How to Build an Effective Social Media Recruitment Strategy?

In a recent study done by CareerArc, “2021 Future of Recruiting Study”, executives stated that a solid talent programme is the most important requirement for fostering success. 

Therefore, the vast majority of companies primarily use social and professional networks to find candidates. 

Through employee advocacy and referrals on social platforms, businesses can access new talent pools. Compared to conventional recruitment methods like classified advertisements and job boards, social media allows recruiters to contact more people and a wider pool of applicants, including passive candidates, in less time and at a lower cost. 

Hence, if you aren’t already using social media, you are missing out on a lot of potential for branding and recruiting success. 

But don’t worry! In this blog, we will tell you all the ins and outs of social recruiting and practices to build a successful online recruiting strategy with Talent Acquisition Software and social media in detail. 

Let’s get started!!

What is Social Media Recruitment?

The term “social media recruitment” refers to the process of identifying, locating, engaging, and screening candidates for employment through social media platforms, including both audience and profession-specific sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. 

The goal of social media recruiting is to connect with and draw in both active and passive prospects on the popular digital channels they use. Social media platforms are used to advertise job vacancies and opportunities or as talent databases to find applicants.

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How can Social Media help to recruit?

Traditional recruiting methods relied on expensive and time-consuming methods of discovering potential employees, making them less effective than social recruiting techniques. Whereas, Social media has ingrained itself so deeply into our lives that it should come as no surprise that it has emerged as a key platform for hiring. Here’s how:

• Cost-Effective Medium: All of your web recruiting efforts through social media are free unless you’re employing targeted advertising.

• Helps in a candidate’s background check: You get the opportunity to see a candidate’s online persona, thanks to social media. You can find out more about them by learning about their history, interests, current initiatives, and, most importantly, what they plan to do in the future.

• Increases Reach: The best method to get passive prospects’ attention, gain their respect, and pique their interest is through developing relationships with them online. By giving them information suited to their hobbies and areas of expertise, you can reach passive prospects who aren’t actively hunting for work and may not be familiar with your business.

• Improves branding: Your employer brand can be effectively promoted on social media to attract candidates who might not otherwise be reading your job listings. By enhancing your company brand online, you can show prospective employees what it’s like to work for you. 

• Finds the best fit: You may be sure to find candidates who will be a fantastic fit for your workplace culture, skill set, and personality if your recruiters are making connections with the right people and your staff members are sharing information on their social media network. Also, the content that candidates choose to share online might help you determine instantly if they are a good fit. 

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Practices for Successful Social Media Recruitment Strategy

1. Research and fix your goals

Building a solid foundation is always the first step on the road to success. Without any specific goals, you’ll be setting yourself up for needless difficulty if you start splitting your attention among dozens of social media websites. 

Instead, develop a thorough strategy focusing on the social media sites where your target candidates are most active and direct prospects through a single platform. 

Find out who and what you are up against first. Discover which platforms your competitors use the most, what kinds of content they produce for each platform, and how engagement is impacted by that material. 

On the other hand, you should also find out where your applicants are since you might come upon a hidden talent acquisition resource. 

Determine what you hope to achieve with your social media recruiting approach that you couldn’t by conventional methods and set your goals accordingly.

2. Choose the right platform

When creating a successful social media strategy, it is important to take into account the fact that social sites can draw users from a variety of age and interest groups, as well as from varying levels of popularity. Therefore, to identify the most skilled and qualified people, recruiters must be flexible in where they set up operations.

You might need to explore specific platforms, depending on your sector and target personas, to find the best prospects. Using a social media management tool may also be something you should think about to streamline your efforts and analysis. 

While it would seem natural to begin your social media recruiting strategy on LinkedIn or Twitter, it’s crucial to research your ideal candidate profile and consider where they are most likely to spend their time. 

3. Simplify the application process

The majority of professionals access social media sites via their mobile phones, thus, each post’s images, pictures, and text must be optimised for mobile devices while also functioning properly on PCs, laptops, and tablets. 

Although this may seem apparent, you might be shocked by how many businesses have slow, unreliable application procedures or job portals that aren’t mobile-friendly. 

Therefore, a further crucial point to have in mind is the need for your application procedure to be as simple and direct as possible, requiring the least amount of steps from the social recruiting post to submission. 

4. Creating an effective online presence

The top 20% of candidates are attracted by company cultures, thus a solid reputation and great internet presence are quite important, especially with passive job seekers. If an employer actively controls its employer brand, 75% of people actively seeking employment will apply. 

You can give applicants a behind-the-scenes peek at what they can expect if they join your team by showcasing employee tales, team events, and other business culture touchpoints through textual, audio, or visual assets.  

Create a strong brand for your business and become the one that everyone knows about and wants to work with. 

Share content that promotes your business as a fantastic place to work. Maintain that voice and make use of it to promote your opinions, values, and individuality. These elements appeal to your potential applicants. 

Promote the expertise of your staff. It might be a daily update, information about major occasions, or simply sharing with your community. The best way to enhance your brand image for recruiting is to demonstrate what it’s like to work for you.

5. Include your employees

Job seekers can’t just apply for a position because they learned about it on social networking. They require some encouragement, evaluations, and endorsements. Here, your employees may be able to persuade candidates to apply for the position by being the person they can trust.  

Content shared by employees on social media is shared 25 times more frequently than the same content shared via brand channels, which has a significant audience. Candidates are looking for evidence that your employees appreciate coming to work. 

The only people who can do that are your staff. Invite your employees to participate in your social media marketing plan. Encourage them to spread any fresh job posts as well as the information you have created. Allow them to express their viewpoints on working for your business. 

6. Make use of Social Media features

Use the inherent capabilities that the majority of the main social networks provide to help you with your hiring efforts to actively target and interact with potential employees. For instance, LinkedIn provides sophisticated people searches and other recruitment tools, TikTok now has TikTok Resumes, and Facebook includes job posts. 

Moreover, by using hashtags, you can quickly be recognised by a bigger audience and climb another rung of the trending posts ladder. If the firm were a spider and the candidates its prey, then the hashtags would be the spider’s web. Be creative when using hashtags, and make sure they are unique to you, your business, and the goals you are trying to achieve. Consider which hashtags are best for your audience. Choose something memorable and brief.

7. Create Engaging Content

Make sure the stuff you post isn’t perceived as spam, whether it’s your own or curated content. Being sociable is kind of the goal of social media, but it doesn’t work if you don’t have anything that people want to share with you. Your content must be engaging, helpful, or both. Keep in mind that employment standards and anti-discrimination laws still apply to social media recruiting. 

Hence, postings should be well-written, free of typos, grammatical errors, and material that could be interpreted as offensive or illegal. 

Maintain consistency in your design. In addition to having a distinctive voice, your images and videos also need to have a distinctive tone. No matter how innovative your business is, if you fail to share the basic idea, no one will pay attention, and your business will remain unheard of for all time.

8. Engage your audience and attract potential hires

The hiring process can be challenging without a clear description of the perfect candidate and an effective way to communicate that description to the audience. Advertising an available position could quickly attract a large number of applicants. Therefore, It’s critical to remember that social recruiting is fundamentally a social phenomenon. The niche networks shouldn’t be ignored. 

Join Facebook, LinkedIn, or Subreddit groups that are relevant to your field. There are always top performers hidden among the debris and unpolished jewels. You only need to look for them.  To avoid coming out as promotional and attracting criticism, join groups actively before occasionally posting about job openings. 

9. Analyse results

Setting up KPIs is crucial to evaluating the success of any plan, including social recruiting. 

Even in the era of social media, traditional hiring metrics such as the time to hire, the cost to fill a position, the new hire’s opinion of the hiring process, and new hire performance and retention rates all remain important. 

Choose parameters that are closely related to the objectives and be aware of the best methods for measuring them. This will enable you to identify the platforms and approaches that provide the best prospects in the least amount of time.

Best examples of Social Media Recruiting

Successful social recruiting tactics are increasingly being acknowledged by enterprise HR departments, recruiting agencies, and other talent experts. Although it’s challenging to maintain recognition and use it in favour, these three businesses are killing it.

1. Verizon

Verizon makes the most of its 218,000 Facebook followers by using the sections on Facebook pages for reviews, photos, videos, and more. Utilising Facebook’s page management tools, career-focused pages like Verizon Careers promote jobs as well as convey information about their workplace cultures. This, in turn, helps the organisation attract quality talent on social media. 

2. Disney

Technology, engineering, “Imagineering,” and other job descriptions can be found on the Disney Careers channel in video collections. The company makes most video material for its dedicated community of 9.5k subscribers on youtube. And thus, connecting with thousands of potential hires online. This is a great illustration of a company using social recruiting to its advantage.

3. NJ Transit

NJ Transit’s primary Twitter account has nearly 245,000 followers, and there are 14 more accounts for various service lines. They used this as a recruiting tool in 2020. They promoted current staff members and neighbourhood projects on social media.  Eventually, their reach increased by 60%. 

Final Thoughts on How to Build an Effective Social Media Recruitment Strategy

Numerous social media platforms exist, ranging from well-known brands to specialised networks, making it simple to interact with virtually all sorts of candidates. With so many possibilities, it’s critical to keep in mind that your social media recruiting strategy shouldn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach.

Remember that your social media recruiting strategy should take into account your target demographic, where they spend time online, rules for building relationships, and which social media platforms to use. If you want to create a strong workforce and remain competitive, you must have a well-thought-out strategy that addresses not only hiring but also retention.