Recruiting in the Digital Age: Best Practices for Social Recruiting

25 Aug Recruiting in the Digital Age: Best Practices for Social Recruiting

In our past blogs in this series, Recruiting in the Digital Age, we talked about modern challenges in talent acquisition, lots of recruitment strategies, including diversity and inclusion, and using professional digital platforms like LinkedIn. Now, for our last conversation, we’ll discuss all the other social networks and some recruiting best practices. Here’s some inspo for you:  The majority of hiring managers are already using some form of social recruiting for hiring – 92% of companies, in fact!

Social Recruiting:  Yes or No? 

First, let’s address whether you need a dynamic social presence for talent acquisition. It depends! That’s not a very compelling answer, but it is accurate. Although most people have one or more social media accounts, some 41% of workers are using these platforms to find jobs – that’s not including people who use social media to evaluate a company’s culture.  

So how do you decide whether to use the platforms and what platforms to use?  There’s an easy rule of thumb:  If you are not using social media for customer acquisition, then you may not need to use it for talent acquisition either.  However, if your business depends on these platforms and networks  to grow, your talent acquisition should too. Think about your audiences, and then ponder these facts:  

• • Millennials own the largest share of the workforce, and millennials live on social media.
  • The same goes for GenZ (those born between 1997 & 2012). They are digital natives and are estimated to spend as much as nine hours per day on social media.

More Demographics That can Inform Your Recruiting Strategy:

• • The top four social networks (worldwide) as of January 2022 were:
    • Facebook – almost 3 million monthly active users (MAU)
    • YouTube – over 2 ½ billion MAU
    • WhatsApp – 2 billion MAU
    • Instagram – about 1.5 billion MAU
  • TikTok is #6, Pinterest is #14, and Twitter is #15
  • Social media user count is expect to reach almost 4 billion 2022.

Knowledge is power. So, now that you know just how important social networks are for your talent acquisition goals, what are some social recruiting strategies that you can use across the board?

Social Recruiting Best Practices

There are two main strategies for social recruiting that companies should use. One is finding qualified candidates and the other is building the brand. 

Showcase Your Company or Organization:

As we previously mentioned, almost half of job seekers consider leaving their current position because of company culture, so you definitely want to leverage your social media presence for telling your story and highlighting your company’s attributes and benefits. All social networks are useful for this: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

Take high-quality photos that showcase the workplace, your employees, at-work or after-work events, and small or big triumphs.

Make quality videos of:

• • customer or employee testimonials
  • day-in-the-life scenarios
  • any new updates 
  • new job opportunities 
  • unique or high-value benefits
  • what to expect during an interview 
  • what to expect when a candidate joins your team
  • employee or team accomplishments

Create blogs and other resources and share them across your social outlets. Find interesting articles or videos related to your industry and share those too.

Social Activity Must-Dos: 

• • Encourage your employees to engage with your social media accounts and share your updates.
  • Make sure you ask for followers’ engagement and respond to any comments or DMs.
  • Make sure anything you post compliments and supports your brand.

Showcase Your Opportunities:

Once you’ve established your brand across your social platforms, you’re ready to go after top talent. Advertising positions without a solid story to back it up is like shouting through a megaphone but nobody being able to understand what you’re saying.

As with showcasing your brand, you’ll want to use high-quality posts to promote your hiring opportunities. And you want to encourage employees to share and promote as well. If you already have a strong foundation of great people, it’s more than likely that they know great people too – birds of a feather, right? So, use your workforce as a resource – referral programs are a great incentive for this too.

Social Recruiting Musts:

• • Make sure you include a link back to your careers page in your posts. 
  • Don’t use too many hashtags, but include a few relevant ones. 
  • Consider creating a profile just for talent acquisition and recruiting.
  • Make sure your application process is simple and accessible.

Be Aware

You must be careful of legal risks in utilizing social media for recruiting purposes. Make sure your anti-discrimination policy covers all your bases, so what you may or may not see on a candidate’s personal profile doesn’t cause biases in your hiring decisions.

On the other hand, you must be aware of the risks of negligent hiring – the possibility of seeing and ignoring red flags (like in the case of potential workplace violence). 

So, while LinkedIn is the major network for professionals, you cannot discount all the other social opportunities available to you: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram – the list goes on. Get creative and get out there!

If all the social recruiting possibilities seem overwhelming or you just don’t have the resources to dedicate to a comprehensive talent acquisition strategy, the team at TalentFront is ready to help. We’re a trusted partner that can easily enhance and manage your hiring efforts. Connect with us for more info!