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Social Media Recruiting Strategies: How to use social media to recruit candidates

With heavy workloads and an ever-growing set of responsibilities, recruiting can feel like a constant race against the clock.

Leveraging social media to recruit candidates can help trim recruiting costs, fill roles more quickly, uncover higher-quality candidates, and reach more passive talent.

Here are 8 guiding principles and 5 actionable steps you can take to build your best-in-class social media recruiting strategy.

 

8 Principles for Standout Social Media Recruiting

1. Show, Don’t Tell

Let your posts do the talking. Use employee photos and testimonials to illustrate the best parts of your work culture.

2. Be Authentic

Whether aesthetics, caption-writing, hashtagging, or interactions with users – be true to your brand and your culture.

3. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Building a social media recruiting presence from scratch is tough. Lean on Communications, Legal, and employees for help creating, managing, and disseminating content.

4. Speak to an Audience

Remember that your posts don’t just go out into the void. Always create with an audience in mind, and tailor your message to their priorities.

5. Make Yourself Stick Out

Make it impossible for candidates not to find you. Give your account an intuitive name. Use keywords and hashtags relevant to your audience.

6. Tell People What to Do

Once you have captured attention, use it. Organize your posts around a call-to-action that drives traffic to your website, an application, or a recruiter.

7. Play the Long Game

Don’t mistake social media for another job board. Use it to build a digital footprint of who you are as a company, and use that image to convert candidates.

8. Test Your Assumptions

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to social media recruiting. Experiment with content, captions, hashtags, and post frequency and timing to find what works best for you.

 

Download our 8 Principles for Standout Social Media Recruiting one-pager to share with your recruiting team.

 

5 Steps for Building a Winning Social Media Recruitment Strategy

1. Identify Gaps in Your Sourcing Strategy

Start by identifying the gaps in your current sourcing efforts and setting intentional, measurable goals that fulfill strategic priorities.

• Audit Current Performance: Benchmark the Talent Acquisition team’s current performance.

• Prioritize Areas of Focus: Determine your primary and secondary goals.

• Link Goals to Outcomes: Tie each goal to an outcome you can use to evaluate success.

2. Carve Out a Niche for Your Social Presence

Deciding where to establish a social media recruiting presence requires a deep understanding of your target candidates and the platforms they use, where your competitors are investing their efforts, and where you already have a social presence you can build on.

3. Tailor Content to Platform and Audience

Tailor content to the audience you want to reach as well as the platform you are on. Be mindful that different platforms can constrain the types of assets you use (e.g., image, text, video) and how they can be displayed.

• Content Tip: Use dynamic content such as videos, polls, and chats to spark higher levels of interaction with candidates. Use static content to convey information about company culture and EVP.

4. Partner with Internal Stakeholders

Partner with internal teams and employees to make the process more efficient. Lean on the Communications team for sourcing content, employees for disseminating content, and Legal for approving content.

5. Measure Performance Across Sourcing Stages

Measure your performance to uncover which parts of your strategy are working and which should be tweaked. Select metrics that allow you to evaluate your progress toward goals, and be sure to consider where you will aggregate metrics and how often you will collect them.

Reach Metrics

• Impressions

• Post reach

• Followers

• Web traffic, etc.

Engagement Metrics

• Likes

• Comments

• Average engagement rate

• Applause rate, etc.

Conversion Metrics

• Conversion rate

• Click-through rate

• Employee referrals

• Bounce rate

 

Download our 5 Steps for Building a Winning Social Media Recruitment Strategy one-pager to share with your recruiting team.

Build best-in-class social media recruiting strategies with the help of Veris Insights.

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