Social Media Recruiting: Definition, Benefits and Strategies

Have you ever used social media in recruitment processes?

Almost everybody has a presence on social media, and they spend a significant amount of their time on these social recruiting platforms daily. Therefore, if a large pool of talented and qualified applicants is what you seek, you should turn your attention to social media platforms.

Over 4.70 billion people worldwide use social media. While social media channels were primarily meant to connect people and enrich their social lives, they have become viable social recruiting platforms.

In this article, we will discuss using social media for recruitment, a few tricks, and tips on developing and optimizing your social media recruitment strategy to source the best talent for your organization.

What is Social Media Recruiting?

Social media recruiting is a recruitment strategy where employers post any new job openings for their company on social media sites to engage the target audience.

Social recruiting targets the online community via social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn for job listings. Additionally, the job title and descriptions are highlighted to ensure that the right candidate can easily connect with the HR departments.

Social media recruiting is a reasonably new phenomenon; therefore, most recruiters might not know where to begin. Job posting and sourcing recruiting through social media require a different approach. 

How Does Social Recruitment Work?

If you want to know how to use social media for recruiting, you can get help here.

You need social media tools to get the top talent for your company. The hiring managers use social media tools ranging from traditional to the most advanced search ones. With some of these products, you can gather more than just personal contact information.

Social platforms use artificial intelligence and machine learning based tools to narrow down open positions, generate leads and send direct messages. In addition, there are service providers who can easily locate passive candidates. The software takes relevant applicants’ data collected from multiple sources and creates a single profile that can easily integrate with a recruiter’s applicant tracking system.

With AI, recruiting agencies can get job descriptions that meet the requirements and rank them accordingly. It then depends on the HR professionals if they want to reach out to these passive candidates and know if they wish for the job opportunity. 

You may need some finessing to contact passive candidates using a social media recruiting strategy. However, service providers offer automated checks of present employees to see if any employee has a connection with a candidate. Such an approach can be coupled with an employee referral program.

For example, LinkedIn offers tools that help identify passive candidates. The talent insights help in sourcing candidates through social media. The agency estimates the demand for employees with certain skill sets and attrition rates by measuring LinkedIn Inmail volume.

Facebook has also developed a business strategy that helps organizations create recruiting sites. For example, a company used Facebook in its social recruiting strategies to create career opportunity chatbots that worked with Facebook Messenger. It is a virtual assistant for a job seeker that converses and guides people to the right fit.

What are the Top Social Recruiting Platforms?

Not all social media platforms are the same. They work very differently from each other. To achieve desirable results, you need to understand the unique mechanisms of each social media platform. 

Consider various factors, such as your social media for hiring goals. You also need to consider the nature of the job and the type of candidate you seek when choosing a social media platform for your hiring activity.

Here’s an overview of some of the major social media networks for sourcing candidates:

1. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is widely seen as a professional social recruiting app. LinkedIn profiles almost serve as ready-made resumes. 77% of recruiters are already taking advantage of the platform. Recruiting through social media has taken a new turn with LinkedIn.

It has more than 400 million members spread across 200 countries. It’s a great platform to showcase your brand, develop thought leadership, and share knowledge to spark a conversation with a sizable audience.

LinkedIn is especially useful when filling managerial and upper management roles since its usage ranks highest among those aged 35 years and above.

On LinkedIn, you can connect and follow potential candidates. You can send personalized messages to your connection by introducing yourself and your company. You can like, comment, and share your industry-related content to gain more attention and authority. Moreover, you can endorse, follow and write recommendations for talented individuals. It will help you build rapport with them. 

2. Twitter

Twitter is a microblogging social networking platform that allows businesses to connect with their audience in real time. Unfortunately, many recruiters struggle to incorporate Twitter into their social media recruiting strategy. 

Twitter can be used to share business information, build relationships with your audience, and gather real-time feedback. In fact, you can search for potential candidates by using various hashtags and locations. In addition, Twitter is an excellent platform for broadcasting open job positions in your company.

A hashtag is the first step of Twitter! Next, you need to search for hashtags that you find relevant to attract like-minded people and participate in conversations. To improve your client engagement efforts, you can follow, like, tweet, comment, and retweet posts. You can also share and retweet timely information by live streaming.

You can pin job posts and tweets to keep them visible on your profile. 

3. Facebook

Despite all the negative media hype, Facebook remains the largest social networking site, with over a billion users worldwide. People share millions of images, statuses, videos, and links on Facebook daily to keep in touch with their friends and family. Facebook, therefore, gives you access to the largest pool of candidates. 

Facebook users have expanded their channel usage to connect with organizations, businesses, and professional network groups. It was also found that 83% of job seekers actively look for opportunities on Facebook. As a result, it’s an excellent platform for the talent acquisition team to find the right candidates. 

Facebook has countless ways to connect with candidates. For example, as part of recruiting on social media, you can interact with and follow potential candidates on Facebook. In addition, you can post open positions of jobs on Facebook job boards and share content to promote your employer brand and company. 

4. Instagram

Despite having the highest engagement rates, recruiters tend to be skeptical about sourcing candidates on Instagram. However, with more than 100 million new users per year, Instagram is a great platform to promote your brand. 

Instagram offers you the chance to get personal and friendly with your audience. With creativity,  you can effectively use the platform to engage with potential candidates. It can improve your brand loyalty and increase the chance of job seekers showing interest in your company.

Instagram is a place of glamour and shine! So get the best visual content that attracts the target audience’s attention and compels them to follow your company page. You can engage with people of similar interests by liking, tracking, and commenting on the content they create. You can also host Q&A sessions to engage better with potential candidates. 

What Are the Advantages of Using Social Media for Recruitment?

1. Customizes your Recruiting Efforts

   You will see numerous social media recruiting examples to reach a specific group, allowing you to target diverse talent for the role if you narrow the applicant pool early in the social recruiting process and focus on the best applicants for the position.

   With every platform, you will get a different audience that will allow you to target job seekers who’ll fill your company’s work culture. You can look at social media job posting examples to customize your recruiting efforts.

2. Improves Recruitment Marketing Efforts

   Social media for recruiting can take your hiring efforts and the recruitment process to the next level helping you reach the best candidates around the globe. Recruiting via social media offers immediacy and scalability to the decision markers. In addition, it provides built-in tracking that gathers company page views, followers, and engagement rates.

   The best social media recruitment practices also improve the acceptance rate of the company and attract candidates.

3. Promotes Employer Brand

   Will you join an organization if you don’t like the company profile? A company’s reputation is essential for any candidate when considering a new job role. With social media, you can promote your employer brand to candidates who do not look at your job descriptions.

What Are the Disadvantages of Using Social Media for Recruitment?

1. May Create Hiring Biases

   Various kinds of biases can affect hiring decisions. Social media profiles can create issues with favoritism and partiality. A comment from any individual can change the recruiter’s perception of the candidate. Though looking at somebody’s profile tends to give a good impression, it is challenging to remain neutral with the number of personal details you come across.

2. Challenging to Connect with Candidates

   You can directly connect with every potential candidate on social media, as most social media sites do not allow you to send private messages until you follow them and vice versa. So, it becomes challenging for employers who do not have a prior connection with candidates.

3. Challenging to Protect Brand Image

   Some companies find it challenging to balance using social media platforms for recruitment and saving the brand image.

   For example, you post a job opening on social media and get thirty-five applicants. But, you choose to call only two-three prospective candidates.

   The applicants who weren’t called can make a scene and say negative things about your company. And many job seekers can pass on jobs from organizations with poor social media content.

What are the Tips to Build The Best Social Media Recruiting Strategy?

Every organization is unique. So, recruiting on social media is tricky as the same strategy may not work for all of them. However, there are some fundamental things that all organizations must do to lay down the groundwork for social recruiting. So, let’s look at the best practices for using social media as a hiring strategy.

1. Participate in Online Conversations

   One of the best social media recruitment practices is participating in online conversations to collaborate professionally. People continuously talk about various topics on social media. It is a great way to seek out like-minded communities and connects with them to share their thoughts and ideologies on various subjects. 

   In fact, if you are a high-profile business and already have a substantial social media presence, people are already talking about your products, services, and even your values.

   These conversations provide an excellent opportunity for you to engage with potential applicants. When you engage with your audience, your company appears approachable. This may encourage passive candidates to participate in your job search, send their applications, and take a chance on your business.

2. Create Quality Content

   Ensure that your content does not come across as spam. For example, do not apply for job postings incessantly. Instead, focus on providing real value to your audience with your content. In the context of recruitment, this could mean talking about your company culture, business values, vision, and more.

   Your content should help potential candidates visualize how it will be to work with your company and what a career with your organization would look like.

   You can also use social media platforms to give your audience an insight into your hiring process. If your hiring process seems straightforward and effective, you are bound to have many interested candidates who will actively apply for the job role.

3. Involve Every Employee

   You should encourage your employees to share job openings. People don’t fully trust advertisements nowadays. However, if potential candidates hear about your company and its culture from your employees, it might impact them better.

   You can create fun and engaging ‘behind-the-scenes’ videos. You can also ask your employees to get involved in conversations. Furthermore, you can make them talk about their experience with your company.

4. Target Niche Networks

   You will find people everywhere- Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. However, to attract the right candidate, you need to target specific networks and forums.

   If you want to target parents, find them on Facebook. Instagram is the best place to connect with a younger audience. Developers continually share knowledge on StackOverflow and GitHub. Marketers are always sharing ideas on Warrior Forum.

   Identify such niche communities and forums to find passionate and driven candidates about various subjects that could create great value for your organization.

What are the Recruitment App Features to Simplify Your Hiring Process?

When you have a great social media recruiting strategy, the next step is implementing it in the best way possible. Nowadays, many recruitment software solutions have features to help you implement and optimize your social media recruiting strategy. 

Here are a few elements of recruitment software solutions that can be quite helpful in sourcing and attracting the right talent on social media:

1. Social Media Post Scheduler

   Using this feature, you can create blogs, videos, images, reviews, and more and schedule them for posting on various social media platforms. Then, you make the draft, which will be automatically shared across the social media profiles that you choose.

   You need to post regularly to attract potential talent. This feature ensures that your posts go up as per schedule. It saves you a significant amount of time.

2. Analytics Dashboard

   This module can help you keep track of essential insights such as the number of profile visits, views on job boards, and more. It can also help you identify the source of maximum traffic to determine which social media channel is giving you the best results.

   In a nutshell, the recruitment marketing dashboard helps simplify and streamline the marketing analytics process. It lets you know which strategy works for you and how your content performs.

Wrapping it Up

Social media has emerged as a vital channel for sourcing and hiring talent and promoting your company culture. The best part is that social media recruiting is mostly free unless you promote job openings through paid ads and campaigns.

Social media as a recruitment tool has been of great help to companies. Have you used social media to recruit candidates? What has been your experience with it? Then, do let us know in your comments.