How To Use Social Media Recruiting to Find Great Talent

By Gaurav Sharma

I bet you must have come across hundreds of social media guides for marketing. And, why not? Social media marketing is an important daily activity for every smart marketer.

But, have you heard of social media recruiting?

Social media is not just a gold mine for generating leads but is also great for finding and hiring talented employees for all departments such as hiring a sales team, finance team, backend team, etc. for your company. 

Social media is a good option to hire good talents for your requirements. To build trust they mentioned their college degrees and certificates that make their offers valuable.

Social media recruitment can boost your recruitment ROI if you can integrate it with the latest technology. Here you can see an example; a combination of an applicant tracking system and social media recruitment process can boost your recruitment ROI.

Although, there are multiple ATS available in the market and you need to review their features and choose the best fit for your requirements.

Multiple firms have social recruiting processes in place and actively use social media for hiring purposes. 

A recruitment agency can’t avoid social media to generate potential leads. Social recruitment is an effective and crucial method of attracting the right candidates for organizations.

Here are some impressive statistics about social recruiting that will blow your mind.

• 79% of HRs didn’t hire candidates because of inappropriate social media content.  
• 90% of employers consider social media as an important factor for evaluating candidates.
• 94% of recruiters use social media to post job listings and vacancies.

These numbers make it crystal clear that social recruitment can benefit both organizations and job seekers. 

Now that you know what social recruiting is, how do you structure your social recruitment process? 

Let’s explore that in detail. 

Setting the Groundwork for Social Media Recruiting 

Whenever social recruiting is considered, many choose LinkedIn as their go-to platform. The reason is that it's a professional social networking platform. You need to optimize your LinkedIn profile and add a real image of yourself instead of a cartoon version of yourself. Add a short and professional bio to your profile as well.

But recently, recruiters are considering other social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as well. 

Which platforms should you choose?

Start by identifying specific demographics, based on job requirements, for your ideal candidates. Then, select platforms whose user demographics match with those of your target talent pool. 

The truth is, there are millions of people on these platforms looking for work.  

Whether you have jobs for college students or seasoned professionals, you can find the right candidates on social media.

So, let’s take a look at how you can find great talent through social recruiting.

7 Ways to Find Great Talent Through Social Media Recruiting

It takes a long time for brands to reap the benefits of social recruiting. That’s because you need time to first build your brand online. 

Your online presence determines your market reputation, helping prospects decide if they want to join your organization. So, it’s essential to build your brand reputation on social media first.

Here are 7 social recruiting tips to stand out from the crowd and find great talent on social platforms. 

1. Involve Employees to Create Content That Matters 

Your brand needs to find a way to seamlessly engage potential candidates so that they notice your brand over others. 

You can present your job requirement in visuals and for this, you can create flow charts, banners, charts, prospectus, brand Kit, etc., and attach them with your social media posting.

That’s where social media storytelling enters into the picture. 

You can showcase your rich company culture through social media posts and give them a purpose to join you.

Also, show that you value your employees as much as you care for your customers and increase employee satisfaction by:

• Asking employees to share their experience working with your brand.
• Show behind-the-scenes footage of office events, showing employees having fun.
• Mention the perks and benefits that employees get with your organization.

For instance, Katie Cook, Director of Sales Strategy at Salesforce, talks about women's leadership roles in this Instagram post. 

It shows that the brand has a firm belief in equal opportunities for all. 

Image via Instagram

This shows the brand's human side and would nudge prospects to apply for jobs at your organization.

2. Build Authentic Connections

Building authentic relationships on social media will let you gauge your prospects better and is one of the best tips for social recruitment. In this process, you need to build your company's LinkedIn, Twitter profiles more effectively. Start social media campaigns with creative visuals to promote your brand so that it looks more authentic. 

Apart from this, you need to follow and reshare industry experts' tweets so that they can follow back and build a better relationship with experts. Also, By utilizing platforms such as Buffer and Hootsuite, you have the convenience of scheduling your tweets. This way, you can maintain an active online presence even when other responsibilities in your business may prevent you from personally engaging on Twitter. Was this response better or worse? 

You will get an idea about whether they can thrive in your company culture or not. And, most importantly, you get a sneak peek into their ethics, discipline, and how they converse professionally.

Let’s consider a profile for a UI expert. You see their Instagram page that’s filled with cool designs. Not just that, you also notice their reels on Figma tips. You keenly follow that profile and interact with them. 

If you think they might be a good fit for your company, you can drop a direct message and ask them about their job experience as well. If you find them good enough, schedule a call using video conferencing tools such as Zoom alternatives.

Even if you have no openings right now, you can get in touch with them whenever the requirement resurfaces. This can help you find talent quickly through social recruiting.

3. Joining Groups 

This is one of the most effective social media recruiting tips and one of the quickest ways to zero down on candidates. 

There are hundreds of professional groups on social media where people post about their experience and availability for urgent hiring. You can also share your company’s job listings in these groups. 

Let's say you are a construction company looking to hire civil engineers. You can easily join groups specific to engineers and post the job description for civil engineers that you want to hire for your company.

Additionally, these groups can also be great from a networking perspective. 

You get an opportunity to share hiring experiences and tips while learning from others. Also, you can consider more who start tailoring resumes in well-describing format and design. Moreover, you stay updated with the latest employment trends and offers in your niche by joining groups. 

For instance, here’s a job listing Facebook group—Jobs in NYC—with 29.4k members. This group is for jobseekers residing in New York City. Candidates can get in touch with potential employers here through various job postings. 

Image via Facebook

4. Start Recruitment Campaigns

I am sure you must have run successful marketing campaigns by creating engaging content for social media. You can leverage translation services for your international recruitment campaign. You can share professional videos on your employee training methods to make more clear about your company. 

Hiring campaigns are not so different, except for the end goal — you strive to find talent rather than leads. So, like every marketing campaign, this too starts with setting a goal and identifying your target audience. 

Use the demographics of ideal candidates to define your target audience and find the most relevant candidates to fit the role from the given talent pool. 

Want to know the best part?

The talent pool you create from these hiring campaigns will help you even in the future.

You have to reach out to this target audience on the social channels they’re the most active on. Then, tweak your high-quality content and use a tone that goes down well with them.

Also, you can leverage social media tools for businesses to schedule your content and then track its performance. 

What’s more?

You can also host competitions and contest to make your job offers more attractive. It can be something as simple as a hackathon or a problem-solving contest. 

This will help get more engagement and allow you to find potential employees for your organization as they compete to win.

For example, Amazon had a recruitment campaign where it called potential candidates to visit their company. 

Almost 200,000 prospects turned up and had career path discussions. The company also organized a guided tour to give them all the details of their everyday work process. 

Image via Instagram

5. Follow Industry Experts

How do you know what are the latest recruitment trends in your niche? 

The answer lies in following industry experts. 

Top leaders like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk have millions of followers worldwide. They’re all thought leaders in their respective niches and your goal should be to tap into their knowledge to fuel your social media recruiting. 

How exactly can they help?

You should be following the experts in your niche to learn about the latest innovations that your brand can embrace. And, if you do leverage those innovations, you’d need employees who can work on those projects.

Thus, social media can help you identify future trends and hiring requirements. 

6. Leverage Hashtags and Referrals

Hashtags are super effective when it comes to boosting your reach. They can help you reach even those prospects who don’t follow your brand on social media. 

But, you can’t use any random high-volume hashtags, which are not relevant to your content. Instead, you need to strike a balance between high and low search volume hashtags that are relevant to your job postings. 

Also, adding calls-to-action (CTAs) just before hashtags is a great way of getting referrals and amplifying your posts’ reach. 

All you have to do is ask your audience to tag the person who might be interested in the job opening. This will amplify your post reach and boost engagement as well.

Have a look at this example. 

Azadea Group, a retail firm in UAE, put up a post listing multiple job vacancies. They used a mix of commonly-searched relevant hashtags and branded hashtags for easy discoverability. 

Image via LinkedIn 

7. Use Social Recruiting Software

Even after you use these social recruiting tips and strategies, the recruitment process takes a lot of time and effort.

So, if you are on a budget and resource crunch, you shouldn’t risk human fallacy. 

Instead, opt for social recruiting software solutions as an affordable alternative. You get a bunch of intuitive features like:

• Automated response
• Social media integrations
• Job postings
• Budget tracking
• Advanced profile searching capabilities
• Customized reports and more!

Such platforms can help manage your entire social media recruiting process efficiently. 

Final Takeaway

Social media recruiting instantly pushes the geographic limitations away and helps you reach job seekers globally.

According to Nelson Sherwin of PEO Companies, “Remote work is thriving, and employees are loving it more than ever now.”

To power up your social recruiting, you can involve your employees, leverage hashtags, join professional groups, and follow industry experts.

What’s more?

You could also leverage social recruiting software, launch recruitment campaigns, and connect with potential candidates on social media to build lasting relationships. 

Do you have any questions about how you can leverage social media recruiting? Ask them in the comments.

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