Social Media Recruitment: The Ultimate Guide

Social media recruitment is not a new trend anymore. It is one of the most commonly used talent acquisition tactics. Since most people use at least one social media platform, it makes sense to leverage these channels to attract and hire new job candidates.

In this blog, we will define social media recruitment, explain the benefits of using social media for talent acquisition, and cover some of the best social recruitment practices.

📚 Before we move forward, check out our article: 7 Points Every Social Media Policy Must Include.

Social Media Recruitment Defined

Social recruiting is the method recruiters use to find candidates through social media platforms. It is also referred to as social media recruiting, social hiring, and social recruitment.

Besides just recruitment, social media is heavily used in employer branding. These channels help employers spread the word about their employee value proposition and optimize their inbound recruitment efforts.

With the consistent increase of social media usage, social media recruitment has been gaining on its popularity among talent acquisition platform professionals. This is not surprising as nearly three-quarters of workers between the ages of 18-34 found their most recent job via social media. Moreover, nearly 90% of recruiters report that they have hired someone off of LinkedIn.

Organizations with well-structured social recruitment strategies are more likely to reach passive job seekers, better showcase their company culture, save money on job advertising, better target candidate personas, and get more referrals.

Why Should Every Company Use Social Media for Recruitment

If you’ve ever wondered how to find new employees, leveraging social media in recruitment has many benefits. For some employers, social media channels are the main source of new job candidates and high-quality job applicants. This is because social media hiring enables recruiters and other talent acquisition professionals to better target their audience and reach more people.

So let’s take a look into some of the main benefits of social recruiting.

1. Reach passive job seekers

Passive job seekers are people who are not actively looking for opportunities but would consider a better offer. These people don’t go to job boards and they don’t visit companies’ career sites to find job openings.

Because there are many more passive than active job seekers, employers need to find ways to reach both groups. Social media is the best way to do so! According to research, 80% of employers say social recruiting helps them find passive candidates.

2. Hire high-quality candidates

Because of the ability to reach both passive and active job candidates, social media is also one of the best sources of the highest-quality job candidates. According to research, 59% of recruiters rated candidates sourced through social media as “highest quality.”

Paid social media job ads also enable recruiters to target very specific audiences and hire people who fit their organizational culture. Targeting people with specific knowledge, skills, experiences, and seniority levels enables recruiters to eliminate irrelevant applications and get better-quality applicants.

3. Reduce time and cost per hire

Recruiters who use social media for hiring usually spend fewer resources to hire new candidates, and they fill their position faster compared to recruiters who focus on other channels.

For example, compared to job boards, advertising on social media can be much cheaper. It brings more high-quality candidates which significantly shortens the hiring process. Furthermore, job seekers rank social media and professional networks as the most useful job search resource compared to job boards, job ads, recruiting agencies, and recruiting events.

4. Showcase your employer brand

According to research, 75% of candidates research a company’s reputation before applying for the job, and 62% of job seekers have reportedly used social media as a way to evaluate the employer brand of a company.

This is why social media isn’t just a good hiring channel. It is also the most efficient employer branding channel where companies can showcase their existing employees, their organizational culture, values, benefits, and everything else candidates want to know about before they decide to apply.

📚 Also check our guide for building a successful employer branding strategy!

Best Social Media Recruitment Practices

Now that we briefly covered some of the benefits of using social media in recruitment, let’s take a look into some of the best practices. Even though best practices may vary based on your candidate personas and target audience, there are certain rules talent acquisition professionals should follow.

Choose the right channels

Today, there are many various social media channels. Hence, it is important to understand how each of the channels works and who is the primary audience on each channel. For example, while Instagram may be the best fit when targeting people in design, marketing, retail and similar, this channel may not be the best choice for developers.

Instead, some employers have started recruiting developers through some niche social media platforms and forums such as Reddit, GitHub, and StackOverflow.

Today, LinkedIn is still the most popular social network used to find new hires with over 90% of recruiters using LinkedIn to fill company job openings.

Improve your social media profiles

Social media profiles that you use for recruitment should be the representation of your company’s culture and core company values. Many organizations create separate profiles on Facebook and Instagram that are designated for employer branding and talent acquisition.

This way, you can really focus on your candidate persona and not your organization’s buyer persona. You can target your communication and messaging towards the potential job seekers and showcase the content candidates are looking for.

Furthermore, many organizations encourage their own employees to optimize their personal profiles on LinkedIn. They provide branded and consistent cover images or ask employees to include links to the company’s career site on their profiles.

If you are using LinkedIn for recruitment, you should also consider implementing a LinkedIn life page which provides a great way for organizations to showcase their culture and employee-generated content.

Use inviting visuals and catchy captions

When advertising job openings on social media, you should use inviting but clear messaging, and you should always include an image that clearly states whom are you looking for.

According to research by Buffer, 63% (or two-thirds) of social media feeds are made up of images. With that, content with relevant imagery reports a 94% higher response than content without.

Also, don’t forget to use hashtags when posting job openings. Some job seekers follow hashtags such as #hiring and #jobopening so including those could help you reach the candidates faster!

Experiment with paid ads

Earlier, we briefly mentioned using paid ads for job promotions and for boosting the visibility of your employer branding content. One of the biggest benefits of using paid ads on social media is better targeting compared to other channels such as job boards.

Additionally, social media advertising on Facebook and Instagram is often much more affordable. On social media, it is easy to target candidates by their job titles, locations, interests, and many other criteria, making advertising much more targeted.

Start with smaller budgets and track the results. Experiment with A/B testing to see what kind of captions and images better resonate with your audience.

Get help from your employees

In order to master your social media recruitment efforts, you will need help from your employees. Organizations that have employer brand ambassadors are much more successful in attracting new candidates and hiring better-quality employees.

In a survey from Monster, 65% of respondents would consider a new job opportunity if they heard about it through a personal connection in their network.

Another study showed that 92% of people will trust recommendations from friends and family over any other kind of marketing, promotion, or advertising, and job seekers rank current employees as the most trusted source for information about a company.

Hence, it is inevitable that your own employees play a crucial role in social recruitment!

Social recruiting through employee advocacy automatically increases your reach when you begin the recruitment process. Just by sharing your job listings through their own social networks, your workforce exponentially boosts your ability to connect with a much wider audience.

Here, it is important to understand that the easier it is for your employees to get involved with your social recruiting campaigns, the more likely they are to naturally share content on behalf of your brand. This is why organizations use employee advocacy platforms built to make content sharing easy for every employee.

10 Facts About Social Media Recruitment You Can’t Ignore

By now, you have hopefuly understood how important social media recruiting is for your talent acqusition strategy. But let’s take a look into 10 most powerful statistics about social media recruitment.

• 86% of job seekers say they use social media for their job search (CareerArc)
• 71% of hiring decision-makers said reviewing social media profiles is an effective way to screen job applicants (Express)
• 78% of recruiters expect the use of social media for finding candidates will increase (Jobvite)
• 70% of hiring managers said they hired candidates using social media (Betterteam)
• 73% of millennials (18-34 age group) found their last position through a social media platform (Aberdeen)
• 82% of organizations currently use social media in order to successfully recruit passive job candidates (Marketing Sherpa)
• Job seekers rank social media and professional networks as the most useful job search resource compared with job boards, job ads, recruiting agencies, and recruiting events. (CareerArc)
• 40 million people look for jobs on LinkedIn weekly. (LinkedIn)
• 65% of people are open to hearing about a job opportunity from a personal connection in their social network. (Monster)
• Socially engaged employees are more optimistic, inspired, connected, and tenured. (Altimeter Group)

Boost Your Social Media Recruitment Strategy With Employee Advocacy

Employees are the most important stakeholders in every social recruitment strategy. Without employees, it is impossible for organizations to get the highest possible ROI of their social hiring efforts.

Not only that employees can reach more people by sharing the organization’s job openings, but they also play a major role in strengthening their organization’s employer brand.

However, building and managing a successful employee ambassadorship program is hard without the right technology.

This is why organizations across the world are using Haiilo Share, employee communications and advocacy platform that empowers companies to:

• Deliver talent acquisition content relevant to employees’ job functions, locations, departments, and interests
• Make the content easily accessible to employees by integrating and distributing it to the entire communications stack, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, SharePoint, Workplace by Facebook, Chatter, and others
• Encourage and drive employee-generated content
• Ensure deskless workforce’s engagement by delivering the content to employees’ smartphones
• Enabling employees to easily share the content to multiple social media platforms in a matter of seconds
• Gamifying and rewarding ambassadorship initiatives to motivate employees to participate
• Aligning social recruitment campaigns with specific talent acquisition KPIs, and measuring the impact on the overall business success