Over the past decade, the recruitment process of job applicants has undergone several changes. Businesses have adapted to growing their labor force in an industry that’s becoming more competitive. As a result, there’s increasing competition for the best job candidates, causing a lot of recruitment firms and HR departments to adopt social recruiting strategies. The adoption of social recruiting strategies highlights the shift in the labor market. Companies are in the market for new staff and skills. In addition, they have adopted new selection processes for the most suitable job candidates as well. So a candidate needs to fill these positions.
The recent trend in the industry is using digital platforms to recruit and engage job applicants. Now, you may be wondering how to do social recruiting work for your organization or recruitment firm. This is the 21st century, and due to the transition of millennials into top positions in several companies across industries, social media has become and will remain an asset in the search for and recruitment of qualified job candidates.
Before we delve into the tips for creating a social recruiting strategy, let’s first look at the concept of social recruiting.
The Concept of Social Recruiting
Social recruiting utilizes social media platforms to effectively streamline the number of job candidates and pick out the best ones among them. Social recruiting works hand-in-hand with tools such as Affinda’s resume parsing software. This recruitment method is usually adopted to complement conventional recruitment techniques. However, it will only be a matter of time before social recruiting entirely takes over traditional recruiting.
When companies properly implement social recruiting strategies, their brand message is effectively conveyed through various social platforms, giving prospective candidates an attractive impression of their organizational culture.
According to statistics from Sproutsocial:
- An overwhelming majority (96%) of job applicants utilize social media platforms for job sourcing
- A simple majority (49%) of professionals in various fields follow the social media profiles of relevant companies in their industry to get notifications about job opportunities on LinkedIn
- 81% of job applicants browse through Facebook for job opportunities
- 78% of recruitment companies and HR staff speculate that social media recruitment will increase in the coming years
- A simple majority (46%) of firms stated that investments in social recruiting are the focal points starting from 2020 and beyond
- The number of job candidates recruited through Instagram has increased more than twice between 2017-2020
- Virtually 40 million job applicants source for job opportunities on a LinkedIn weekly
- 71% of American recruiters believe that taking a look at the social media profile of a job candidate is an effective screening process.
Tips for A Great and Effective Social Recruiting Strategy
Social recruiting can be conducted actively, passively, or in both ways. It’s crucial that an organization drafts and fine-tunes a solid strategy before posting job vacancies across various social media platforms. We’ve provided you with some helpful tips to help you create a solid social recruiting strategy.
1. Outline Your Goals
This is the foundation of any strategy. Have a foundation before the process begins. Otherwise, you’ll be chasing your tails and getting entangled in the process. When there are no defined goals or objectives, it will be easy for the company’s attention to be divided between various social platforms. Having clearly defined goals will help you decide on the most suitable job candidates and social platforms for your social recruitment. You can then use these platforms to funnel or streamline job prospects.
Presently, most employers utilize social media platforms to recruit job candidates. However, these employers may employ different techniques to use social media for their recruitment strategy. These techniques include:
- Checking out the LinkedIn profiles of job candidates to evaluate their professional experience
- Checking candidates’ profiles on Facebook to know how they present themselves to family members, friends, acquaintances, and strangers
- Candidates’ engagement via Twitter to be more familiar with their values and interests, which will help the employer ascertain their compatibility with the organizational culture
- Uploading videos on YouTube to exhibit the culture and values of the company
- Using hashtags on Instagram or TikTok to promote jobs and show your target audience the organizational atmosphere in your company
2. Utilize the Right Social Platforms for Recruitment
Admittedly, LinkedIn and Twitter may sound like the best platforms for you to implement your social recruiting strategy. However, you must have a specific candidate profile because this determines the social platforms they are more active on. For instance, you may be posting job vacancies on LinkedIn, while your ideal applicants may be spending more time on Facebook or Twitter.
If you’re a graphic design firm looking for qualified designers, visual-oriented social platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram are the best places to implement your social recruiting strategy. On the other hand, a company that wants to recruit video editors is more likely to find suitably qualified applicants on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube.
Picking the right social platform for your social recruiting strategy ensures you get the best candidates and talents for the job openings. Also, your approach to candidate search should be determined by the platform you choose for social recruitment. For example, a company sourcing candidates on Twitter should use hashtags to enter the trending topics and easily reach out to possible leads. On the other hand, a company using Facebook to source candidates can check out job groups or career pages to find prospective job candidates.
3. Adapt Your Approach to Sourcing Candidates and Make the Job Application Process Easier
Social recruitment has become a valuable recruiting strategy, especially in this era of remote working. Aside from the fact that social recruitment helps them reach more prospective candidates than traditional recruiting, it also makes the recruitment process more straightforward. As a result, companies have decided to follow up on and update their techniques to align with the current industry trend to remain relevant and thrive.
One way companies are beginning to adapt their approach to candidate sourcing is to stop restricting the job openings to job boards. Instead, they have realized that social media is where most job applicants search for jobs. This vast number will increase with time because more digital natives will join the labor market. This is especially beneficial to companies that adopt remote working policies, and they can use social recruiting to source candidates globally.
Companies have also started to be intuitive regarding their application process, including just a few steps between job openings and submitting candidates’ applications. But unfortunately, a lot of companies are still adopting slow and lengthy application processes coupled with job portals that are not optimized for mobile phones.
4. Make Your Digital Presence a Reflection of Your Brand
The more reflective and desirable a brand is perceived on social media platforms, the higher it ranks on prospective candidates’ list of companies to apply to. Nothing attracts high-quality job candidates and employees more than an excellent organizational culture. A well-grounded reputation and digital presence gain a lot of pull where job applicants are concerned, mainly passive job seekers.
Many active job applicants are more likely to apply for a job opening if that company actively reflects its brand on social media. For brands to build a positive and more active presence on social media platforms, they need to consider the manifesto of their brand and highlight their staff, values, and other differentiators. An excellent way to go about this is by featuring your recent employees because if your company has a solid brand identity, they will be your top advocates.
Use audio, textual, and visual content to display team events, employee stories, and other touchpoints on the company culture. This will give prospective employees a glimpse behind the scenes of your organization, and they will know what to expect when they become staff in your company.
5. Incorporate Employee Advocacy
Using employee advocacy for social recruiting is an effective way to boost the reach of your job openings. Sharing job openings on the social media profiles of your employees greatly enhances the connectivity with new job applicants. Using employee advocacy to share job openings increases their reach many times compared to the reach of a job posting shared exclusively by the company’s social profile. When companies make it easier for their staff to get involved with their social recruitment strategies, the employees become more likely to share the company’s content.
This is the digital age, and most adults are active on at least a social platform. Moreover, a majority of these people use social platforms for business.
6. Engage Your Social Audience Regularly
Companies shouldn’t focus strictly on job postings. Instead, they should engage their audience and be open to asking or answering questions. The key to engagement is triggering conversations to engage diverse categories of people, sharing beneficial resources, and integrating your message with the company’s unique values and tone. This way, your audience will engage your brand even in the absence of job openings. In addition, this makes it easier to amass a pool of high-quality candidates you can easily pick from when job openings are available.
Conclusion
Social recruiting can be an excellent avenue for job seekers. However, the employer needs to adopt meaningful social recruiting strategies for that. This will also help them build an excellent team and stay competitive in the market.
Author’s BIO
Lori Wade is a journalist and content writer from Louisville. Lori creates news and informative articles about HR, recruiting, and employee productivity. In addition, she is part of a team that is working on Affinda’s resume parsing software. You can find her on LinkedIn.