Ready for a deep dive into social recruiting?

Social recruiting is really quite simple, because it’s exactly what it sounds like: using social media to attract applicants to your available positions.

LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are the primary channels for social recruiting, though Instagram is a popular choice for influencers and content creators. These platforms continue growing all the time, which is part of what makes using them for recruiting easy.

Leveraging social in conjunction with more traditional job listing sites can create a substantial talent pipeline. We have a fairly comprehensive list of social media statistics here, but check a few particularly interesting ones below:

• Close to half the world’s population (3.03 billion people) are on some type of social media. (Statusbrew)
• LinkedIn has more than 810 million users in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. (Omnicore)
• Facebook still reigns as the most popular social media network with 79% of internet users in the US logging on the site. (Pew Research Center)
• 326 million people use Twitter every month. (PR Newswire)

Social recruiting makes it so easy to reach potential candidates that there’s really no reason not to add it to your arsenal. A vital part of any modern brand’s strategy, it’s how you connect with the best talent! Let’s go through some of the major benefits:

Target your perfect job applicants

Instead of waiting for people to apply, your recruiters and HR team can proactively reach out to candidates or share content about your company to build an online relationship and get open job positions in front of your target audience.

Reach passive candidates

Many people won’t be actively searching for a new job and won’t be looking at job boards or your career pages. However, social makes it easier for people to see the cool things your company is doing and what the work environment is like; open jobs can be enticing.

Save your company money

Hiring and replacing employees who leave is expensive! The cost of advertising on job boards and social media adds up fast. Furthermore, there’s no guarantee that the candidates they produce are a good fit.

As stated in a study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, hiring an employee in a company with 0-500 people costs an average of $7,645.

Show off your company culture

While social recruiting is great for sharing about open jobs, it’s also the best place to showcase your work culture, AKA your employer brand. Good benefits, cool company initiatives, and opportunities for career advancement make for a place your employees will love to work, which is incredibly attractive to outsiders.

Shorten hiring time

Streamlining the hiring process and finding the right people for the job is crucial to the success of your recruiting efforts and the company as a whole. Using social, you can quickly engage applicants or new hires to build a more personal rapport, screen employment history, and learn about their interests outside of work.

To ensure your success, you’ll want to establish and adhere to some foundational strategies: 

Organically build your online reputation

It takes time and effort to build up a brand with high visibility that everyone wants to work for. You’ll need to show off your workplace vibes, how employees collaborate and what company initiatives you’re running – all of that goes into building a positive corporate reputation.

If you just spam your audience with open job listings, you won’t be very appealing. Also, make sure to keep your messaging and branding consistent. Building a reputation takes time, but it’s very doable.

Involve employees on social media

An increasingly popular (and effective) strategy involves getting your other employees active in social recruiting. Employees are the face of an organization and the most trusted resource for information about their company.

The concept is called employee influencing, and many organizations have adopted programs to help build their employer brand and drive recruitment. You’ll need a social media policy in place and an influencer platform like EveryoneSocial to make sharing/reporting a breeze. Most importantly, continually encourage your employees to share honestly on social media about the company culture.

Stay active on multiple social media platforms

The big three social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) are your strongest avenues for social recruiting, but don’t forget to leverage other options like Instagram, Pinterest, or Snapchat to help showcase your employer brand.

Each platform’s primary user base – and what resonates with them – is unique, but that just gives your company the opportunity to reach more people with messaging. Always make sure your profiles are complete, detailed, and aligned with brand messaging.

Don’t completely abandoned social media ads

While the biggest piece of social recruiting is the ability to reach people organically, that also takes time and sometimes you need a bit of help. Sure, costs are rising and lead quality isn’t always ideal, but they do still serve a purpose and can help fill in some initial gaps here and there. Be strategic with your targeting to best supplement your program’s organic reach.

As you read through the previous section, there were probably companies that came to mind immediately due to their strong social media presence. That’s no surprise; highlighting work culture and employer brand is a marketing strategy staple for many enterprise and mid-size businesses.

Why? Because it helps solidify their place as a highly sought-after company to join. However, while being a well-known brand will naturally attract top talent, organizations still need to ensure that they offer a great employee experience and showcase it on social media.

Here are some examples of companies that have great social media recruiting strategies:

The Home Depot

Social recruiting has proven to be useful for all industries, as illustrated by The Home Depot’s use of their company social media handles. They post tons of content focusing on career opportunities and the people who work there.

Looking at their LinkedIn company page as an example, the majority of the content centers around their people, as well as volunteer work and philanthropy involvement. Naturally, that sort of stuff fosters positive brand sentiment but, more importantly, it attracts top talent for their corporate and retail job openings.

Dell

Dell has been in the social recruiting game for years — since way before it was a common business strategy. That instinct has paid off well for Dell; browse through their social channels and you’ll see tons of content about employees and career opportunities.

Dell has also been leveraging EveryoneSocial for years, which they use to keep their employees engaged and sharing as part of their recruiting efforts. Download our case study to learn more about Dell’s employee influencer program.

T-Mobile

There is no denying the social media prowess of telecommunications leader T-Mobile. With executives who are highly active on social media and frontline employees that are empowered to create and share content, T-Mobile is absolutely an example to follow.

Creating and distributing strong content that shows off their culture, employees, or career opportunities is how T-Mobile maintains a strong employer brand. Take a look through their major social profiles to see what we mean.

Nothing talks quite like data does, so we’ll just let the numbers below speak for themselves:

The above statistics are only a snippet of the data that’s out there, of course; we put together a larger list of social recruiting statistics here if you want to dive in further.

Okay, now that we’ve covered some of the basics on social recruiting, we should also discuss potential pitfalls. No strategy is completely foolproof, but by knowing what may lay ahead you’re more likely to avoid making these particular mistakes in the first place.

Failing to be authentic

People are already constantly bombarded with content online, so recruiters who simply have social media to blast out open jobs aren’t utilizing its full potential.

Social recruiting helps foster an authentic connection with candidates. When you start a dialog in hopes of cultivating a relationship, you’ll find people are far more receptive to your content and brand.

Not following a social recruiting strategy

Like any other company initiative, you need to go in with a plan. If need be, you can have an overarching strategy at a team level and individual strategies for specific team members.

It doesn’t have to be overly complicated or take months to create. Instead, it should analyze why you are recruiting on social, what you plan on sharing and why, and what you’re measuring to track the ROI of your efforts. Just please, please don’t wing it.

Ignoring branded social account mentions

Keep an eye on hashtags, content your brand account gets tagged in, and general appearances of your company’s name on the web. You’ll discover a treasure trove of insights on what people are saying (good or bad), who is talking about your brand, how often your brand is being discussed online (is it growing?), etc.

It’s a great way to interact with those same people – and put out any employer branding fires, if any were to happen – in a personal way. You can do this via social media accounts and sites like Comparably or Glassdoor.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently. – Warren Buffet

Offering low-quality content

Having the right content for social recruiting is critical; it attracts people to your company and the brand. You can start small, but try to offer a variety of blog content, videos, cool visuals, work culture content, user-generated or employee-generated content, etc.

It’s important to know what kind of content will best appeal to the candidates you want to attract, but your content must be high quality. No need to post 25 times a day trying to stay at the top of the feeds.

Leaving out other employees

While your social recruiting strategy might be owned by the HR or recruitment teams, that doesn’t mean they’re the only ones that should be involved. Recruitment teams can only reach so far, but other employees have untapped networks of potentially great candidates.

Giving others the ability to share some HR or employer branding content can be extremely impactful in growing your talent reach.

Congratulations on making it this far into such an in-depth guide! Hopefully, you’ve got a solid grasp of the social recruiting essentials now. It can be incredibly valuable when building an employer brand. If you’re interested in starting your social recruiting program, our team is more than happy to discuss your goals! Schedule your demo here.

Here are some additional resources you can check out to expand your social recruiting understanding:

• Your Company’s Social Recruiting Is Not Just Human Resources Job Anymore
• Why Kelly Services Got Their Recruiters Active On Social Media
• How Atkins Global Used Employee Advocacy to Boost Social Recruiting
• The Complete Guide to Building Employer Brand on Social Media

What is social media recruiting?

Social recruiting is using social media networks – most commonly LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter – to recruit and attract job candidates for available positions. By posting content about work culture, open jobs, highlight career benefits, and employees, your company can generate more organic interest in your brand and reach the best talent.

Why is social media good for recruiting?

Social recruiting makes it easy to reach more potential candidates and showcase why people should work for your company. Plus, people are using social to evaluate your work culture and what it might be like to work there. You can:

• Target your perfect job candidates
• Reach passive candidates
• Saves your company money
• Show off your company culture
• Shortens hiring time

How do you build a social recruiting strategy?

A social media recruiting strategy looks at your hiring goals and how you want to position the employer brand. To start, you’ll want to:

• Organically build an online reputation
• Involve employees on social media
• Be active on multiple social media platforms
• Avoid completely abandoning social media ads

How can employees help social recruiting?

One of the MOST effective social recruiting tactics is getting employees outside of HR active on social media. Employees are the face of a brand and the most trusted resource for information about their company. You’ll need a social media policy in place and an employee influencer program to make sharing and reporting results a breeze.