it by taking a small clip of it for Instagram or a screenshot from it for Twitter.
Fosters Your Employer Brand
68% of Millennials, 54% of Gen-Xers, and 48% of Boomers prefer to see companies’ social handles to evaluate their employer’s brand. Additionally, 75% of active job seekers will potentially apply for a job in case the employer manages its employer brand actively.
Considering these stats, we can safely say that employer brand plays an important role in attracting qualified candidates. And to boost your employer brand, there’s no better place than social media by showcasing your existing employees, culture, values, benefits, and every other thing that candidates consider before applying.
Lessens Time & Cost Per Hire
Companies that leverage social media for recruiting tend to spend fewer resources to hire top talent. Furthermore these companies can fill their position a lot faster in comparison to those who focus on other channels.
For instance, if you advertise on social media it will be a lot cheaper than advertising on job boards and it will help you attract significantly higher-quality candidates in a short time span. The reason? Well, job seekers prefer social media and professional networks as a prime resource for a job search in contrast to job boards, job ads, recruiting agencies, events, etc
Broadens Your Candidate Reach
Except you are among those few companies which dream company of most candidates, it’s essential to reach as many prospects as possible. It’s because the more candidates you reach the higher the chance to reach top-notch talent and the possibility to hire them. With social media recruiting you can:
- Connect with passive candidates
- These candidates are those who might be interested in a new opportunity but aren’t actively looking for it. You can connect with them and provide information after personalizing it as per their interests and expertise.
- Bring personalization to communications
- By using this medium to reach out to people through features like direct messaging or comments to kick-start a conversation without appearing overly promotional.
- Focus on Specific Personas & Industry Experts
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By opting for paid advertising options on a variety of social media platforms or websites.
Top Social Media Recruiting Sites to Consider
1. LinkedIn
Being the largest professional networking site with over 52 million candidates searching for jobs, LinkedIn is the most preferred place for finding top talent.
You get a complete overview of candidates’ work history as well as a glimpse into their interests, endorsements, and more. Companies like Google and AT&T trust LinkedIn to promote their employer brand across the globe.
How can I connect with potential candidates on LinkedIn?
- Begin with sending connection requests to candidates
- Reach out to candidates via direct messaging and introduce yourself and the company.
- Gain attention and authority by engaging with industry-related content on the platform.
- Build rapport by following, endorsing, and writing recommendations for talented people.
2. Facebook
It’s more of a casual social networking site but that doesn’t mean it can’t be used for social media recruitment. Facebook is a giant platform that already makes it a great hiring resource for recruiters.
Due to its casual nature, you can get an idea about the candidates’ personalities. In addition, it offers a dedicated job board along with various ways to find and engage with candidates.
How can I connect with potential candidates on Facebook?
- Follow and connect with potential candidates.
- Join relevant groups or create your own for the position you’re hiring
- Promote your company & employer brand by creating and sharing interesting content.
- Try to start conversations through Facebook Messenger.
- Not to forget, start posting your open positions on Facebook Job Board.
3. Instagram
Millennials and Gen Z are the ones among whom Instagram is popular especially. These two generations cover the major part of the workforce globally and many of them look for companies they’re interested in via platforms like Instagram.
You can understand why Instagram is a great hiring resource by the number of people who use this platform. It has more than one billion users globally including 200+ million in the US only.
How can I connect with potential candidates on Instagram?
- Create different types of visual content to grab the attention of your target audience and encourage them to follow your company page.
- You can actively follow, like, and comment on the content of individuals of interest in order to interact with them.
- Post content relevant to trending topics with suitable hashtags to take part in it.
- By using Instagram’s stories feature host Q&A sessions.
4. Youtube
Youtube can also be a great social platform to find your next best hire. It is the central place where people come to learn something, get entertainment, explore new things, and a lot more. Youtube caters to over 2 billion monthly active users globally and your potential hires might be there wishing to learn more about your company and its culture. Make sure you utilize this platform as much as you can.
How can I connect with potential candidates on Youtube?
You can attract potential candidates by making and sharing engaging videos showcasing your:
- Company culture
- Employee testimonials
- Day-in-the-life scenarios,
- Career & growth opportunities,
- Behind-the-scenes insights
These videos will attract top talent and provide a glimpse into your organization’s unique employer brand.
5. Twitter
includes 73 million users in the US itself. Definitely, you can include this massive platform in your hiring resources list.
How can I connect with potential candidates on LinkedIn?
- Find relevant hashtags to get involved in conversations and attract top candidates
- Engage with your potential candidates’ content on Twitter by liking, commenting, tweeting, and retweeting the same
Frequently asked questions
Social media recruiting is the process of attracting, engaging, and hiring candidates through social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. It involves using social media’s reach and features to advertise job openings, showcase company culture, and connect with potential candidates.
The best social media platforms for recruiting are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. These platforms offer a wide reach, diverse audience, and various features for promoting job openings and engaging with potential candidates.
Due to its targeted reach, increased audience engagement, and cost-effective methods, social recruiting can be more successful than traditional recruiting. It allows direct communication, showcases company culture, and attracts passive candidates who may not be actively searching for jobs.
Social media recruiting is a powerful hiring strategy that enables recruiters to access a wide range of candidates, strengthen employer branding, engage directly, gain valuable insights, and streamline candidate sourcing and screening processes for more effective talent acquisition.
