According to a 2021 study by CareerArc, 92% of employers said they use social networks to find talent.
Social media enables companies to reach a wider audience and provides a platform to engage directly with the 96% of job seekers who use it. It’s also a good way to catch the attention of passive candidates who may otherwise not see your job postings. Bottom line, if your target candidates are using social media, you should be too.
Here are a few ways you can leverage the platforms to strengthen your talent acquisition plan:
Set Social Media Goals
To maximize your recruitment efforts through social media, it’s important to determine your goals. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive candidates to your careers page? Target a certain audience?
After you know what you want to use socials for, you can decide which KPIs will be the most valuable to track your progress.
Some useful KPIs include:
- Traffic – Find out how many people are going to your application page and from which social channels.
- Engagement – Learn which posts are getting the most likes and comments.
- Conversion rates - How many applications were filled out and submitted from social referrals? This number will allow you to calculate the ROI from your social recruiting efforts.
Now that you have set goals, make sure to measure and track your progress every month so you can determine what strategy is working and what needs improvement.
Focus on Relevant Channels
Using every social platform may not be the most efficient or effective way to recruit for your business. The first step is to define your target audience or the type of job seeker you want to attract.
Developing a candidate persona document is huge for digital recruitment and will give you a good understanding of your target candidates' typical behaviors and goals. It will also help you know which social media channels to leverage.
A good candidate experience is important for all channels where you are promoting your jobs, including how easy it is to locate your social media channels. To optimize your profile for search, avoid altering your company name on your social channels as much as possible and include keywords such as your location, industry, and tagline.
Employer Brand
Regardless of which channels you decide to leverage, you should ensure your branding and voice remain consistent across all platforms. Consider your overall EVP and the traits you want to portray on social channels, and develop guidelines and a social media strategy to align your company's voice across your social channels.
A Feel for the Culture
A major perk of leveraging social media as part of your recruitment strategy is showing off your unique company culture. Take advantage of posting photos and videos of events and daily life at your company to show people what it’s like to work for your company.
Giving applicants insight into the experiences they can expect working at your company can be beneficial in attracting the best candidates over your competition. Conversely, if your social channels make your company look stale and unengaging, a candidate will not likely take the time to apply.
Job seekers should easily be able to identify WHY they should want to work at your organization, otherwise known as the Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Promoting company values is key to attracting the right candidates.
Employee Advocacy
Employees who truly enjoy working at your organization will naturally become employee advocates – a powerful resource to leverage on social media. Employee advocates are more likely to repost content on a company’s behalf, boosting your reach to more prospective candidates and building your talent pipeline.
You can also leverage employee advocates by sharing content they’ve created. Social posts from employees at your organization are genuine testaments to their experience, and job seekers trust them.
Engage with Social Communities
It’s easy to lose sight of the original purpose of social media – to be social. Make sure to have a two-way dialogue between your brand and your audience to boost engagement and humanize your accounts. Plus, communicating with your audience is another opportunity to share your company’s tone and voice and tie it back to your employer brand.
Another way to engage with your community is to join relevant groups or communities. Groups on Facebook or LinkedIn can help you spread the word about your company’s job opportunities to a larger group of people you may otherwise miss. Make sure to have a healthy balance between job posts and providing valuable content and resources to avoid negative attention. Establishing yourself as an added value in a community will help others be more receptive to your posts.
Don’t Limit Content
If you only post job openings on your social channels, it’s unlikely you will grow a large, engaging audience. Make sure to vary the type of content you share in order to keep your audience interested. Whether it be entertaining content or a resource they might find helpful, it’s important to develop engaging content that provides value to your audience.
Moderate your Channels
While job candidates are navigating through your social platforms and website, they are likely to run into comments and reviews of your organization. It is essential to generate positive buzz about your company when you can.
According to Inc.com, 68 percent of job candidates will form an opinion after reading between one and six online reviews.
Although you can’t stop the reviews from trickling in, good or bad, you must stay present on your social platforms. Comment on reviews, and be proactive in ways you can boost your Google stars or company ranking to strengthen Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It shows your organization cares about the feedback received.
Use and Track Ads
Most social media platforms have an ad or sponsorship program. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok all have their own ad managers, which allow you to post and track ads, and generate leads.
Facebook ads have detailed targeting options such as interests, job titles, education, and location. You can set up your ad as a still image or video with catchy headlines, text, and a call-to-action button, which is a great way to grab somebody’s attention and bring them to your career site.
Instagram ads can either be on the main feed or the Instagram Story feature. In the main feed, it will say “Sponsored” in the top left corner of the post and have a link at the bottom, which in this context could say “Apply Now” and send someone over to your mobile-optimized application. You can also leverage Instagram Reels ads to capture a wider audience in a different format. The ads can be up to 30 seconds, play on a loop, be featured on stories, and your audience can access the application directly by clicking on the ad.
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social media platform, so it would be a suitable place to advertise higher-level positions or positions that require more experience. With LinkedIn ads, you can target your audience based on job title and seniority. It can be sponsored in the news feed or sent to people’s inboxes.
TikTok ads are another great way to target candidates for entry-level positions or to showcase a more humanized look into your company’s culture. The platform allows you to select the campaign objective you want to achieve, and it will optimize your campaign for you for brand awareness or conversions. One of the unique capabilities is that you can target users based on their recent engagement in specific content categories.
The greatest benefit of running an ad on any of these platforms is the ability to track ad performance. When running ads to generate candidate leads, tracking is essential to know where they are coming from and how to alter your ads to reach the right leads.
We’ve just skimmed the surface of tips to increase your social media recruitment strategies. Contact us to learn how we can help you further strengthen your recruitment efforts!
