Social Media Recruiting: Everything You Need to Know to Excel at it in 2022!

From in-person interviews to virtual ones, from newspaper recruiting ads to online hiring, the face of recruiting has completely transformed in the 21st century. In Jobvite’s recent survey, nearly 94% of the surveyed recruiters said they already use or plan to turn to social media for recruiting. 

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has significantly pushed online recruiting to the forefront of talent acquisition. According to one poll, 67% of employers used social media to capture potential candidates in 2020.

Hiring via social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn quickly gains an edge over traditional recruiting methods. 

So then, how exactly can HR leaders and business owners identify if a social media recruiting strategy is the right thing for them, and how can they leverage this state-of-the-art hiring approach to its full potential to land the best hires and optimize their recruiting efforts?

Review Your Company’s Existing Social Media Accounts

To begin with, start assessing how your company is using social media platforms at present and what goals you have in mind for them in the future. 

For instance, if your goal is to attract job seekers with your social media profiles, you should consider posting photos that highlight your team’s accomplishments and company culture and show your employer brand positively.

Here are a few other points you can consider when assessing your current social media platforms:

• Which social media platforms are getting maximum traction concerning potential candidates at present?
• Are your job openings receiving positive responses on these channels?
• Is the content being shared on those platforms relevant to your goals and hiring process?
• Do you feel confident about potential candidates landing on your page? Would they be compelled to work at your company?
• Will your existing profiles improve your social recruiting efforts?

Now that you have a brief understanding of whether or not you need to look at formulating a social media recruitment strategy for your company, let us dive into some tips to help you out.

1. Engage Candidates With Video Content

Our brain has the potential of processing images 60,000 times faster than textual content. Additionally, 90% of the data transferred to the brain is in a visual format. 

Hence, utilizing video content such as Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Stories can help you capture the attention of job seekers instantly. 

You can engage both active and passive candidates with unique videos that involve non-verbal messages, visual clues, or educational content. Another best practice would be to create videos through which candidates can experience your company culture virtually or host rapid Q&A sessions to make your social feed more interactive.

2. Focus on Building a Strong Online Reputation of Your Brand 

“Now, more than ever, it is critical to share your voice for others to get to know who you are and what you stand for. Customers can tell when you ‘sell’ to them versus when you are just trying to help.

“Find organic outlets (blogs, forums, articles) to share what makes you special, help them with the subject matter you are an expert on and be authentic. Your reputation and reviews will follow,” says Joshua Curlett of Sound Productions, in one of his recent interviews with Forbes.

Per Glassdoor, 79% of job seekers use social media for job search. Hence a well-defined brand online attracts the right potential job candidates for your company. 

Some of the things you can do to establish a robust brand reputation on social media sites include:

• Post about your company’s perks to attract talent
• Set a tone for your employer brand
• Identify customer pain points and provide solutions to those
• Set measurable and clear recruiting goals if you engage a hiring agency to expand your brand reputation online

3. Look at Ways You Can Increase Employee Engagement on Social Media Channels

Your employees are one of the best resources you can leverage to create a brand reputation within your niche today.

According to Social Media Today, content shared by employees gains eight times more engagement than the content posted by brands themselves, therefore, one best practice when leveraging social media hiring would be to involve your employees in the recruitment drive by asking them to share posts on the company’s social media platforms. 

Ensure that you have a social media policy in place and employees know what’s expected of them while posting. Guidelines help to maintain your brand reputation and voice. 

In addition, allow employees to join professional groups relevant to your industry. Networking via these groups helps locate top talent in the employment market and attract the right candidate profiles for your company. 

You can then make use of employee referrals to augment your recruitment efforts.

4. Be Specific About Your Target Group and Potential Employees

Each year, over $37 billion is wasted by brands on ads that ultimately fail to engage their target audiences. 

This statistic points out that to attract and recruit the right talent, you first need to set clear goals and requirements. Identify better cultural fits that align with your organization’s core competencies. This requires research on their motivation, interests, and aims. 

You can start with these three tips:

• Create a list of your potential candidate personas
• Ensure that your recruiting team or hiring manager understands who you’re targeting
• Spell out your requirements within job postings

5. Cast a Wider Net to Target Both Active and Passive Candidates

Per CareerBuilder, 73% of job seekers are passive candidates. You’re missing out on many potential solid partnerships if you aren’t targeting passive candidates with your social media hiring strategy. 

While passive candidates aren’t actively seeking opportunities on job boards, they often use social media channels to research and keep themselves updated on the latest industry trends. 

You can easily attract such candidates through their social profiles and reach out to them. You can also furnish educational content for them on your company’s social media profiles, such as blog posts or infographics that subtly embed or talk about the existing vacancies at your company.

Doing this will grab their attention and place you in an authoritative position, but it will also compel them to become a part of your team because of your strong social media presence.

6. Leverage Content Marketing

Content marketing can be a powerful tool to attract the right candidates, especially passive job seekers, because they highly value educational content from within their niche.

Share curated or original content on your company’s social media platforms. Research what your target audience wants to know and is demanding answers to. Keep them engaged by giving them the correct answers. 

Ensure that your content is entertaining, informative, educational, interesting, and valuable. Here are a few content formats that you can use:

• Videos
• Blog posts
• How-to guides
• Images
• Infographics
• Photography
• Podcasts

7. Make Use of Social Media Advertising

Connecting with candidates through means of an advertisement on social channels that they are active on or use often is comparatively easier than taking missed hits and reinventing the wheel when it comes to social media recruiting efforts. 

According to one study, 70 percent of the US population has a social media account, and the number is expected to rise to 243 million by 2025. Hence, using social media for advertising job openings opens opportunities to hire the right talent. 

Social media ads that signify a brand message, personality, and voice help build authentic connections with your target candidates. Marketing via online advertisement improves visibility and helps gain recognition for your company. Thus, making your brand familiar and accessible to new seekers. Further, social ads define your ideal candidate, hence refining your search parameters. 

Now that we’ve discussed social media recruiting best practices, let us look at which social networking channels you can leverage to maximize the efficiency of your campaign.

Some of the Best Social Media Recruiting Platforms For Businesses

1. LinkedIn

According to some research, LinkedIn is extremely popular amongst college students, and 50% of college graduates in the USA have active LinkedIn accounts. Hence, if you’re primarily looking at recruiting freshers out of college, you can easily do that by leveraging LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s search filters make it easy to locate candidates with specific experience and skillsets. You can receive smart suggestions and integrate those with your candidate tracking system. Further, LinkedIn’s premium subscription gives you access to InMail, on-demand videos, and features such as who’s viewed your profile. These features help send hiring details directly to the desired candidate.

2. Instagram

Instagram is another social media platform taking the world by storm at present.

Posting your company’s social activities on Instagram can help attract a wide range of job seekers. This is true because Instagram isn’t a professional network per se, but it can attract people to your company pages if your work culture or company ethics stand out.

Also, use the right hashtag strategy for recruiting. Think of the hashtags used by your candidates as well. Instagram’s direct message feature also allows you to message potential candidates. 

3. Facebook

Facebook’s Graph Search allows you to scan people’s profiles based on their interests, location, education, followed, and liked pages. This approach can quickly help you to detect ideal candidates. 

You can post job openings on Facebook by creating a Business Page and bookmarking it as jobs. Your hiring managers can then share this page on their timeline for recruiting people. Further, you can reach job seekers via paid boosts, enabling you to target specific candidates based on your requirements.  

Design Your Recruiting Strategy Today

If you don’t have a social media recruiting strategy in place, don’t worry. While these tips can help, sometimes it’s best to rely on an expert’s help.

That’s where Recruiter.com comes in. We have powerful AI tools and an extensive network of recruiters to augment your strategy.

To know more about other innovative social media recruiting strategies, contact us today!

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