How Social Media Can Influence Recruitment Strategy

By Victoria Robertson on June 28, 2019

At the moment, the job market is pretty scarce, as unemployment rates are pretty low. While this is great news for everyone as a whole, when it comes to hiring new talent, things are becoming a bit trickier.

When it comes to social media, hiring new talent isn’t only about qualifications, but also about personality and a “cultural fit.” These elements are essential when bringing on a new employee, which means that it’s essential to utilize social media in your recruitment strategy.

So how exactly can social media influence your recruitment strategy?

Here are 10 ways that you can use social media to influence your recruitment strategy.

Photo Via: Pixabay.com

1. Appeal to your company’s culture

One of the most important things that individuals are looking for nowadays when it comes to an employment opportunity is company culture. Individuals aren’t just looking for a job, but they are also looking for a company that they can grow their career with.

While there is a lot of discussion regarding job hopping, if your company offers proper compensation, benefits and culture, you’ll be able to retain employees without issue. Employees are looking for more than just impressing you, so it’s important to remember that recruitment is a two-way street. You need to attract them just as much as they need to attract you.

For that reason, sharing postings that are about your company’s culture is in your best interest. Whether sharing images of company outings, content that speaks to your culture or sharing core values that you and your company share, providing your culture through your social media profile is the best way to ensure anyone that you recruit through your social media page is of quality and interested in the office environment that you are advertising.

2. Advertise your job openings

Remember that social media is a great avenue for promoting your job posting content without issue. Not only is it inexpensive, but it’s also a way in which you can promote every job opening you have, allowing you to specifically target the audiences you are seeking for the given role.

You can provide a link to your job openings page, promote the individual job openings through status updates and other marketing content and you can even ask current employees to share these postings on their social media networks for additional reach without any cost on your company’s part.

Advertising job openings through social media can also cost small amounts of money if you’d like to promote your postings for about $25/day for a slightly larger, targeted reach, which we will discuss in more detail later on.

Essentially, the more you are using your social profiles to advertise your openings, the more likely you are to get additional applicants that you wouldn’t have by simply posting your job openings on the company website or job builder sites.

3. Engage with college campuses

While many companies look for individuals that are experienced and have workforce involvement already, given the current job climate, it is also in your best interest to start recruiting individuals from directly out of college, in order to groom them into the type of employee you are looking for.

When looking at a social media recruitment strategy, you should also consider engaging with college campuses in order to draw the attention of individuals that are new to the workforce and ready to learn.

College campus engagement is the best way to ensure you get a number of applicants, all willing to train themselves to work for your organization and fit the role that you’re looking to fill.

In addition, this is a great way to attract new talent over time, as continuous posting on college campus social media platforms is the best way to draw eyes and attract applicants at the college campus level, from freshman year until the time they should be applying to new roles their senior year.

Engagement with college campuses can include but is not limited to, posting on the college campuses’ page regarding your openings (which may require special permissions), or simply targeting ads towards individuals that are attending specific universities local to the position in question.

However you choose to use college campus engagement to your advantage, be sure to continue these efforts over time to ensure the best candidate pool.

4. Offer educational postings

Educational postings are a great way to share social content that’s relevant to your followers as well as to attract and teach new talent.

For instance, if you are working in a marketing firm, you should be sharing content relevant to that audience. So you can share articles regarding graphic design and its impact on marketing, how promotional product marketing is right for your agency and the best ways to market your organization, year-round.

Basically, when you are sharing content on any of your social media platforms, you should be sharing content that is relevant to you, but that could also be relevant to potential applicants. All of your postings should be two-fold, which means that you need to focus largely on your social strategy to ensure that your content is serving dual purposes.

Photo Via: Pixabay.com

5. Share content that speaks to your target demographic

When you’re looking at a target demographic for your social media postings, you want to look at the individuals you are looking to recruit. For this reason, given the multitude of opportunities in a given company at a time, there’s a large possibility this will be a rather expansive search.

Therefore, you should be focusing on a “per-job” basis through which you share content that speaks to the demographic that content is focused on. Again, we’ll talk a bit more about targeting ads in the next point, but your target demographic is where this all begins.

Know your audience. Know who you are looking for, what you think your audience would be interested in, what education level you need for the role, what personality traits would be beneficial to your organization’s culture, etc.

There are a lot of elements that come into play regarding a demographic, so be sure that you are selecting all pertinent information when looking for specific targeting.

6. Use targeted ads

When it comes to posting content to improve your social media recruitment strategy, targeted ads are a great way to go. This not only allows you to select a target audience, as mentioned above, but it also allows you to track the performance of your postings so that you can adjust as needed.

Let’s say you post an ad for an open marketing role, and you use a specific tone to speak to social media-adept marketing professionals. Through targeted ads, you can A/B test the verbiage, you can make a single posting and track how well it performed in your target audience versus another audience, or you can simply track how many applicants actually went so far as to visit your job site.

There is a lot of data available to you through targeted ads, which is why they are so useful in terms of posting social media content.

7. Screen your candidate pool 

From a different angle, social media recruitment can be a strong opportunity for you to screen your applicants, whether they came to you through social platforms or not.

So if you have a list of applicants that are qualified for the job based on their resume, but you need to narrow this list down, using their social media profiles to screen them is a legal and beneficial way for you to determine who would be a good fit.

While you don’t want to place too much emphasis on their social media profiles, when used in addition to their qualifications to give you a better sense of the person behind the resume, this is a great way to find the right fit for your company.

Social media profiles are fair game in the job search, which is why many applicants will clean up their profiles when applying for opportunities. For this reason, you shouldn’t feel as if you are invading their privacy, as the content the individual is posting online is always relevant to an employer.

Infographic by Victoria Robertson

8. Share more for free

Again, sharing via social media platforms is one of the most inexpensive recruitment efforts you will have the opportunity to be a part of. The more you share, the more likely you are to build a following. In addition, your employees can share your postings to expand this reach even more.

The only time you will pay for postings on social media is if you share promoted postings, which typically require minimal, daily monetary amounts to expand your promoted content’s reach beyond your following.

Again, you can get creative as far as expanding your reach without shelling out any cash to do so, it’s just a matter of developing a social media content strategy that fits into your needs.

9. Use real content

One of the most underrated elements of social media is the element of posting real pieces. What this means is that if you are speaking to your company culture, you should be putting imagery to fit your words, as words aren’t enough anymore.

If you promote a “work hard, play hard” environment, you should be sharing social media images of you and your coworkers out at a happy hour, or participating in another company sponsored event.

Basically, anything you say on social media can and will come back to you, so be sure that you can back up your claims with evidence. It’s important to be real with your users and share content that’s not only going to entice them, but that’s also going to show them that you are honest in what it is that your company does.

This is a great opportunity to showcase your company culture in a way that looks and feels organic, which is always a good thing.

10. Keep an active platform

Staying active on your social media account is far more important than you realize. When you don’t’ post on your social media accounts, at least once a week, you will no longer appear in your followers’ news feeds, which means that, when a new post automatically appears, they are more likely to unfollow you at that point.

In addition, users begin to follow you because you post content that’s relevant to them, so if you over post or under post, you can lose these followers.

There is a strong balance here that you have to adhere to, which is why maintaining social media accounts can be so challenging. Basically, ensure that you are always posting content, but stick to a strict schedule so that you aren’t over or underdoing it at any point.

As a general rule of thumb, you should at least be posting content on every one of your social media platforms once a week. From here, you can vary this number slightly, depending on your following, but you should also be sure that you aren’t overdoing it.

Consistency is key here, so if you start out by posting content every day of the week, be sure you stick as close to this number as possible moving forward. Posting the correct number of social media postings on a weekly basis is an art, so begin by testing your content and determine how often you should be posting for your specific audience.

There is a lot of research to be done on this end, so be sure that you look into the best numbers for you!

Again, hiring on new talent, especially when available talent is at a low, can be rather difficult. It’s not just about bringing on an individual that’s qualified, but also one that’s going to grow with your organization over time.

Social media can help recruiters and employers to select qualified individuals that will fit in well with the company culture and ultimately serve as the best fit for the position.

While social media is largely seen as a past-time, it’s also an important factor when considering candidates for a position, so use it to your advantage as long as you can!

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