Social Recruitment 101: All You Need to Know

Every strategy should consider the current trends to ensure that the strategy works with the intended target audience. Recruitment strategy is no exception to that. Hiring trends need to adapt to the changing times to ensure that they are still valid. In such a case, the most recent up-and-coming trend in hiring is social recruitment.

 

Recruiters can be limited to the incoming candidates if they depend only on active candidates. To attract passive candidates, they must broaden their reach and make the passive candidates aware of the job openings. Social recruitment or social media recruitment is the key to doing this.

 

What Is Social Recruitment?

Social recruitment or social media recruiting is the process of posting jobs, attracting and engaging with candidates, then finally recruiting them through social media platforms.

The social media platforms you use shouldn’t be limited to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn alone. It can also be used on platforms such as Github, Stack overflow, online forums, and blogs.

Social recruitment is interchangeably used as social media recruitment or social recruiting. Social media is where people spend a lot of their time, catching up on current events, watching funny videos, and just passing the time. Using social media for recruitment can easily gain you more candidates for your job postings. Social recruitment also offers a lot of advantages.

 

Social Recruitment vs. Traditional Recruitment

Social recruitment is a relatively new process that makes it easier for recruiters to reach out to candidates. Traditional recruitment does not have a broad candidate pool at the primary level. This is something that is never a problem with social recruitment.

Social recruitment is better viewed as an extension of traditional recruitment. The candidate experience should still be prioritised, and every aspect of importance is just like conventional recruitment.

While the advantages of social recruitment are undeniable, it is only as efficient as your employee branding and the recruitment funnel experience. Job postings can reach a wider audience, saving time and money on the recruitment process.

Using social recruitment effectively can ensure that job openings see a considerable boost and might even become viral, which would bring more candidates to your organisation.

 

How Does Social Recruitment Work?

So far, we know that anything that involves the web to scout for applicants for a proper role can be categorised as social recruitment. The following are some examples of how social recruitment works.

• LinkedIn can be used to find candidates who work in the same industry. It also provides a feature that can add hashtags to the user’s profile. These hashtags can either be #OpenToWork or #Recruiting. It makes the search for recruiters and candidates easier.

• Twitter can be used to tweet links to job positions that lead the candidate directly to the career page. Relevant hashtags can be added to the tweet to increase the tweet’s reach. Candidates searching for such open roles can filter out the tweets, making them easier to find.

• Instagram is a place where you can promote your organisation’s brand and build an audience. Your organisation can use this page to post various highlights of your company and promote your employer brand. This will encourage the candidates to approach you.

• Use YouTube to showcase your company’s workings. It can be an employee appreciation video, a company walkthrough, your organisation’s culture, and any noteworthy events that can improve your employee brand reputation.

 

Advantages of Social Recruitment

Many advantages make social recruitment an exciting process for bringing in new candidates. Some of the benefits are as follows:

 

• Extend Your Reach

As mentioned earlier, the most crucial advantage of social recruitment is the vast audience it can reach within a short time. A job posting seen by many candidates is most likely to get a suitable candidate and bring in more potential employees.

This helps to build a network of people aware of your organisation who will eagerly look forward to being a part of your organisation if the opportunity presents itself.

• Find and Recruit Passive Candidates

Passive candidates are those who are not actively looking for a job. Such candidates are usually happy with their current position in their organisation. Job postings and attractive offers must reach such candidates to recruit them.

With social recruitment, the candidates can look at various job openings within your organisation and can get an insight into your company’s culture, goals, and values.

Added to that, it also helps the recruiter and hiring managers to quickly identify the candidates who can potentially be passive. It also helps the recruiters take the first step and approach candidates through various social media platforms.

Recruiters can get an idea of the candidate and approach them based on how well they would suit the organisation.

• Showcase Your Organisation Culture

One of the main factors candidates considers when they choose an organisation is the core values and culture the company offers.

Having a solid social media presence can be pretty helpful when promoting your organisation as a brand. It can be used to show your organisation’s cultural values and inner workings.

Social recruitment helps to attract candidates and encourage them to apply for your job roles after checking out your organisation. It makes it easier to help the candidate join the recruitment funnel and filter them through various stages of recruitment.

• Target Specific Candidates

Extending your organisation’s reach for the recruitment process can only be helpful if it reaches the right audience. Having a wider audience without anyone actually applying for the job would be fruitless.

Social recruitment helps ensure that the audience is chosen and only the targeted and suitable candidates apply. Targeted ads can be placed on sites for only potential candidates. This way, only the right demographic is targeted, and the efficiency is improved.

• Gain More Referrals

Social media sites are popular because anyone can consume and share the content they find impressive. The same logic applies to jobs, too. One of the best contributing factors to a wider reach with social recruitment is people’s ability to share jobs with their friends and family, even when they don’t find a job suitable for them.

Having a referral program within your organisation is an excellent way to increase your candidate application rate. It also helps with the primary screening of candidates, even before entering into the recruitment funnel.

While that may not be the case with social recruitment, a person scrolling through their social media posts would only refer the job to one of their friends if they felt it would match them.

• Saves Time and Money

Recruitment is an expensive and time-intensive process. Even a tiny step that reduces time and saves money can go a long way for the organisation.

Creating job boards and searching for candidates can take a long time. It is easier to post a job advert online and attract candidates. Social recruitment helps to reduce time, and the same template can be used for various social media sites.

 

Social Recruitment Strategies

Social recruitment by itself may not yield results. Like any other medium, some best practices and strategies can be used to implement an efficient method of social hiring. The following are such social recruitment strategies:

• Focus on Your Employees

Instead of the company and the recruiter pitching in and showing their presence online. It would work wonders if employees bring themselves and showcase your company culture. Such a way could give the candidate a sense of familiarity, and they could see themselves as a potential employee.

It can also give the candidates employee-centric branding, which can make it easier for them to apply. Testimonials coming from employees would have a much more significant impact than those coming from the hiring manager or a recruiter. This process is called employee advocacy.

• Build and Engage with Your Audience

As an organisation, your audience should not just be employees from your organisation. The social presence of your organisation should not be restricted. Depending on your reputation, the organisation may have a large audience.

The most valuable thing about social media is engaging directly with your candidates. This helps when queries need to be addressed or when you have questions that need to be answered by using a poll.

• Stay Consistent with Your Online Presence

The reason your online followers subscribe or join your pages online is simple. They like the content they see and would not mind knowing more about your organisation. Having no updates on your social presence is a sure way to lose followers.

On the other hand, spamming your followers with posts on their feeds can also harm their engagement with your organisation.

Stay consistent with your updates and make sure that each update contributes something to the followers. Showcasing your company culture, showing appreciation towards an employee, or celebrating an occasion could be great subjects to tap into. You could even use the platform to address an ongoing issue.

• Do Not Be Restricted to a Single Platform

To increase the reach of your audience, you should branch out to various popular forums. You may find that some tracks work well for your organisation and others do not suit your organisation’s needs.

For instance, you might find that LinkedIn works well and your audience has a good engagement with it. On the other hand, Instagram or Facebook might seem a little informal. Ensure that you branch out with your social media reach and engage your audience in all channels.

Make sure that you tweak your content based on the channel you are creating. The same type of content might not work well with every track. Sharing your content to other channels is always a viable option if it does not work out.

 

Mistakes to Avoid with Social Recruitment

Sometimes the social recruitment methods of your organisation might not yield the desired results. It is essential to be aware of recruiters’ common mistakes to ensure that you do not fall for them.

• You have to remember that there are thousands of other companies competing with you. To stand out from your competitors, you should use a different strategy to ensure that you have the spotlight. People may compare your company with your competitors, and it should be noted that they will continue to do that unless you are exceptionally good at creating your content.

• Another mistake with social recruitment is that you may not monitor all the mentions of your social handle. You should observe and analyse your social handle to give you an idea of how people see and perceive your brand. Carefully following this rule can help you come up with a plan. It is also advisable that there are people specifically to handle your social media channels and community engagement.

• A mistake many people make with social recruitment is the lack of an actual plan. Engaging your audience without a plan should never be the case. There should be a proper plan in place and milestones to achieve it. This will help the team monitor and understand which growth and develop strategies to work on.

 

Final Thoughts

Social recruitment is mandatory to stay ahead in these thriving times. Without a proper understanding of social recruitment, you may not be able to contribute to your organisation’s growth. If done poorly, social recruitment can even tarnish your reputation. It is always advisable to have a strategy in place and a proper understanding of various social media channels and forums. This will ensure that you have a good audience and a well-established company reputation.

 

LogicMelon

Award-winning recruitment software that will find, attract, hire and analyse the way you want to work. At LogicMelon, we have experienced software recruitment marketing specialists to help you build effective recruitment solutions supported by the best customer service you’ll find anywhere!

Email: sales@logicmelon.com or call LogicMelon (UK) +44 (0) 203 553 3667 (USA) +1 860 269 3089

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