Going About Social Media Recruiting The Right Way

Attracting top talent to join your team can be tricky if you’re not a well-known brand, but social media recruiting can make up for that. 

Recruiting great people to work for your company has obvious benefits. If you have a really talented web designer, you’ll probably like the way your website looks. If your Customer Success team is great at what they do, you’ll likely minimize churn, and have a lot of upgrades. However, if these employees are not that talented, then it’ll have the opposite effect.

As you may know, recruiting great people is not an easy task. In fact, 76% of hiring decision-makers say attracting quality candidates is their biggest challenge, according to Glassdoor.

76% of hiring managers say attracting quality candidates is their No.1 challenge.

This is why you need to approach social media recruiting the right way. It’s not just about seeking out applicants on social media and posting positions on LinkedIn. You need to fine-tune your digital presence. Optimize your pages and postings for search, make sure your page represents you the right way, make sure your ratings on review sites are what you want them to be, and get your employees involved in your social media recruiting efforts.

Benefits of Social Media Recruiting

It’s really a no-brainer to promote your brand and your open positions on social media, and it’s probably something you’re already doing. But are you doing it the right way? The trick is you need to know what steps to take in order to be successful.

There are many benefits to social media recruiting:

• Increase your brand's social media reach and awareness.

• More applicants and higher-quality candidates

• Shorter hiring time.

The point of social media recruiting is to go to where people are, rather than having them find you on a job board or the careers page of your website. More people are using social media to find their next opportunity than ever before.

Roughly 79% of job applicants use social media in their job search, according to Glassdoor. Job seekers rank social media as the most useful job search resource over job boards, ads, employee referrals, recruiting agencies, and job fairs, according to CareerArc.

Job seekers rank social media as the most useful job search resource over job boards, ads, employee referrals, recruiting agencies, and job fairs.

You should share your message authentically through your employees rather than just through your brand handle. Messages shared by employees on social media reach more than 5x further than the same messages shared by a brand account, according to the MSLGroup.

This is because people trust other people more than they trust brands. When an employee says their organization is a great place to work, it resonates with other people more than if a brand handle posted the same message. Job seekers view current employees as the most trusted source for information about a company, according to CareerArc.

By promoting positions where job seekers are, and presenting positions in an authentic way, you’ll get more visibility into your job openings. Because of this, you will get more applications than if you didn’t use social media, and you will get more quality candidates.

Going about social media recruiting the right way leads to a shorter amount of time spent on finding quality candidates. Instead, you can filter down your applicants to people you’re truly interested in.

Shore Up Your Digital Presence

Before you start putting your brand out there and promoting your job opportunities through social media recruiting, you need to shore up your digital presence.

Are you representing your brand the way you want to? What impression are you making on people who visit your LinkedIn page? Is this page optimized for search? What do your Glassdoor reviews look like? Does your social media presence depict your company culture in the way you’d like?

You need to make sure you cover all these bases before you promote your job openings because it will impact whether or not you attract top talent. Over 83% of job seekers are likely to research company reviews and ratings when deciding on where to apply for a job, according to Glassdoor.

Over 83% of job seekers are likely to research company reviews and ratings when deciding on where to apply for a job.

Having poor reviews on Glassdoor, Google, or any other website is a detriment to your recruiting abilities. But what can you do? If people left you poor reviews, you can’t go in and change them or delete them. How can you get your ratings up?

Employee Advocacy and Social Media Recruiting

Here is your ticket to a stellar social media recruiting strategy and gaining some fans over in the HR department.

Employee advocacy allows marketing departments to request colleagues to carry out actions on social media. This could mean anything from like, share, or comment on a post, share a post organically, vote in an online poll, write a review, and more.

This is a big deal for your social media recruiting efforts. If your Glassdoor reviews and ratings are not where you’d like them to be, you can use an employee advocacy tool like GaggleAMP to request colleagues in your employee advocacy program to write their own reviews. This is a great way to get some positive reviews and up your company’s rating on the site. You can use similar actions for other review sites as well.

Once you shore up your digital presence, including Glassdoor reviews and social media pages, have your employees promote your job openings. This is an easy win, or “low hanging fruit” as marketers say. According to Monster, 65% of respondents would consider an opportunity for a new job if they learned about it from a personal connection.

What your employees post on social media resonates more than what your brand account says, especially when it comes to recommending your organization as a great place to work. People are also a contact for job seekers to reach out to via direct message, while your brand handle is not viewed the same way.

When it comes to attracting top talent, people have an advantage over your brand account, so leveraging the people in your organization is the best route you can take.