Like marketing your product or service, you need a solid social media recruiting strategy to get the word out about openings within your company. Social media recruiting involves more than posting a job opening on your newsfeed and hoping your post gets in front of the eyes of suitable candidates. Instead, it’s a marketing strategy designed to market your employer brand and create your own pool of talent, directly from social media, who is ready and eager to work with your team.
If you don’t already have a social media recruiting strategy (or you do but need to revamp it), here are five steps you can take today to get the most out of using social to recruit top talent.
5 Steps to Build Your Social Media Recruiting Strategy
1. Scope Out Your Competition
If you live by the “keep your eyes on your own paper” rule, it might be time to break it and look at what your competitors are doing regarding their social media recruiting strategy. While you shouldn’t steal their content and claim it as yours, you can use it to inspire your own social media recruiting strategy.
As you look at your competitors, notice how they interact with their followers and see the kinds of posts that they share. Do their posts with lots of images get more engagement? Take notes and use your notes for your content and strategy.
2. Get Active on Relevant Platforms
As you research your competition, you’ll also get a good idea of where your ideal candidates hang out online.
Note which social media platform is the most popular for your target audience. You’ll want to actively use those platforms for your company’s social media campaigns. No matter which platform is right for you, remember that the key to creating an engaged audience of interested potential talent is to be active, provide valuable content, and engage with your audience.
Focus your energy on the platforms that best match your audience. For many industries, LinkedIn is a great place to start. Especially considering nearly half of adults with a bachelor’s degree spend time on LinkedIn. But, also think about other sites, like Reddit, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, or Facebook.
3. Tailor Your Content for Your Audience
Social media recruitment marketing involves more than posting a job opportunity to your company’s feed and hoping for the best. Plus, if you only publish job advertisements, your feed will come across as spammy and be a turn-off to potential new talent. This is why you must tailor your content for your audience.
Use your content to attract potential candidates for your role by sharing engaging visual content to your feed and talking about your employer brand. These posts can include employee highlights, explanations of employee benefits, or office perks. Interested candidates will search for your company online anyway, so by sharing content relevant to your amazing workplace, you’ll carefully curate a strong employer brand.
4. Invest in Social Media Tools
Joining multiple social media platforms for your company is an excellent start for your recruitment strategy.
Social media is an excellent resource to market job openings to an interested audience of prospective jobseekers, but joining multiple platforms and attempting to stay active on top of your other job duties can add more to your already full plate. Various social media tools can help you schedule content and track important analytical data.
Tracking data, such as the number of clicks on your job listing posts, is essential from a marketing standpoint. With this data, you’ll know which type of content performs well, the span of your reach, and how many people visit your applicant tracking system, or ATS, with each post.
5. Recruit Current Employees to Share Your Posts
Social media recruiting is an efficient way to get the word out about open positions within your company, especially if you have created an engaged community with your followers. To help generate trust and reach a wider pool of potential applicants, encourage your current employees to share your company’s posts to their feeds. There is a good chance your current employees are colleagues with your next talented new hire.
Create Your Social Media Recruiting Strategy with ProIQ
Using social media for recruitment takes time, consistency, and a well-defined strategy. While you can do it all on your own, you don’t have to. ProIQ is here to help.
At ProIQ, we’re ready to share our talent marketing and recruitment expertise to elevate your social media presence and bring you high-quality talent leads. Contact us today if you’re ready to leverage social media and attract talent.