How to leverage social media for recruitment: 3 powerful ways to scale

As every talent acquisition team knows, leveraging social media for recruitment isn’t easy. You have to figure out what to create, how to create it at scale, and–perhaps hardest of all–how to publish it with adequate reach and frequency to make an impact. For many companies, effective social media recruiting at scale soon becomes a pipe dream. It’s just too much work, and they’re already overworked and understaffed.

That’s where we come in. We help our clients embrace social media recruiting at scale–turning understaffed and overworked talent acquisition teams into powerhouses.

As an example, take Vi Living. Vi Living used CareerArc in 3 powerful ways to change candidates’ perspectives despite limited time and resources.

How to leverage social media recruiting with limited time and resources

When Vi Living started thinking about how to leverage social media for recruitment, they knew they’d be facing an uphill battle. They didn’t just have to change public perception–they had to do so with limited time and resources.

They define themselves as high-end senior living, but those are 4 words that don’t tend to go together. As Shawn Scott, Talent Acquisition Manager at Vi Living put it: “When you think about senior living, most of the time we think of a nursing home. We think of very pre-made bland food. We think of bad smells. Older communities and infrastructure, high turnover, and very poor care.”

Vi Living is exactly the opposite.

As Shawn continued, “At Vi we have gourmet food, we have a culinary team–executive chefs who make fresh food from scratch every day. They’re luxury work environments. If you go to our communities–I call them senior resorts–they’re absolutely gorgeous. You look at our community in Naples, they have a swimming pool, a golf course. We have great benefits, very high employee retention, as well as quality care.”

To find the right candidates for their jobs, Vi Living didn’t need to simply build brand awareness. They needed to change candidates’ expectations of the industry.

Which is kinda difficult, considering that there’s only one person on Shawn’s team: Shawn.

So they partnered with CareerArc to overcome these challenges by using social media in three powerful ways.

1. Automate social media job posting with CareerArc magic posts

We estimate it takes at least 4 minutes to compose, schedule, and publish one social media post that promotes one open job. But what if you had 10 open jobs? And you wanted to promote each uniquely, repeatedly, and across multiple social profiles over the course of a month with varying images, text, and hashtags?

That could take days. With CareerArc, it’s automatic. And it saves companies on average 949 hours a year–about 6 months of work.

“Over the course of a year, hundreds of hours of my time are saved. I can’t imagine not using CareerArc to effectively execute our social media strategy.”
Shawn Scott, Talent Acquisition Manager, Vi Living

With CareerArc, automatically sending out your posts is effortless, because we do all the heavy lifting for you. CareerArc auto-syncs to your ATS and pulls in pre-approved content from your Dropbox, Google Drive, Sharepoint, YouTube and more; auto-creates countless new social media posts for you; and auto-publishes your posts everywhere, including to corporate, recruiter, hiring manager, and employee profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. And we do it all while giving you as much creative control as you want.

As Shawn shared, “The automation and scheduling is a lifesaver.”

Psst: CareerArc helps brands of all sizes and across all industries scale their social recruiting with ease. Like CVS Health, Leonardo DRS, and ULTA Beauty.

2. Use the CareerArc content calendar to craft and templatize their content strategy

But automation is just the beginning. With CareerArc’s content calendar, you can easily customize your content strategy to meet your goals.

As Shawn shares, “Careerarc really allows me to have a reservoir of images and content that I can easily update. I can go back a couple of weeks or even last year and think, ‘Hey, I did a post on Valentine’s day or a story about an employee,’ and I’ll go back and I’ll update it and make it more relevant–you know, change the image, change the hashtags, all of those things–that’s really easy there.”

Shawn adds, “The Content Calendar allows me to be more strategic and efficient in postings. Before, it was a very manual process going to the various social media sites one by one, but now, the Content Calendar allows me to go to one place and with a few clicks, I can post and schedule postings in advance, saving me a great deal of time.”

Here are Shawn’s top 3 tips for campaign and content creation:

1. Highlight employee journeys that resonate with candidates.
2. Highlight what makes your company unique especially in an industry many may not be familiar with.
3. Answer the question “Why work here?” Everyone is hiring, so you must stand out!

Take, for example, this post:

This post shares everything candidates stand to gain working at Vi Living. Factors like career advancement, work-life balance, free lunches, DEI initiatives, and so on–all things that a lot of Vi’s competition doesn’t offer.

Access our new 2022 Social Media Recruiting Lookbook for more examples from leading employer brands, and use these free social media recruiting templates to get a headstart on your content strategy.

3. Easily publish to unlimited social profiles to power employee advocacy, ambassadorship

As our recent 2022 Social Recruiting Benchmark Report showed, employer focus on employee advocacy and ambassadorship nearly doubled in 2021. The power of employees’ and recruiters’ social networks in driving talent attraction and retention is why it’s one of the top talent acquisition strategies today.

With CareerArc’s social recruiting platform, you can move beyond your own brand accounts and turn your employees into a powerful team of advocates and ambassadors. With just a few clicks, you can connect and publish to any number of your recruiters’, employees’, and hiring managers’ social profiles.

As Shawn puts it: “I’m automatically on all of our brand ambassadors pages. Again, I’m a small team, so it allows me to really re-imagine content and to update it more quickly.”

How Vi Living put it all together to change candidates’ perspectives

But we know: we’ve kept you in suspense too long. How did it all play out for Vi Living?

In addition to changing candidates’ perceptions, Vi Living were also trying to keep their employees safe during a pandemic. As Shawn shared, “We actually announced that we would be mandating the vaccine, but what we wanted to do is we didn’t just mandate it and say, ‘Hey, this is when it’s going to happen,’ and that’s it. We actually did a survey. We did a Great Place to Work survey.”

The results of their survey were extremely positive: 92% of employees said they felt safe coming back to work, even during a pandemic. 87% felt they had the right tools and resources to do their job. And not long after, they were awarded a “Great Place to Work” certification.

Shawn knew that to reach candidates, it wasn’t enough to simply be a great and safe place to work. They had to publicize it. Safety, career advancement, and work-life balance are all things candidates don’t take for granted, especially in the restaurant industry.

So they got to work. Partnering with CareerArc, they created posts like these:

To highlight their “Great place to work” certificate, and posts like these:

To highlight that they’re a safe place to work.

Experience the power of social media recruiting at scale

Vi Living is far from the only ones leveraging the power of social recruiting at scale. Take Texas Roadhouse for example, who partnered with CareerArc to get 400k applicants in just 12 months. Or Novipax, who filled 19% of their open jobs with CareerArc in just 2.5 months. Or UAMS, who received 3x more applicants from one CareerArc-powered social recruiting post than from 3 months of traditional recruitment marketing.

And you could be next.

Looking to reach more candidates? How about increase your brand awareness? Maybe you’d love to find more qualified or passive candidates, or just see results faster and reduce your cost per hire?

CareerArc can help.

We’re the only social recruiting solution designed for talent acquisition, and it shows. From top to bottom, our award-winning solution was built with just two goals in mind: to help you achieve your talent acquisition goals, and to save you time in doing so.

Ready to see how we can help you do the same? Just click here to check out a free demo of CareerArc.