Using social media in recruitment is not uncommon any more. Especially in modern times, it’s one of the most commonly used tactics in hiring talents. Be it via LinkedIn, Facebook, or even Instagram, more and more recruiters have been utilizing these platforms to fill job vacancies.
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It makes perfect sense. According to Hootsuite, there are 4.48 billion users in the world-- that’s 57% of the world population! If you want to get in touch with a wider range of audiences, it’s a sound strategy to leverage such channels to find more candidates and shorten the time-to-fill.
That’s why in this article, we’ll be explaining what social media recruitment is, what benefit it brings organization, and tackle the best social media practices to help you run your staffing agency successfully.
What is Social Media Recruitment?
As the name suggests, social media recruitment or social recruiting is a method where talent acquisition professionals use social media platforms to source candidates. Other terms for this can be social recruitment or social hiring.
It allows them to easily post job ads on the channels and find more candidates quickly and more efficiently. Ultimately, it saves time for the recruiters and increases their chances of finding the best talent in the market.
With a proper social media recruiting strategy in place, organizations will also be able to tap passive candidates, save costs (i.e. job advertisements, OT pay, etc.), target a specialized audience or niche, and get more referrals.
Aside from that, social media recruitment can also affect one’s employer branding. Using social media can help with two things:
- Spreading the word about the company culture, values, etc.
- Optimizing inbound recruitment efforts
What are the Benefits of Social Media Recruitment?
As mentioned, it’s highly advantageous to leverage social media in your recruitment efforts. With the constantly increasing rate of social media users, it’s becoming more and more used by recruiters.
Think about it. Nearly 90% of recruiters report that they highly utilize LinkedIn. Furthermore, around ¾ of workers between 18 to 34 said that they found their most recent occupation through social media!
Clearly, it’s proving to be one of the main sources of gathering more high-quality job seekers. Let’s dig deeper and take a look into some of the main benefits of social recruiting.
Helps tap passive candidates
We’ve mentioned passive candidates briefly above. In a nutshell, these are people who are not looking for a job opportunity but are somewhat keen on moving to another company should there be a better compensation package for them.
They usually don’t check job boards or company career websites directly. However, they can be influenced through word-of-mouth, advertisements, and, of course, social media.
If you must know, 70% of the workforce are passive candidates. If you want to tap this majority, social recruiting is a great way to do so. This is backed by research. 80% of employers say social recruiting helps them find passive candidates, too.
(RELATED: 5-Step Guide to Attracting Passive Candidates)
Leads to high-quality candidates
Because you can tap both active and passive candidates, it can lead you to better chances of finding highly qualified individuals. According to LinkedIn, “59% of recruiters rated candidates sourced through social media as the highest quality.”
Why is this? Because social media, especially if it’s boosted, allows recruiters to target a niche or specific audiences that are appropriate for your job vacancy. Reaching such talents with relevant experience and skills will let you reach applicants that are proven ideal for the role.
Faster time-to-fill and fewer costs
Through social media, you’ll be able to shorten your average time-to-fill. This also lessens the costs that your company usually makes regularly.
Social media is fast-paced. Since people are on it most of the time, the response time is pretty quick. This allows fewer resources to be spent. First, advertising on social media is much cheaper compared to job boards or Google. Second, no overtime work will occur if the job is done seamlessly. And third, the return on investment (ROI) is very high.
This is truly great for businesses if they want to make more profit.
Strengthens employer branding
It’s very interesting because, according to this article, “86% of candidates research a company’s reputation before applying for the job, and the majority of them have reportedly used social media as a way to evaluate the employer brand of a company.”
It means that people will also get a good grasp of what your company is about when they stumble upon your job ad on social media. That gives you the edge in showcasing how wonderful your organization is.
You can take pride and show your company culture, organizational values, company benefits, and everything else that might pique a job seeker’s interest to click the “apply” button.
7 Ways to Maximize Number of Applications through Social Media
Did that get your attention now? Great! Let’s go into the 7 best social media recruitment practices that you must remember.
Polish your social media strategy
First and foremost, you have to take a step back and analyze how your company is using social media in your recruiting efforts-- if you are even doing it at all. Monitor on what scale you use it and up to what level you’re engaging your recruiters in integrating it into their processes.
You’ll be able to determine what’s lacking if you do this. That is the perfect time to formulate the right social media recruiting strategy to optimize your recruiter’s actions and reach as many candidates as you can.
Use analytics and know where your market is
You can utilize your reports and analytics to help you in your strategy-making step. Who are your target audiences? What websites do they usually use to find job opportunities?
It’s crucial that you can answer these questions if you want to hit the bull’s eye in filling job vacancies. Tailor these findings accordingly to your next tactics. If you lack the data, you can begin asking candidates “where did you find this job post?” during the initial interview or when they fill out the first application form.
Manatal has comprehensive reports and analytics suite where you can get information about everything related to candidate acquisition. Through our software, you can analyze and benchmark your various sourcing and application channels such as job boards (Indeed, Monster,…), social media (Facebook, Linkedin,…), your career page, and many more to optimize your current recruitment strategy.
(RELATED: 6 Analytics Best Practices to Improve your Recruitment System)
Focus on building your employer branding
Think about how to improve your employer branding along the way, too. We’ve said that social media recruitment helps with employer branding, too, right? This means that you have to make sure that what you post on such platforms will have a positive impact on your value proposition.
Your company’s working environment will be more transparent online, so establishing good employer branding is critical. Ensure that all content, job descriptions, and even your way of replying will highlight your strengths and prove that you have a healthy and ideal working atmosphere.
You can include bits of your company values and culture on your career website. You can post inspirational or informative content on social media. You can entice people by indicating salary and benefits on job descriptions. There are many ways!
Putting up employee testimonials will be effective, too. Millennials are more likely to apply if they feel an emotional connection with your company. Organically attract people this way by sharing the first-hand experience of your staff.
Just remember to be consistent. Have a distinct persona online and ensure that this speaks to what your company encapsulates.
Keep your content fresh and exciting
To continue the point above, you have to continuously engage with your target audience on social media. Don’t leave them hanging!
Keep your content fresh and exciting by considering various creative elements on your feed. If possible, you can replace job descriptions with a visually appealing graphic poster or video. You can add them to your career website or social media profile directly, as well.
This will ensure that you perpetually give site visitors a compelling reason to follow you and watch out for what you post. Twitter is a great example of this. They have been using videos and it is said that social media users are more likely to engage with the post than other forms of content as written here.
This is probably because the human brain can process visual data 60,000 times faster than reading plain texts. Simply put, you can convey your message clearer with this method-- all thanks to a mix of various factors that watching a video produces.
You also can opt to:
- Do live streaming to entertain questions
- Have a live tour in your company to give people the catch to see it for themselves
- … and more!
People love this type of video. What’s best is that it is very engaging!
Divide and conquer with your staff
It is a recruiter’s job to source candidates. Yes. However, don’t be afraid to stretch your reach through your staff, too.
Remember that your employees are one of the most (if not the most) trustworthy sources of information about your company. They know what the company is actually like and what they offer. Use that to your advantage and make them your very own brand ambassadors.
You can ask for testimonials (be it through video or text), and post them on your social media accounts. Let them talk about their experience in the company and what they like about it. After that, ask them to help spread the word by sharing the content.
When you and your team do this, the number of applications will increase exponentially. The power of recommendation and referral is not to be undermined! People value such feedback and opinion to the point that it can influence their decision entirely.
According to Semrush, “88% of people had the highest level of trust in a brand when a friend or family member recommended it.”
Truly this is one of the most efficient ways to source candidates. Just make sure that you have a healthy company culture and regulate what your employees can share on social media. Since they are your unofficial ambassadors, they should know what to post and what not to share.
Maximize multiple channels
One of the best ways to maximize applications through social media is by understanding the different platforms that you use. Leverage their uniqueness and make sure that you create engaging content tailored to each.
Here are the four most popular social media platforms to use in recruitment:
LinkedIn is used by almost all the professionals in the world. This is a great platform to use because you can fully customize your search in finding the right talents. You can filter people by location, current occupation, current company, skills, and many more.
You have the choice to reach out to them directly or post a job ad and advertise it specifically to your target audience.
You can make use of the groups there, too. There are many active groups on LinkedIn that are relevant to certain industries. Search for one that suits your needs and feel free to post there, too.
LinkedIn is all about linking professionals across the globe. If you can fully maximize this platform well, you won’t have a hard time increasing the application rate and finding the best potential employee.
Facebook, on the other hand, is one of the biggest social websites in the world. Being one of the pioneers in the social networking sphere, Facebook has branched out to many functions since it started.
From communication, it evolved to online selling (Marketplace), dating (Dating), and of course, recruitment (Jobs).
This is great because you have quite the freedom in posting various content here. There’s no character limit and you can use multimedia content to attract potential candidates. You can either post a job on the “Jobs” tab or you can put up a Facebook Page and grow your network there.
Twitter is a fast source of information. With a short character count, it makes sure that people take in digestible information quickly and effectively.
You can do this by going directly to the point and posting a job ad. Especially if you already have several followers, this will help spread the word instantaneously.
Glassdoor
Another choice that you have is Glassdoor. This is where candidates go to check out reviews or feedback about companies. You can find ratings, employee testimonials, and almost all information about the organization from culture to estimated salary to interview questions.
(RELATED: Need interview question templates for your next job interview? Here’s a guide)
Use a Recruitment Software
Lastly, don’t forget to use recruitment software. This modern hiring solution will make your life easier. With features that can cut laborious tasks and help save time and effort, you can improve your operations ten folds.
It comes with tons of benefits like:
- Improves work productivity of recruiters
- Saves time and effort by reducing tedious tasks
- Helps lead to top candidates faster
- Makes communication and collaboration more seamless
- Improves social reach via social media integration
- Improves candidate and recruiter experience
- Allows you to use anytime and anywhere
Our trusted ATS can help you with all these. Manatal has the AI-driven technology and strong capability to assist you in your recruitment process and lead you to high-quality talents in no time. There’s the AI recommendation engine, social media enrichment, free career page builder, an option to post on premium job boards, and many more.
For staffing agencies, you can also benefit from our recruitment customer relationship management (CRM). It will help you coordinate all communications with clients and potential leads. Ultimately, you can leverage it to increase sales and aggregate and organize client data that can be analyzed to help companies understand and improve these relationships.
As a recruiting firm, this would be advantageous to have because it:
- Provides detailed client profiles
- Keep your customers engaged and informed
- Boost communication with involved parties
- Help manage and foster client relationships
You can read our beginner’s guide to recruitment CRM here.
Social Media is Extremely Useful for Your Staffing Agency
The benefits that social media can bring to your staffing firm are undeniable. By employing the right strategies and carefully strategizing your efforts, you can get more candidates and, more importantly, find the talent that stands out and is the best fit for the role.
Follow these 7 foolproof ways and be successful in your field.
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