Social media recruiting is a modern talent acquisition tactic combining employer branding, recruitment marketing, and employee referral strategies. As modern recruitment goes, social media plays a crucial part in gaining access to both active and passive job seekers. The trick is to find them on the networks/platforms they use. Today, we will discuss some things related to social media recruiting, social media recruiting strategies, benefits, and implementation tips.
What is Social Media Recruiting?
As we had said many times before, talent acquisition means more than posting job ads on several platforms and waiting for the best candidates to come to you. We have pointed out before that modern recruiting strategies involve companies’ and agencies’ direct, active involvement. Social media is just one of the many opportunities you have now to find elite candidates.
While there is no “standard” definition of social recruiting, it is a practice that more and more companies use. In the beginning, hiring managers and CEOs were skeptical about it, but statistics and research proved they had nothing to worry about regarding this strategy.
The simplest definition of social recruiting goes like this:
Social media recruiting is the enterprise use of social media platforms to identify, engage, and vet individuals the organization may want to hire. This HR practice, which is sometimes called social hiring or simply social recruiting, uses social media sites and other internet-based options, such as blogs, to reach potential job candidates.
While it is easy to understand what social media recruiting is, how to implement social recruiting strategies that help you hire the best talent on the market.
5 Benefits of Social Media Recruiting to Consider for Your Company
According to experts, there is no
a big secret that the market is candidate-driven. It is not the employees who are trying to fit the criteria of a job requirement. It is the employers who are trying to attract candidates by creating a perfect work setting. There are just so many job offers and so few qualified experts.
In this context, companies and recruiting, agencies need to step up their game if they want to stay ahead of the competition and recruit outstanding candidates. Just like social media changed forever how businesses address digital marketing and advertising, so it did forever alter the recruiting landscape. So let’s see what benefits you can enjoy using social recruiting to attract and retain top talent.
1. It Helps You Grow Your Employer Brand
As we said in the beginning, social recruiting is a hybrid between employer branding and marketing. Nevertheless, it also contributes to the growth of both strategies. Since you cannot have employer branding without social media and vice versa, it is preferable to polish your SMM skills and get to work.
Social media builds your brand as an employer as it allows you to convey your company culture naturally and organically via your written copy, videos, employee testimonials, business storytelling samples, and more.
Harness the full power of social media by allowing active and passive job seekers to engage with your content and company. The better they get to know you, the more inclined they will be to apply to your job ads or consider your hiring offer.
2. Social Media Helps You Hire the Best Cultural Fits
Long gone are the days when the only things that mattered in recruiting were experience and technical skills. Now, most organizations recruit for organizational culture fittings, personality, attitudes, integrity, values, etc.
Social media is an excellent tool to vet candidates who seem to share your company’s organizational culture. On the other hand, potential recruits can get a feel of your business before they apply to your open positions or accepting an interview offer.
As we said, skepticism is still present among employers and candidates alike. Are people supposed to refrain from speaking their minds on social media just because some of their opinions might not sit well with potential employers? Can a joke ruin anyone’s chances of landing an amazing job?
Things are not as black and white as they might seem. According to research and statistics,
- Over 80% of recruiters say that have hired talent on LinkedIn;
- When it comes to job seekers, they say they found their dream job on Facebook.
In other words, both employers and candidates find each other through social media. Of course, for this to occur, everybody must be on the same page regarding what should or should not be on social media.
3. On Social Media, You Can Reach Passive Job Seekers
Everybody is using social media, whether they are currently looking for a job or not. However, if you bump into somebody who may be an excellent cultural fit for your organization, nobody stops you to make them an offer.
Most passive candidates do not know yet they might like a career change. Employing the right social media techniques helps you put your company in front of these experts. By building genuine engaging relationships with passive job seekers, you can enjoy access to a larger talent pool.
4. Social Media Helps You Grow and Diversify the Talent Pool
If social media is not the place to find and encourage diversity, nothing is. Social Media allows you to access a larger talent pool you can track down with the help of your Applicant Tracking System. Moreover, you can diversify your staff easily, thus increasing your business’s competitiveness. Expanding your “playground” is always a great idea if you understand the game’s rules:
- Instagram has some of the highest levels of user engagement; it is also the predilect social network of young and diverse people;
- Another interesting social platform where diversity, freedom of opinion, and speaking truth to power are in their element is Reddit. Look for Subreddits dedicated to your industry, interests, etc., and engage with active or passive job seekers.
- Facebook is the preferred social media platform for both employers and employees who praise a more business-like approach to recruiting; with the tools, insights, and advertising options available, it is no wonder that Facebook is one of the most used social networks for hiring active and passive job seekers;
- Twitter is the go-to choice for both companies and job seekers, as the platform allows everybody to boast their copywriting skills, freely expressed opinions, thought leadership, and so on.
- LinkedIn is the favorite choice of executives and recruiting agencies to engage and find experts in their fields.
- Specialized platforms, such as Stack Overflow, GitHub, or W3Schools are the favorite playgrounds of programmers, developers, and, generally, the IT crowd.
- On the other hand, Black Hat Forum, Warrior Forum, or Digital Point are some of the best places to find digital marketers, SEO specialists, copywriters, and so on.
5. Social Media Smooths Your Employee Referral Program
As you could easily figure out, social media is the ingredient that oils the engine running your successful employee referral program. You can make the best out of social media platforms when managing such a program by:
- Encouraging your employees to post your job offers across all their social media networks;
- Posting your employees’ testimonials and reviews across social media platforms to convey your company culture;
- Posting engaging content – adapted to each network – to spark curiosity in passive job seekers and engage both active and passive candidates and build relationships with them;
- Saving and resharing social media posts coming from your collaborators, suppliers, partners, stakeholders, etc. When you receive praise and testimonials/reviews from your partners, it is always a good idea to let the world know how others think about your business.
5 Social Media Recruiting Strategies to Use in Your Favor
Now that we saw some of the most evident benefits of social recruiting, let’s move on to the real interesting part. Let’s see how to use social media efficiently to hire top talent!
1. Build a Unique Online Voice and Personality
You test your candidates’ personalities, behaviors, attitudes, etc., hoping to find the ones that match your organizational culture. In the same manner, you should present an attractive, coherent, and unique personality to potential recruits.
When you take your “corporate persona” online and on social media, make sure you are adapting your message and medium to the social platform in question. More than that, however, here are some tips on social recruiting the right way:
- Think about those companies that everyone is talking about – diversity-oriented culture, employee benefits & rewards, unique working environments, etc. Are you one of those? What unique features could you “sell” genuinely on social media to attract top talent?
- Be consistent across all social media platforms – we talk more than just about branding but speaking coherently about your ethics, values, performances, etc.
- Always be truthful. Don’t try to sell yourself as a worthy employer when you know you have people management issues or negative reviews on career sites.
Just as it happens in marketing and advertising, lying does not go far, especially with experts you want to recruit. Hiding things, exaggerating some qualities, or omitting recurrent company problems are the worst practices for companies.
2. Borrow Techniques from Your Marketing Team
Your marketing team is an expert at selling your company’s services or products. Why don’t you borrow some of their tools and strategies? Let’s see what could work for your social recruiting strategies that you already use daily to promote your business:
- Video content. It is a fact that most marketing experts consider video to be among the highest converting mediums to convey a message. Moreover, any social media specialist will confirm video gains ten more times the engagement of other content forms. When it comes to recruiting, the sky is the limit in using video. From “behind the scenes” clips to funny ads, and spontaneous Q&A sessions, you can get as creative as you can.
- Blogging. A company’s blog is not there only for press releases and company news. It is there to offer your audience actionable information, useful data, funny, engaging, and shareable content, etc.
- User-generated content. Ask your marketing team and they will confirm. User-generated content is probably the best and most enduring marketing strategy one could use to build genuine relationships with their audience. It is the content created by fans and followers and not the companies themselves for advertising purposes. It goes the same with social recruiting. If your employees, clients, collaborators, etc. post or reshare content highlighting your qualities, you can win over the competition all the talent you need.
Other types of content that have a great rate of returns concerning recruiting talent are infographics, how-to guides, and tutorials, podcasts, etc. As long as you match the content with the platform and address the right audience with both, the talent pool is yours to rule.
3. Create a Community
Do you remember how we said social recruiting was a mix between employer branding and marketing? One marketing strategy you can borrow and adapt to your human resources needs is to create a community around your brand and shared values/ethics.
Spamming social media with your job ads is not the way to go about seeking talent. We mentioned engagement a lot in this article, but let’s emphasize it a little more. When you build a community of mind-like people, you need to meet them halfway. Follow the rules of building genuine relationships. Know when to talk and when to listen, insist when you must, take a step back when you went too far, etc.
Don’t harass people who are not in the mood of talking to you. On the other hand, don’t allow potential talent to fade away and fall through the cracks because you ignore them or don’t engage them enough.
Final Thoughts
Social recruiting is not an easy feat and encompasses more than posting some job ads in Facebook groups. It means building a solid marketing plan and testing its efficiency while following the KPIs. With a strong employer brand and the proper social media marketing strategies, your company could ace talent acquisition before the competition does.
