For years, employer hiring strategy relied on job ads posted to job boards and local newspapers. In recent years, brands have shifted strategy to include employer branding, which involves showcasing their values, corporate culture, and job vacancies on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
This phenomenon—known as social recruiting—has helped employers expand their candidate reach. In fact, 84 percent of organizations now use social networks for recruitment.
Whether you’re new to using social media for hiring or looking to test new strategies, you won’t want to miss out on the social network recruiting secrets shared in our recent webinar, Social Recruiting 101: How to Apply a Growth Mindset to Your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram Strategy. In this webinar, Jon Thurmond, podcast host, consultant, and HR manager at Team Fishel, reveals social recruitment secrets that can help you target and attract passive candidates.
Here are the webinar highlights:
How to Choose the Right Platform
Not all social networks are the same when it comes to recruitment. In fact, you need to choose one that meets your goals and objectives as a recruiter.
- Thurmond recommends targeted posts on Facebook for open house recruitment opportunities—when candidates can talk with employers online about open positions.
- LinkedIn, however, is best if you’re looking for a key talent to fill a specific role. LI Recruiter, in particular, proves useful for engaging with skilled job candidates for your sourcing needs.
- Twitter, on the other hand, is a great idea if you want to communicate with trade schools.
Thurmond also uses CareerArc’s social recruiting solutions to improve social media recruitment. His company Team Fishel worked with CareerArc and incorporated an interactive job map onto its website, which showed open positions across the United States.
“Our team was blown away,” he says. “They enjoyed how interactive it was.”
How Companies Use Social Media in Their Recruiting Strategies
During the webinar, Thurmond asked attendees how they currently use social media in their recruiting strategies. The results were surprising:
- Around 61% of organizations said they post some jobs on social media, but have no real strategy.
- Around 31% of organizations said they use social media for recruitment “across the board.”
- Around 8% of organizations reported not using social media for recruitment at all.
These results suggest that most recruiters don’t fully leverage social media when searching for and communicating with job candidates.
What the Benefits of Social Media Recruitment are
Thurmond introduced three key benefits of social media recruitment:
- Engagement
- Learning and market intelligence
- Brand development
When organizations use websites like Facebook and Twitter for recruitment, they can engage with candidates more effectively than they can with conventional recruitment methods. In addition, social recruiting helps companies gain insights into HR and recruitment trends in their niche and develop their brand.
How to Increase Followers
In order to attract top talent, you need to have followers. After all, nobody will hear about your organization’s job openings and career opportunities if you have no social media presence.
It might be tempting to buy followers, but Thurmond says this is a big no-no. Plus, you can still make a huge impact on social media even if you don’t have millions of followers.
“The goal is not to be everywhere all the time, but to be at the right place, at the right time, more often,” he says.
How can you do this? By changing your growth mindset. You might want 1 million followers in a week, but 10,000 followers who engage with your organization will prove far more effective.
“You want to be real. You want to be targeted. You want to be intentional,” Thurmond says.
According to Thurmond, working with influencers isn’t always a positive thing. Instead, he says to focus on micro-influencers. These people might not have as many followers as the biggest authority figures in your niche, but they can help you grow your social media presence as they resonate with followers more effectively.
“Engagement tends to drop the more followers an influencer has,” he says.
In short, needing a large social following for recruitment is a myth. Working with micro-influencers and creating highly-targeted click-worthy content will provide you with a more significant return on your investment.
What Tactics Improve Engagement for Social Recruiting
Throughout the webinar, Thurmond shares social media recruitment secrets that will help you attract more job candidates.
- Include hashtags and a location in your Instagram posts. These have the highest levels of engagement.
- When it comes to creating job posts, include a job title, location, job link, and a call-to-action at the end.
- Create a value proposition for your brand. Tell the world why people should work for your organization and what they can expect in return—programs, rewards, benefits, etc.
Where to Find the Best Job Candidates
Thurmond asked webinar participants about the most valuable social networks for recruitment. The majority of respondents said they think top-quality job candidates use LinkedIn, followed by Facebook, and then Instagram.
Thurmond points out, however, that job candidates are likely to use a variety of different platforms, so employers should invest in an omnichannel approach to improve engagement. For example, 90% of LinkedIn users also use Facebook, according to the Pew Research Center.
How to Build an Audience
Here are some of Thurmond’s tips to build a social media audience for recruitment:
- Follow other brands in your space on social media.
- Consider the hashtags you use. Keep things simple.
- Always be authentic. “It’s about relationships, not followers,” says Thurmond.
- Interact with other users. Comment, follow, like, retweet.
- Encourage your followers to follow you on all of your platforms.
- Use a platform like CareerArc to revolutionize your social media recruitment strategies. Learn more about CareerArc’s social recruiting tools.
- Finally, remember the four Cs when posting on social media—content quality, credibility, conversation, consistency.
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