In a candidate-driven market, your job postings need to be easy for job seekers to find. With most users spending an average of two hours and 22 minutes a day on social media, these channels are some of the best places to establish your employer brand and share your job openings.
According to CareerArc’s research, 96% of job seekers use social media for their job search and analysis of the company. Plus, sharing job openings on social media is often less expensive than traditional methods, and it allows you to better engage with potential candidates.
Here are the top eight reasons why you should include social media in your recruitment strategy:
Further establish your company brand
Give potential candidates an employee perspective of your company
Showcase your employee value prepositions
Allow potential candidates to check out your company culture and self-assess their fit
Expand your reach and target candidates around the globe
Reach more passive candidates
Establish connections with Millennial and Gen Z candidates
Achieve a cost-effective solution
How can you use social media to become the brand that candidates want to work for?
Before you jump into social recruiting, you’ll want to assess and define the primary goal of your social media presence. For example, perhaps you’d like to create a talent pool of recent graduates, increase applicant quality, or even find people for hard-to-fill roles. This can help you curate a more targeted content strategy.
Here are five methods for establishing your social media strategy:
1) Create a candidate persona
The first step in any marketing strategy is to identify your target audience. It’s important to define the requirements for your ideal talent pool, including candidate qualifications, work experience, and goals. This will allow you to create content that resonates with a specific demographic.
2) Establish your employer brand
Just as consumers research brands before they make a purchasing decision, candidates research their potential workplaces. According to Corporate Responsibility Magazine, 92% of employees would consider leaving their job for a company with an excellent corporate reputation.
That’s why it’s crucial to use your platform to showcase your company’s values, mission, and achievements. For example, you could post about recent CSR activities, new company milestones, and the benefits and recognition you provide to employees. Maintaining transparency and showing what it’s really like to work at your organization can bring in more high-quality applicants.
3) Transform your employees into brand ambassadors
Your employees are the best representation of what a candidate’s future could look like if they are hired at your company. You may choose to create a social media policy to ensure that your brand maintains a good online reputation, and you could encourage employees to share their work experiences on their professional social media pages.
It’s also helpful to share inspiring stories of your top-performing employees and establish channels that help potential candidates connect with your workforce.
4) Cultivate conversations
Social media has given us the power to connect with people from around the world. This means that you can send personalized messages to potential candidates and even interact with industry leaders. Participating in the right conversations and groups can expose you to a large group of like-minded people, allowing you to engage with high-quality talent and showcase your expertise.
5) Look beyond the resume
Social recruiting can open up a new window into candidate qualifications that goes beyond their resume. From professional social media pages, you can explore candidate interests, find mutual connections, and evaluate culture fit. That said, remember to practice extreme caution and avoid any implicit or explicit biases.
Our five-step guide to joining the social recruiting movement
1) Choose your medium
Once you’ve defined your social media goals, you’ll need to choose the right platform to reach out to particular demographics. While LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook might seem obvious, don’t shy away from diversifying your platforms further. For example, designers typically spend more time on visual media sites like Pinterest, and developers often spend time on sites like Stack Overflow. The objective is to make it easy for job seekers to find you.
First, we’ll look at how the “Big Three” social media platforms can help you recruit better.
It is safe to say that LinkedIn is the go-to platform for recruiters, as its primary purpose is to build a professional network. With LinkedIn, you can:
Post job openings
Simplify the application process with the Easy Apply feature
Find candidates with a quick Boolean search
Crosscheck candidate experience and references
Connect with candidates through InMail
Conduct competitor analysis
Join relevant groups
Build a stellar employer brand
Zoho Recruit’s Apply with LinkedIn feature auto-fills candidate information from their LinkedIn profile directly into the ATS.
Facebook is the biggest social media platform, with over 2.9 billion monthly users. While LinkedIn might be a well-established platform for recruitment, Facebook is on the rise, and the sooner you make a move, the less competition you’ll have.
According to Time, 84% of job seekers have an active Facebook profile. With Facebook job boards, you can post job openings and create targeted job ads. Facebook groups can also be great way to engage with other professionals and share new job vacancies. Most importantly, Facebook has powerful search filters and advanced search options that can facilitate your candidate search.
Twitter can help you make a lasting impression in under 140 characters. By using the right hashtags, participating in the right trends, and engaging in the right conversations, you can connect with your desired audience and showcase your brand. Twitter retweets, mentions, and hashtags are straightforward and effective tools that can allow you to network with your existing employees and potential candidates.
2) Draft the perfect description
Most users who land on your page will read your bio, so it’s important to mention key information about your company while keeping it brief. Your description can also help people find you effortlessly if you use the right SEO keywords.
3) Create platform-specific posts
While it makes the job easier to post the same content on all pages, it’s best to create specific posts that perform well on particular mediums. This can help you attract the right audience on different platforms.
4) Make the most of hashtags
Hashtags are often the best way to expand your reach. It’s recommended to use a handful of short, memorable hashtags that will help users find your content. Be sure not to overpopulate your posts with hashtags though, as this could cause them to get lost among the rest. Instead of adding all relevant hashtags and hoping to reach more people, use four to five tactical ones that can help you reach a targeted set of users. It’s helpful to do a quick search to ensure that your hashtags are not used for different, less-relevant purposes.
5) Get actionable insights
All social media platforms have a version of built-in analytics that help you analyze how your posts are performing and your account growth. With social media analytics, you can evaluate your page engagement and see if you are reaching the right audience. These kinds of tools can also reveal how your social media efforts impact your recruitment metrics.
Getting started: effective content examples
Participate in the latest trends
Here’s an example of General Electrics making great use of Engineer’s Day to spotlight employees and show their brand presence across the globe. This post’s caption also encourages user engagement.
Share employee stories
This podcast from Taco Bell is a fantastic example of how you can get creative with your employer branding. It’s unique, as we don’t often think of using podcasts for employer branding, and it also draws people in with a love story about how two employees excelled in their Taco Bell careers.
Recognize employees
Every person wants to feel appreciated. This post from UPS uses the LinkedIn platform to recognize and appreciate employees who have completed 25 years or more at the company. It’s also a great way to show that people are happy with their workplace.
Show what it’s like to work at your company
Google’s video of their employees sharing gratifying experiences at the company can make anybody want to work for them.
Share company milestones
Sodexo’s vlog of their pitch meeting is a short video that showcases the company’s vision, goals, and achievements.
Showcase company culture
This beautiful post from Adobe uses employee voice-overs to highlight their company culture. Plus, it serves as a job ad with a CTA for interns.
Share employee testimonials
Employee testimonials can make a lasting impression on potential candidates. Here’s an example from Intel’s Instagram career page.
Share your CSR initiatives
Many employees are drawn to organizations that make it a priority to give back. Offering opportunities for your workforce to serve the community allows employees to get involved, and it speaks volumes about your company’s core values. This CSR post from T-Mobile shares snapshots of their volunteering activities.
Talk about your diverse workforce
According to Glassdoor, 67% of job seekers consider workplace diversity an important factor in deciding whether they want to work for the company. This employee perspective post from T-Mobile shares how an employee gets to enjoy various cultures as part of the company.
Share career blogs
It’s necessary to give like-minded social media users a reason to follow you, and you can do so by sharing value-based content. This post from Dell highlights employee stories while creating inspiration and providing value.
Be transparent about the recruitment process
Clarifying your recruitment process on social media can show candidates that you are committed to fair hiring standards. This simple video from Amazon shows candidates what to expect from their interview process.
Show your workspace
Many employees spend hours of their day inside the office, and seeing what their potential workplace looks like can be a big factor in where they choose to work. This fun video from Google shows what their Singapore office looks like and features the unique benefits of working there.
Interact with your followers
Engaging with potential candidates is often the most exciting part of social media for recruiters, and this interactive post from Adobe is the ultimate example of how easy it can be.
Conducting social recruiting campaigns
Job ads
Social media platforms offer efficient tools to run low-cost, targeted ads and measure the outcomes. You get to choose your audience based on various factors, including their age, gender, location, and interests, create budgets, pick an objective, and choose a format to specify how you want people to see your ads.
Job boards
LinkedIn and Facebook enable you to post jobs for free on their job boards. You can also pay to promote these job postings so they are even more likely to reach potential candidates.
Referrals
You can leverage employee networks by creating a social media referral program and encouraging your workforce to share new job openings. For example, Zoho Recruit’s referral platform allows workers to share job openings directly from the ATS.
Is social media worth the effort?
Social media gives you endless opportunities to enhance your employer brand and create a diverse, high-quality talent pool. While it’s a relatively new strategy in recruitment and can involve a steady learning curve, it has the potential to vastly improve applicant quality and make your recruitment process more fruitful long term. As you experiment with social media for your business, don’t be afraid to get creative and showcase the people-oriented elements of your brand.
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