6 Simple Tips to Make Social Media Recruiting Work

Implementing social media into your recruiting strategy is a great way to boost your hiring efforts. By doing so, you’ll be able to reach a broader and more appropriate audience.

With billions active on the world’s most popular social media platforms, most of your future hires are all-but-certainly on more than one social media platform and possibly even sharing their own experiences – good and bad – in their particular career fields. To win over your potential employees, you must approach social medial recruiting in a strategic way.

Here are 6 best practices to make social media recruiting work.

1. Involve your Employees into Social Media Recruiting

You’re communicating with your colleagues daily. They’re familiar with your company. And most, if not all, are already on LinkedIn and other social networks. It would only be natural to include your brand’s existing employees in your social media recruiting strategy.

So, do it. Provide your employees with an opportunity and the platform to contribute to your recruiting methods. Empower them to share their own stories, involving both your company and their own unique experiences in whatever industry your brand is in.

If you yourself are in a recruiting role, educate your colleagues by informing them how much influence they have when it comes to attracting new talent. So much influence, in fact, that they can play a part in who their future colleagues will be. At the same time, they’ll be helping to promote your company or organization while building up their own professional networks.

Just make sure that when involving employees to help with your social media recruiting, you provide them with the training, resources and availability of someone from the recruiting team to help when necessary.

The reality is that your employees have direct connections within their professional networks of people with experience in similar industries. This makes the storylines that they’re promoting on their social networks relevant and more likely to attract the right candidates.

💡 Related: Employee Value Proposition: The Complete Guide to Building a Great EVP

2. Make Sharing Content with Professional Networks Easy

Everyone is busy. You, others from your team, your boss, even your dog. Okay, maybe Fido is simply enjoying his nap without a care in the world.

The point here is it’s all about making it as easy and seamless as possible for your colleagues to share quality employer branding content to their LinkedIn feeds and their other social media platforms, thus aiding your social media recruiting efforts.

If you don’t provide the material for them or at the very least make it easy for them to find, you won’t make much headway.

Platforms including Haiilo’s employee advocacy solution make the process simple for everyone involved throughout their companies and have been helping businesses and brands of all sizes with their employee advocacy solutions, including their social media recruitment strategies.

🎧 Listen to our podcast about the 5 reasons why internal comms are vital for successful employee advocacy.

3. Curated Content as a Booster for Social Media Recruiting

It’s excellent when fellow employees make an effort to share the newest open positions from your company or even engage in an employee referral program. This is taking a small step of involvement to promote the company to their social networks.

The reality is that the small step is usually not enough to make a real dent in your social media recruiting efforts. The recruiting world has changed quite a lot. Recruitment marketing requires a successful strategy for companies to be able to attract top talent. Today, it’s less and less a company market when it comes to talent acquisition and more and more candidates choosing the best companies.

In saying that, taking the time to curate quality employer branding material that will attract potential future employees is essential. Consider pieces of content that highlight the culture at your company and why your existing employees feel it’s a great place to work.

Are there pieces of external content available that have highlighted your company’s work culture, work-life balance or other benefits? Be sure to include those in your treasure chest of quality content. There’s nothing wrong with using curated content from external sources that are vouching for your brand’s workplace. In fact, in many cases, those are even more relevant in that they are organically promoting your brand.

📹 See our recent online session: The Great Comms Debate 8: Talent Turnover Tsunami Edition

You may already have a boatload of internally-created content that you can use or modify, including thought-leadership stories, employee testimonials and stories about the attractive culture at your workplace.  This content can all be in the form of articles, blogs, graphics podcasts, and videos.

💡 Related: Company Values: Definition, Importance and Examples

4. The Right Social Platforms in the Right Spots

We all know the mainstream social media platforms, and most of them have a place when it comes to your social media recruiting efforts. Each social media platform is different, but each provides a unique strength to help with your social media recruiting strategy.

Obviously, LinkedIn is at the top, boasting over 700 million subscribers as of 2021. Consider the reach of closing in on 1 billion people. Plus, the platform is overflowing with hundreds of millions of experienced professionals and the world’s most well-known thought-leaders. Quite simply, it’s the place for professionals to have genuine conversations with other professionals both within and outside their networks.

💡 Related: Recruitment vs. Talent Acquisition

With its targeting abilities second-to-none, Facebook enables recruiters to target a very specific audience for their recruitment goals.

More often than not, Facebook can be a great social media recruiting tool when targeting graduates recently out of university, perhaps in a specific area of the world. Maybe even from a particular university. Looking to target computer engineering graduates in the last five years from Harvard University? Yes, Facebook can help you drill down to that specific audience in your social media recruiting.

YouTube and Instagram enable companies with unique ways to promote their brands, from more humanized lifestyle and culture videos to relevant campaigns to their industries.

Furthermore, even professionals have their favorite brands that they’re passionate about, and the chances are they’re also followers of those favorites’ Instagram and YouTube channels, so it’s a good idea to consider these two platforms for your social media recruiting.

Source. Agency Central

5. Have a Conversation with Potential Employees on Social Media

Social media recruiting is a two-way street and is meant to be social. Whatever the social media platform you’re posting content to in recruiting and in reaching new potential employees, take the time to answer questions that will come your way and engage with other comments.

This is especially important when posting through your company’s official social media accounts.

There are several benefits to engaging with those within your reach who are asking questions or sharing an opinion. Not only are you answering the question for the specific person asking, but you’re showing a potential candidate (and other potential candidates) that someone at your company has taken the time to interact with them, making them feel important already at such an early stage in the recruitment journey.

💡 Related: What Is Social Recruiting and How to Build a Successful Strategy

6. Define your Goals and Social Media Recruiting Strategy

Understanding the importance of social media recruiting is essential to anyone within the company helping with social media recruiting efforts. Inform your teams and employees of the motivations and learnings you have to share behind your social media recruiting efforts and make sure to communicate the goals and KPIs.

💡 Related: How To Use Social Media for Recruitment: 5 Best Practices

Sorting those allows you to modify on the fly and address any needed changes that may come, based on those metrics. The metrics should include a peek into your engagements with various forms of content, which content types are converting, and something as simple as reviewing the website traffic to your careers pages – for example, which shared content items and types generate the most traffic?

By considering all your data points and metrics, you can look at ways to optimize your traffic and improve your social media recruiting strategy.

There you have it. You now hold the basic framework featuring several tips to either get you started on your social media recruiting strategy or to assist you in improving your existing social media recruiting initiatives.

Want to learn more about how other companies are using Haiilo to help them recruit the best talent through social media? Schedule a demo today!