3 Steps to Effective Social Media Recruiting

Social media has become an indispensable tool for companies to generate sales, increase brand awareness and build communities around their brand. It is no surprise, then, that businesses may consider it for recruiting as well. But, what does that mean? And how does one be an effective social recruiter?

While recruiters can now leverage social media to post jobs and recruit talent, it’s still new for most organizations. This is why it’s important to establish your brand as a known social-recruiting company. That’s also why there are a lot of mistakes to avoid.

Here are just a few benefits of using social media to build a dream team:

• Connect with the largest pool of passive and active job-seekers
• Lower the cost of sourcing
• Lower the cost of hiring
• Engage your own employees as brand ambassadors and social recruiters.
• Target the right audience (on the network they use to browse the wild internet)
• Engage with qualified job-seekers as well as spread brand awareness at low cost

Here’s how to become a top performer in social media recruiting:

1. Establish a social media recruitment strategy

Your social strategy should effectively state the goals you are seeking to achieve. Don’t, or should I say NEVER, go social in your recruitment if you don’t have an effective and accurate strategy you could damage your brand image as well as fail to find at least one qualified job-seeker.

Remember: On social media, you’re not hiring, you’re recruiting. There is a big difference between someone who is looking for a job and someone who already has one, but is willing to change for a better career path.

Define and display company culture

Identify your company environment, culture, and value. You can define it yourself, at first, but never forget to ask your current, and existing employees as they will spread the word. Don’t lie about your culture or your strategy might backfire.

When applicants realize what you said is not the reality they will leave you as fast as you recruited him/her. Remember, even if it is a lower cost, social recruitment still has a cost. It’s not a game, it’s a person’s livelihood. Once your culture is defined and realistic, share your story on social networks.

Understand your employee interaction

This part is as important as your culture, tailor your recruiting strategy to target candidates that will match the existing team energy.

Focus on the skill sets and personality traits of your top performer employees and find similarities in your candidates to retain those traits as part of your company culture.

2. Create branded company profiles

In 2023, a Facebook Page is no longer enough to represent a brand and its values. To create a strong employer brand, don’t forget to also create a Twitter account, a Linkedin company profile, a YouTube channel, and any other social network profiles that may be relevant to your industry.

All those pages should have the same goal: finding talent. The good news is that there are many more benefits of having active social media profiles for your company, including additional marketing channels, creating a positive brand image, and controlling your branded search better.

If your company is hiring frequently, create new social media accounts specifically for job offers.

For example, your main Twitter account may be @Bananacompany while you’d then create @bananajobs to feature job offers. This way, your content will not be lost between commercial posts or product discussions.

If you are setting up a separate channel for your hiring needs, make sure you register a domain for it as well. This will help you consolidate your efforts around that entity. You can use that site to publicize your company events, feature interviews, and curate other content about your company and your team.

Having your own hiring site will help you control the conversion journey from a candidate to an applicant. You can set up custom CTAs (for example, upload your resume or schedule an appointment)

Whichever route you take (whether you decide to set up separate accounts or use your main social media channels), make sure your behind-the-scenes content is authentic. Post pictures from your events, let them run Q&As and ask-me-anything sessions, etc.

This will encourage potential employees to apply for jobs to become part of your team.

Both your job and business pages should relay the same voice and message, and relate to each other. Your YouTube channel should provide a positive representation of your company. Short videos could present the jobs you’re looking to fill. The videos should be short to trigger curiosity and desire to learn more about the jobs available.

Candidates or followers will hopefully feel inclined to look for more information on your other social media pages, and you want them to get excited about an opportunity to join your team.

You are seeking the best talent for the role. Even if there are a lot of candidates waiting to work for you, there are only a few that are a perfect match. So, spread the word and make every post count.

Promote jobs the same way you’d promote your business or product. Ask the marketing and communications team to assist in creating job offers that both explain what the job is as well as attract worthy candidates. You also want to entice others to share the job offer on social media by retweeting on Twitter, sharing on Facebook, etc. Take advantage of all your available channels. Setting up a dedicated recruiting playlist on Youtube and announcing your job offer in your email newsletter – all of these are great options to try.

3. Execute your recruitment strategy

Now that those key steps are all set it’s time to make it work by interacting with job-seekers. Your communication has to be consistent, pertinent, and timely.

Engage your employees

At the beginning of your social recruitment campaign, your employees will be the main gate to success.

They should be able to spread the word on their own social networks and even start networking with job seekers before sending them to your pages or directly to your recruitment team.

Engage your employees by creating gaming and ranking based on the content they share or on the applicant they bring in. This is not easy work to do, but if your company can’t afford to have a recruiter dedicated to social recruitment there are a few high-tech tools and business phone apps you can automatize for that.

Interaction and content

The type of content you share depends on the candidates you are looking for. If you’re looking for technically skilled job seekers, you will not post the type of content that interests marketing applicants. 3/4 of your content should be about related fields and topics, and only 1/4 should be directly related to your company.

This way your content strategy will not seem exclusively brand-oriented, and you will find applicants that share the same interests.

Rating and ranking your results

Data analysis is mandatory to check what content is most likely shared or read as well as check the channel and networks that are working well.

You can include a blog strategy with content oriented in your industry. (New technology that is working well in the field or information targeting the candidates you are seeking to reach.)

As well as the employment engagement, you may want to control who sees what and how many views you get by posting a job offer on Facebook or Twitter, and even make a comparison between both. Data analytics tools could help here too.

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