Social media recruiting is the new tsunami that is superseding the old wave of traditional recruiting. You may find talent on Indeed, Glassdoor, and other sites, but top-tier candidates confident of their skills are already engaging with customers and brands on social media.
LinkedIn, for instance, is the best social media platform to find top talent for obvious reasons, and statistics point in the same direction.
73% of youngsters between the ages of 18 to 34 say they found a job using social media, and a whopping 40 million people look for jobs on LinkedIn weekly.
When the signs are this clear, it is wise to surf this tsunami, and getting your feet wet at the earliest makes the most sense.
Before diving into social recruiting tips, we need to understand what “Employer Branding” means and how it is invaluable in upgrading your recruitment efforts to the next level.
What is employer branding?
In simple terms, Employer Branding is making an organization’s brand attractive to applicants in the long run. Let’s break this down.
For many years, brands have managed to attract talent by offering various perks. While flexible work hours, wearing casual attire at the office and working seated on a beanbag are always attractive propositions, Millennials and Gen Z demand more.
Today, top-performing candidates know their value & worth and expect brands to fulfill their short-term needs as well as long-term requirements.
This is where Employer Branding comes into the picture.
Employee branding is the strategy of taking everything attractive about your brand and showcasing it on social media to attract top talent. In other words, it is a process of creating a brand identity that helps recognize the brand and stands out in the HR market.
Why is employer branding important?
It is evident that creating an employer brand for HR is as vital as “branding” itself, but if you’re still unsure of its importance, the following statistic may help.
According to a Harvard Business Review, the Great Resignation did not start with Covid-19 but much earlier. Albeit the pandemic exacerbated the situation, it resignifies the importance of employer branding.
The impact of the Great Resignation is the high cost of hiring, loss of productivity, diminished workflow morale, loss of clientele, lower customer satisfaction, and many others.
So, as we are reeling from the pandemic and walking right into a recession caused by wars, climate change, and other factors, employer branding may be the saving grace for companies to stabilize their foundation.
Here’s what employer branding can do:
- Appease the process of hiring new employees.
- Create a strong brand culture.
- Reduce marketing costs.
- Help retain employees, reducing attrition rate.
- Build a solid global reputation.
- Enhance customer experience.
- Strengthen online and social media brand visibility.
- Reduce the cost of hiring.
That said, employer branding can also effectively resolve the reasons for Quiet Quitting, and social media can play a vital role in HR.
10 Social media recruiting tips to hire top talent.
Facebook is generally used to catch up with friends & family and occasionally as a shopping portal. But a study conducted by Link Humans found that 81% of job seekers would like to see job postings on Facebook career pages.
When this is the situation, you’re missing out on a vast talent pool if you’re not making the most of social media platforms. Here are ten tips to get you started.
Set a long-term goal
Before embarking upon your social media journey, you must have a vision and a goal you wish to achieve. Jot down one roadmap to attract passive candidates and another to attract active candidates. Doing so will unclutter your hiring process from the get-go and make the rest of the steps easy.
Set a team meeting, combine the strengths of each team member, and ideate a long-term goal for this exercise. In the same process, identify your current metrics, monitor competitor activity, and choose the correct social media recruiting strategy that works for you.
Strategize your approach toward active & passive candidates
As mentioned earlier, differentiating between active & passive candidates can be of great help. For an active candidate looking for a job, you may:
- Launch an ad on social media to attract active candidates.
- Request your team members and employees to spread the word about the opening on their social media.
- Utilize SEO best practices to reach active candidates easily on social media.
Passive candidates are happy with their current job but scoping for better opportunities intermittently. Said candidates are often high-performing individuals, and you may have to get creative to garner their attention. You may try:
- Deploying a robust employer branding that showcases all the merits available at your organization compared to their current company.
- Deploying targeted social media ads on Google, Facebook, and other platforms and using video to get the message across quickly.
- Joining groups on LinkedIn and Facebook to interact with passive candidates who are active on said groups.
Attract talent organically
Possibly one of the tougher undertakings, building organic content takes time, effort, and expertise. But as organic content pays dividends in the long run, it is a must to explore it thoroughly to attract top talent.
Create content on Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook showcasing your company culture, branding, and job opportunities. Make the content engaging, simple, and consistent.
Encourage your employees to engage with your content on all platforms.
Advertising on social media
Social media advertising is a shortcut to attracting top talent and can work more efficiently than organic content. Layered targeting your ads based on location, interest, age group, job title, and others can reach the right job seekers on any given day.
Advertising with blog posts, videos, and others can reach both active & passive candidates, making this an ideal undertaking for recruiters.Â
PRO TIP: You may check out this definitive guide on talent acquisition that includes functional LinkedIn search algorithms, pro tips for enhancing your search engine skills, and the top platforms to explore in sourcing the best talents.
Create & deploy a variety of content
As the algorithms dictate your reachability on all social media sites, be ready with a mixed bag of content. Images, videos, and text are often the three pillars algorithms respect, and splitting your efforts between value-driven, promotional, and personality-driven content works like a charm.
By doing so, you’re ensuring not to be blindsided if a platform starts prioritizing one kind of content over the other.
Deep dive into the social recruiting platforms
Understanding the merits & demerits of social networking platforms give you an advantage in recruiting. It may seem like all social platforms offer similar opportunities for HR, but this is far from the truth.
- LinkedIn is ideal for reaching the inboxes of candidates looking for an opportunity and is a great platform to search & connect with professionals at large.
- Facebook offers powerful targeting tools to advertise your openings to specific individuals.
- Twitter allows you to search for individuals actively participating in any given [niche] topic based on search, hashtags, virality, and others.
- Instagram is where you can build strong employer branding to attract top talent and utilize its robust advertisement platform.
Focus on creating top quality employer branding content
Search engines, and social media platform algorithms have become extremely good at rewarding quality content lately. As your content, social presence, and activity are directly connected to your employer branding, focusing on creating top-quality content must take precedence. In the meantime, ensure the content you create aligns with your company vision and coaxes your followers to engage with it.
Do not ignore trends, hashtags, and updates
LinkedIn recently started prioritizing posts with images over textual content. Similarly, Instagram began to prioritize reels over images. Keep yourselves and your social media teams updated with such changes and remain agile to switch to content that pleases the algorithm gods.
Seek hashtags and news articles that are trending and actively engage in meaningful dialogue in the comment section. When you provide value to participants in the comments, there is a high chance they may follow your page and engage with your content after that.
Turn your employees into advocates
If you intend to attract top talent, there is a good chance that top talented people already work for you. You can utilize the power of your current workforce to reach out to top candidates they may know, share your job openings on their social media, and even reward them for their efforts.
Make use of social media tools
Every social media platform allows you to run ads, and it is up to you to utilize & optimize it to work in your favor. Use the following tools offered by popular social media networks to seek top talent.
- LinkedIn Recruitment to post ads of your job openings and track applicants.
- Facebook Ads to target niche candidates and Facebook Marketplace to post job ads based on location.
- Twitter Advanced Search to find niche prospects actively engaging on the medium.
- Instagram Ads to target candidates based on usage and search.
- Run YouTube Ads targeting educational and niche YouTube channels.
- Social media management tools to monitor applicant engagement, manage multiple social media platforms, streamline team coordination and other vital data.
Final thoughts
By following the steps mentioned above, you’re significantly closer to hiring top talent using social media. As the HR space evolves from hiring Millennials to Generation Z, recruitment via social media becomes a norm.
Now is the best time to add social media hiring as your core recruitment strategy, as it is the present and the future of talent sourcing.
