Using Social Media to Recruit Employees

Recruiting and hiring top talent is no easy feat. Without tools and systems to streamline the process, your recruitment efforts aren’t likely to attract quality employees who ultimately want to stay with your company for years to come. This is where using social media to recruit employees comes in handy. 

 

One of the best tools you can use to streamline recruiting and hiring processes is social media. Building a recruiting strategy around social media is especially important because Millennials and Gen Zers make up a considerable part of the current candidate pool — and their daily use of social media includes looking for job opportunities.

 

Using social media to recruit employees can effortlessly attract the current workforce and open up the talent pool if done right.

 

This article will explore three ways social media can be used in the recruitment process. Let’s get started!

 

1. Creating Strong Relationships Within Your Network

First, social media is used in the recruitment process for the general purpose of creating solid relationships within your network. You must build genuine connections with people in your network by showing up each day on your platforms with something of value. This can take them from just loving your brand to working for it.

 

Start developing relationships with individuals in your social network with a design and layout that they’re attracted to. The way you layout images, the colour schemes you use, and even font types play a role in attracting good candidates. Use colours reflective of your brand, in-depth captions, high-quality images, and other innovative visuals to attract top-quality candidates to your pages.

 

Share content that has nothing to do with open positions, like industry information or how to get the most out of the products/services your company offers. This helps nurture genuine, trust-filled relationships with your entire audience because they can rely on you for valuable, relevant information.

 

If you aren’t confident in your ability to make your social media pages visually pleasing to visitors, don’t be afraid to enroll in graphic design classes. These classes can teach you to use space effectively in your posts, the role of typography, the importance of proportion, and the influence of colour in your social media content.

 

The way you design your social media pages attracts potential candidates and creates a foundation for solid relationships to bloom within your network. But the content you share on social media is just as crucial to your recruiting efforts on these platforms.

 

2. Sharing Content on Company Culture

Many businesses use social media in their recruiting strategies by sharing content on company culture. A random post about a job opening here and there isn’t sufficient to gain the momentum you need when using social media to recruit employees. The content you share on your social platforms should include a focus on company culture.

 

 

When the goal is to attract top talent to your company, you must share content that thoroughly looks into what it’s like to work for your company. First, ensure your employer branding is strong before posting content on company culture. It’s incredibly dishonest to share how fantastic your company culture is when your current employees constantly express how dissatisfied they are with working conditions. Make sure everything is on the up and up internally before sharing externally.

 

Then, dive into one of the best recruitment strategies to deploy on social media: sharing content on company culture. Share your company’s work environment through social media posts. Highlight exemplary employees and introduce new workers on your platforms. Show potential candidates how your company can help them grow their careers.

 

Also, ask employees to share their experiences and refer suitable candidates to open positions within your company. In addition, allow company leaders and employees to do a “social media takeover.” You can choose a day for them to lead your social media outreach by answering questions about day-to-day work in real-time or having company leaders introduce themselves and express their desire for new employees.

 

Finally, you can use this content to implement our last way to use social media in the recruitment process.

 

3. Advertising on Social Media

 

 

Using ads on social media is a great way to recruit top talent, but many businesses don’t use them efficiently. For example, the visuals accompanying the ads aren’t representative of what is being said in the captions. The captions aren’t descriptive enough, nor do they have a solid CTA that drives traffic to the careers page or application itself.

 

Many businesses also only use ads for one-off job openings and don’t have a real strategy to get the results they want. If you’re going to advertise on social media, do so consistently and with specific goals in mind. In this case, it would be to attract top talent to work for your company. So, use social media content on company culture that’s performing well as a base for the ads. Ensure your captions give detailed information on what the job opening is, who would be a good candidate, and where to go if they’d like to apply.

 

Also, to advertise on social media effectively, you may need to enlist the help of experts like personnel managers or human resource managers to ensure you are targeting the right kind of people in the right way for your advertising efforts. Both roles focus on attracting and retaining top talent. But their approaches are different. For example, a personnel manager can educate candidates on the benefits, training, and development opportunities available. And a human resources manager can help bridge the gap between company executives and employees to ensure a healthy relationship is built between them, ultimately resulting in excellent company culture.

 

Moving Forward With a Recruiting Strategy Around Social Media

Although building a recruiting strategy around social media is a smart move, you should be mindful of the pros and cons associated with this method. For example, it’s easy to get lost in targeting everyone on social media because there are so many users. But this approach ends up being counterproductive and extremely costly.

 

Another challenge is engaging with your audience effectively. When people start to comment, send messages, or share your posts more frequently, it can be hard to keep up. And lack of engagement can turn people off, especially candidates with questions about company culture, job openings, and so forth.

 

But the pros of social recruiting are that you have the opportunity to reach a wider audience, you can tailor your messaging and visuals to ideal candidates, and you can engage with active and passive job seekers.

 

Ultimately, building a recruiting strategy around social media should be done only with clear goals, efficient systems, and the right tools in place.

 

Ready to improve your recruitment process?

Attracting candidates through social media is just one vital part of the recruitment process. Learn how to maximise your whole recruitment process from start to finish by downloading our eBook on this topic.