Social media has become an essential part of our lives in today’s trendy world. We can use social media to communicate quickly, share information, or even find employment; virtual social media platforms are great tools to achieve that. Thus, social media recruiting has become a game-changing strategy for organizations seeking to attract top talent.
This article explores the power of social media recruiting. We delve into the key benefits that social media offers organizations as well as the main challenges, with a particular review of the best strategies for leveraging social media.
What is Social Media Recruiting?
Social recruiting, or social hiring, is an HR practice that uses social media platforms to reach, engage, and recruit potential job candidates. It enables employees to post job offers and job seekers to apply. If we’re about to compare social media to traditional recruiting, social media recruiting offers employers a wider pool of candidates and the ability to target them more effectively.
In order to engage in social media recruiting, businesses first must establish a strong presence on social media platforms in an effort to strengthen their brand, highlight their corporate culture, and ultimately motivate job applicants to apply.
Employers shouldn’t miss the huge benefit of social media recruiting due to the fact that, as a statistic shows, 79% of job seekers use social media when searching for jobs. LinkedIn is the primary form of social media they use, accompanied by Facebook and the company review website Glassdoor.
Social media should always be a part of any organization’s recruitment strategy, as they can find thousands of qualified candidates on social media. As they can easily reach job candidates, it is important that those candidates can find them as well. To achieve that, organizations must establish a strong brand on social media platforms.
Build a Strong LinkedIn Presence
LinkedIn is the No. 1 social media platform for job recruitment. The website is equipped with tools that make posting jobs and accepting resumes incredibly simple because it was created with professional networking in mind. Additionally, LinkedIn provides post boosting, which enables you to advertise your job openings.
For most recruiters, LinkedIn continues to be their primary social media channel. So it’s important for your organization as well to build a strong presence there. Top talent can be attracted or lost depending on how strong your personal brand is.
6 Steps on How to Build a Strong Presence on LinkedIn:
1. Choose a high-quality profile picture: That’s the first thing people see when they visit your LinkedIn profile. Make sure your headshot is professional yet friendly.
2. Create a catchy headline: Next to your profile picture, your headline is the first impression you make on people. This needs to be a short and catchy mission statement to show your talent or highlight the opportunities. Try to be unique and inspiring.
3. Show your passion: Use a profile summary to show something insightful and original about you, and list your goals, accomplishments, and your mission as a recruiter.
4. Create and share content: If you regularly share useful content, you’ll present yourself as an expert in the field. LinkedIn allows you to publish long blog posts on your profile, which will help you build your own network of followers. Sharing content is less time-consuming, you can share useful articles with your candidates, or use status updates.
5. Get LinkedIn recommendations: On your profile, include positive feedback from previous hires and colleagues.
6. Respond quickly and personalize your messages: Take time to write a personal message, as they have a greater response rate. Respond in a timely manner and make your candidates feel valued.
Which Additional Social Media Platforms Should You Use?
While recruiters appreciate LinkedIn as the main social media platform for recruiting, job seekers use a variety of social media platforms, especially the younger population. Recruiters must find a way to reach them, by using different social media networks. The most popular social media platforms besides LinkedIn are Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
Successful social media recruiters understand each platform’s personality, which helps them know which platform engages professionals, who are the best match for their job requirements. For example, Dribble gathers talented designers, and GitHub is a community for software developers. Younger professionals are more engaged in Instagram and TikTok than the older population, while Reddit and Twitter draw people who want to engage in dialog rather than visual content like Pinterest.
People tend to group online based on their personal affinities and use social media platforms that appeal to their interests. Good social media recruiters are aware of these differences between platforms and are able to create messaging that is appropriate for the different engagements that each platform is known for.
Use Videos, Images, And Hashtags
After you set up your social media profile, it’s important to stay active and keep all your social media pages up to date. It creates better engagement with potential future candidates, even though you have already found current candidates for your recruitment campaign. If you ignore your social media platform, your potential candidates may think you’ll ignore them as well.
Videos and images can engage audiences exponentially, next to well-written text that grabs attention. You can attract viewers’ attention and make them excited about applying for your jobs, by asking your staff to make videos about their time working for you and by publishing images from company gatherings.
Using hashtags is another important step in increasing visibility on social media. Use hashtags related to the popular topic people are talking about on social media. Popular hashtags among people searching for jobs online are #jobs, #careers, #jobsearch, #hiringnow, #jobhunt, #careerchat, and #jobposting.
If we go into more detail, we will highlight a unique hashtag market, for example, tech and engineering, retail and sales, marketing, hospitality careers, finance, education, and so on, to appeal to a specific group of professionals.
Use Metrics to Track Social Recruiting Success
Analytics are crucial when attempting to increase the effectiveness of your social media recruiting strategy. With the right social media recruiting metrics, you can easily determine what’s working, what needs to be improved, and how well your strategies are reaching your goals. With that said, let us move on to 4 social media recruiting metrics that can increase your return on investment (ROI).
4 Social Media Metrics to Monitor Hiring Success
1. Overall performance: The first thing you want to measure is overall performance, to get a big picture of engagement, clicks, and follows. You should look at your performance over a specific time period, such as the past week, month, quarter, or year. Then, compare performance across different platforms and also measure performance regarding the volume of your posts.
2. Type of content performance: You can keep track of the different types of content you post and see how they perform. Like posts with images, links, videos, or gifs. The important thing when measuring the success of content is to measure it over a longer period of time, in order to collect enough data so that you can come up with the best strategy.
3. Best time to post on social media: A lot of research has been done about the best time to post on social media. Regarding LinkedIn, which is a business and career-based platform, the best time to post is during the work week, which is estimated to be from 9 a.m. – 12 p.m.
4. Impressions and reach: Tracking your impressions (the number of times your posts were displayed) against your reach (the number of people who actually saw your posts) is also an important metric. You should really pay attention to job clicks, or the number of people who actually applied after clicking the link in the job posting.
Common Social Media Recruiting Challenges
Social media platforms are great tools for job advertising, although using them for that entails certain challenges.
- Difficulty in discovering candidates who match the exact skillset.
- Difficulty in finding and keeping recruiters who are experienced in using social media platforms for recruiting.
- It’s time-consuming to search through all the different candidate profiles.
- Establishing and financing a full strategy where social media recruiting strategies align and work well with the organization’s brand.
- Not all professionals will have a social media account.
- Passive applicants on social media.
Benefits of Using Social Media Recruiting
Here are 4 advantages of using social media to identify and attract top talent.
1. Make jobs more visible online: Facebook alone has over 2.19 billion active users, so it is likely that your ideal candidates are already using it.
2. Enhances employer branding: Creating a captivating social media profile will help you build your employer brand and increase the visibility of your business.
3. Reduces hiring costs: Social recruiting is a more affordable option, but there are still some costs involved. Although, compared to other processes, the costs of hiring through social media are typically lower, A Facebook advertisement, for example, can increase your visibility by twice as much when compared to traditional hiring methods.
4. Target specific talent groups: For example, Facebook ads are talent-specific and allow you to set advanced search filters based on the ideal candidate persona.
In Closing
Using social media for recruitment can be a really effective strategy for hiring managers. This approach improves your reach to a greater number of qualified applicants, simplifying the process of creating connections. You can find new talents by building a strong employer brand, engaging your audience on social media, and using advanced search options and metrics.
Consider your company’s goals for each platform as you develop your social media recruiting strategy, and then decide how to best apply those recruitment strategies.
