10 Extraordinary Tips on Social Recruiting That Will Take You Ahead of Your Competitors in 2022

In the past decade, recruiting has changed drastically, with companies finding new and innovative ways to bring in new talent from the employment market. Thanks to social media, recruiters can now instantly connect with passive and active candidates.

49% of HR recruiters  say that their organization plans to invest more into social recruiting ideas to bring in potential employees.

Social media has become a significant contributor to brands’ recruitment strategies that 9 out of 10 companies use it. But with social media platforms constantly evolving, even recruiting strategies from two or three years ago are not as effective. Therefore, you will need to develop with the internet and create a strategy to bring in younger millennials and Generation Z groups.

Here are a few tips to help you take your social recruitment effort far ahead of your competitors.

Tips to Help Improve your Social Recruiting Ideas 

Social media marketing strategies and social recruiting go hand in hand, as the basic premise is often the same. The core difference between them is that the latter focuses on bringing in customers, and the former focuses on candidates.

So with that in mind, we can move on to tips that you can integrate into your social recruitment strategies.

1. Use the Right Platforms 

The first place that most recruiters start looking is often LinkedIn or Twitter since many consider it the obvious place to start. However, your ideal candidates might be out of your reach on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, especially if they are in the younger bracket. Only 20.4% of people aged 18 to 24 use LinkedIn, making it not a useful platform if your ideal candidates are in that age group. However, the same study showed the 25 to 34-year-old bracket makes up almost 60% of the total user base.

If you are looking to reach a younger age demographic, social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram can be better. Ages between 18 and 24 make up 31%  of Instagram’s following, with Snapchat’s largest demographic being 15-25 at 48%. Sites like Instagram also tend to be more engaging, with the average post across all industries having an engagement rate of 0.98%.  Compared to Facebook’s 0.19% engagement rate, it is evident that Instagram has the edge.

Apart from the different age groups, these social media platforms offer varied advantages to different industries. Pinterest and Instagram can be a good fit if your company focuses more on designs and artsy products. As for gaming-related content, the social media platform that thrives the most is YouTube. The gaming channel on YouTube has 92 million subscribers and599 thousand concurrent viewers during the second quarter of 2021.

2. Create a Vibrant Online Presence as a Social Recruiting Idea 

The company itself also needs to have a vibrant online presence, being able to show off its work environment. Future candidates always want to have an inside look into the company, with a good company culture often attracting the top 20% of interested candidates . Of course, it is not enough that the company posts random content to attract users. You can engage with them more personally with carefully curated content that caters to candidates.

The company’s brand plays a large part in the perception candidates have about it and if they will apply. 75% of job seekers  will likely check the brand’s social media handles before sending in their applications.

Creating a vibrant social media presence often comes down to the values and people you want to highlight. Do you want to show a more lighthearted side of the company? Or do you want to focus more on the motivational and inspirational side? In either case, you will need the help of current employees, who will offer their testimonials in this social recruiting idea.

Even though video interviews tend to look the best, having audio presentations and offering written testimonial transcripts means more people can see them. You can also use quotes from these testimonials in social media recruitment ads online.

3. Use Advanced Features from Various Social Media Platforms

Speaking of using social media to spread the message, only posts on them are never effective. Instead, you have to use their various tools to bring in more talent that would better suit your company. Of course, as a recruiter, these tools will be an invaluable asset, allowing you to reach multiple people all in a short span. Some of the most popular social media tools include:

• Twitter Advanced Search will enable recruiters to find candidates for niche positions. You can also better reach the right people with the help of hashtags.
• Facebook Graph Search is a helpful tool when searching for specific attributes available on an individual’s bios.
• LinkedIn Recruiter should be an integral part of any recruitment plan, as it helps search for candidates based on particular skills, similar to Facebook Graph Search.

4. Determine Your Goals for a Social Recruiting Idea  

Instead of thinking too far ahead, start from the beginning; begin with a plan. Every well-built structure needs a solid foundation, and for your social recruitment idea, you will decide what you plan to achieve with it. While 92% of employers use social media to bring in talent, you have to be more specific about what type of top talent you want to bring in. Social media can be very effective in bringing in talented individuals, with the most popular types of candidates being:

Source: SHRM 

Working on a dedicated recruitment strategy is more fruitful instead of using every social media platform to reel in some candidates aimlessly. You will get the chance to focus on individuals explicitly looking for jobs. Using only a handful of social media platforms at first is the best way to bring potential candidates through to you and get them through the recruitment funnel.

You could use Instagram and TikTok, along with their hashtags, to focus on various aspects of the business that they value—going through potential candidates’ Twitter profiles to see how they interact with strangers and how they interact with their followers.

5. Create Separate Strategies for Active and Passive Candidates

When developing a strategy for your recruitment plan, you should also decide how you will interact with both passive and active candidates. Since these two types of individuals will likely find out about you in different ways, they can hold equal opportunities. For example, interacting with an active candidate usually involves taking a more passive approach to get them to apply. This can include:

• Making your social media posts easier to find by optimizing them makes the company easier to find.
• Encourage employees to promote the recruiting content that the company puts out.
• Posting job openings to your social media channel.

As for passive candidates, you will have to make more active social media recruiting efforts to bring them into the recruitment funnel, as they are not actively looking for a job. Therefore, you can try something like:

• Engage with passive candidates on forums to convince them
• Use video sharing platforms like TikTok and YouTube to help get your message across.
• Create branded content to show off your company’s values and personality

6. Make the Application Process Easier

Distributed and remote teams have become especially popular, especially after the days of the pandemic. As a direct result of the increased popularity of remote working conditions, recruitment professionals dived deeper into using social media to attract new candidates. It allows you to access a much wider pool of applicants and dramatically simplifies the recruitment process.

Making ads and posting them on job boards no longer catches the attention of job seekers, who you can usually find on social media platforms. Over 86% of job seekers use social media when searching for job postings. So when they are using social media to look for jobs, you should be making applying significantly easier.

There should be as few steps from the original social media post to the submission page. You must have a robust system to load the page as quickly as possible since job seekers rarely want to waste time waiting. The website should also be mobile-friendly, seeing how 42% of worldwide social media users primarily use smartphones.

7. Work With Employees to Promote Content

Despite a company’s best efforts, public perception of them is never dictated by what they say. They could post as many friendly videos or pictures of people smiling, but if employees say differently, people will listen to them. Therefore, employee advocacy as a social recruiting idea is crucial, as it helps bring in new candidates and helps build trust.

A company’s social media engagement is rarely as personal as its employees, with identical posts from employees getting more engagement. The social media content that employee posts are 25x likelier to be shared than the company itself. Employee advocacy is also very effective in helping employees feel like they are a part of something bigger.

Employee advocates can organically spread content and news about the company, making the selection process feel more organic.

8. Offer Unique Content as a Social Recruiting Idea 

Along with making sure that content always reaches prospective job seekers, you should also try to offer more diversity in your content. It should be engaging, but it should also align with your business’s values. The content in this social recruiting idea can keep job seekers engaged while telling them a lot more about the company.

You can make three posts, each focusing on a different aspect of the brand. So you can create personality-driven, value-driven, and promotional material for job seekers to engage with. You can also divide that content into images, text, and videos posted online.

9. Make Use of Social Media Advertising

Another very effective tool to improve recruitment is social media advertising. While organically advertising and sharing the content is an excellent way to bring in more people, it cannot hold a candle to social media advertising. The average reach of organic posts on Facebook is just 5.5%. Not only does it help target specific age groups, but it can also target job titles, location, and the individual’s interests.

With the help of social media advertising, you can significantly improve how you target certain applicants. However, paid to advertise tends to be expensive. So not only will you have to decide if you can afford to work through paid advertising, but you will also have to determine which social media platform to use for paid advertising.

10. Measure Your Results to Determine Their Effectiveness

Of course, you do not want to keep spending money on a strategy without seeing its effectiveness. All recruitment teams have a limited budget, so they will have to spend their budget wisely. Using social media tools or paid advertising will always show you engagement metrics and the number of people your ad has managed to reach.

While reaching more people is essential, you also want them to engage with your content. So be sure to check both metrics when implementing an excellent social recruiting idea.

An excellent social media recruitment strategy can do wonders for a company, often resulting in job applicants finding your company engaging with it meaningfully. Therefore, before you set your strategy into motion, check through these tips to make it more effective in the long run.

If you wish to learn more about a social media recruiting strategy or how you can optimize your hiring process and empower your employer’s brand, contact us at Recruiter.com.

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