Hireology guide
Social Media recruitment playbook
usE social channels to drive your next hirE
Foreword
If your business doesn’t have a social media presence, you’re not only missing out on customers, but quality job applicants as well. Social channels are used by more than 3.5 billion people, including every living generation and socio-cultural background. So if virtually everyone is on social media, shouldn’t your business be, too?
Social media is a great avenue for showcasing your company culture, interacting with potential candidates, and marketing your open roles. It may take some time to become familiar with the different channels at your disposal, but you’re opening your business up to a huge pool of applicants through utilizing social media.
And you have the opportunity to show, not just tell, prospective applicants why your company is a great place to work. Through social channels, you can convey what it’s like to work at your organization much more accurately than through a job description alone.
While there are plenty of niche social channels available, in this ebook, we’ll cover the four primary channels that can help you drive applicant adoption, and what the best use cases are for each platform.
Promoting your open roles on LinkedIn is likely the most effective way to engage with your next hire, as it’s the world’s biggest professional network.
With 706 million members in 200 countries and regions worldwide, LinkedIn is a formidable recruiting tool that lets you post jobs (directly from Hireology), build your company brand, and network with passive candidates.
Interested in using LinkedIn to build your brand, tap into your employees’ connections, and target top talent with surgical precision? Here’s where to start.
Set up a Free Company Page
First and foremost, your company needs a real presence on LinkedIn. That means a Company Page, which is an official LinkedIn profile for your business. If you don’t have one set up already, create one now for free.
Your Company Page is your home base on LinkedIn. It’s a place to share a high-level description of what makes you different, connect your business to existing employees, share updates on behalf of the business, attract followers who’ll see your updates in their feed, and post your job postings for any perusing prospects.
Encourage Employee signup
Once your business’s LinkedIn is up and running, encourage all your employees to sign up for a free account if they don’t already have one, and connect with your Company Page.
It’s likely that most of your employees already have a profile, but make sure they’re officially listed as current employees, so that their profiles link back to your Company Page and drive awareness of your business and opportunities. And viewing profiles is actually the most common activity on LinkedIn, so you’ll drive more traffic to your Company Page just by virtue of having more employee profiles publicly connected to it.
Get your Jobs Posted
LinkedIn groups are places where professionals within the same industry gather to share content, develop business contacts, and post and view targeted jobs. Many groups have specific ‘Jobs’ sections, where you can advertise your jobs.
Share listings on your own profile as well by simply posting an update with news about the job ad. Your professional connections will be able to see and share your update. You can use the in-platform “Hireology Career Site” link to allow interested individuals to quickly browse through your openings and apply.
When it comes to what to include in your job posting, address the top three things candidates want to know about your company: what your culture is like (66%), what perks you offer (54%) and what your company’s mission is (50%).
Make sure that you breathe in some life and spirit into your social media advertising of your open job positions. Don’t just copy paste boring, formal job descriptions. Instead, post a fun and creative introduction to your job openings. Make it sound interesting! And of course, don’t forget to post visually attractive photos of a team that the candidates applying will be a part of if they get hired.
post Relevant Content
Post about product updates, accomplishments, business news, events, your employees — anything that you’re proud of and want your network to know about. Your followers will appreciate these updates, and you’ll humanize your company to prospective candidates.
Neighborly used their LinkedIn page to highlight a recent hire, ensuring their new employee felt welcome.
Consider publishing your own articles on LinkedIn with LinkedIn’s publishing platform. The benefit of publishing on LinkedIn is threefold: You’ll share your knowledge and expertise, cultivate a following, and develop and strengthen your own professional identity.
You can also share important company information through your LinkedIn, like how your company has adjusted to COVID-19, or how your employees celebrated Black History Month, like we did at Hireology.
You can even reshare content from other industry experts that’s relevant to your audience, like Right at Home did below.
Amplify your Job Openings and Updates
While it’s always a smart idea to post updates and content on your Company Page, you can also encourage your employees to share that content for a huge multiplier effect, leveraging their network. This is true of any content — e.g., a blog post or press release about an award your company won — but it’s particularly important when you’re hiring on LinkedIn.
You might only have 100 followers on your Company Page to start out, but most users on LinkedIn have between 400 and 1,500 connections. If just one of your employees shares your company update or job opening, that content can then be pushed to the news feeds of all their connections. And if any one of their connections likes, comments, or shares it, then it can be pushed to all of that person’s connections in turn.
Employee amplification can easily increase your exposure by 10x, 100x, or even 1,000x compared to your initial audience.
Practice Passive Recruiting
If you want to really compete with large enterprises, you should also be targeting passive and open talent — skilled workers who aren’t currently looking for a job, but may be open to new opportunities. Build your employer brand on the platform to increase your chances of connecting with passive candidates. This will open the door to better hires, shorter time to fill roles, and better retention rates.
When it comes to messaging candidates, be courteous, make sure you spell your recipients’ names correctly, and personalize each message to get the most engagement. Template emails can save time, but it’s best to personalize your messages to speak directly to the passive candidate you’re attempting to recruit. Read up on their work, mention one of their accomplishments, and keep your message brief with a clear call to action.
With over 2.8 billion active users, Facebook is by far the largest marketplace for candidate sourcing. Yet, only one in five recruiters and hiring managers are recruiting on Facebook.
By relying solely on job boards, you’re missing out on passive talent — those who aren’t actively searching for a job, but might be open to the right opportunity. 79% of job seekers use social media in their job search, and Facebook users are more active than any other social media users. Additionally, with more monthly hits than Indeed, Monster, and CareerBuilder combined, it’s a great platform to get your job ads out in front of the right people at the right time.
Here are just some of the reasons to get your organization set up on Facebook.
Showcase Your Team
By branding your company and posting your job openings on your Facebook Business page, you’re making it extremely easy for team members to share these posts. Building a strong company culture and employer brands increases the likelihood of your employees wanting to re-share your company’s posts.
Every time you tag a team member in a post or a photo, all their friends will also see your post. So, even if your employees don’t share your company posts with their friends, just tagging them in a post already means your job post is reaching a wider audience.
Focus on Employer Brand
To build trust around your Business page, a good method is to share a little bit about your company culture — like photos or videos of your office or team events, funny quotes or wise words from team members, or quotes about why working at your company is great. You can post these updates on your Business Page Timeline, or even under the same photos folder. That way, if a potential job candidate lands on your Facebook Business page, they can quickly find all relevant information about the company culture.
Use Jobs on Facebook
Hireology recently launched a two-way integration with Jobs on Facebook, making it even easier for you to post your open roles to multiple platforms. It also makes applying easier for the applicant, as their Facebook information will be auto-populated when applying directly through the platform. So to get the most attention on your job postings, use good copywriting, visuals, and call-to-actions that stand out.
Keep the text of your posts short and mention some of the benefits that come with the job. It can be either the salary range, some employee perks — like a free gym card or the possibility to travel, or whatever it is that makes your company and your team stand out from the competitors.
Use photos of your team, and include a clear call to action in your post, such as ‘Apply now’, ‘Learn more’ or ‘Share with friends who are interested’ to avoid being passive.
Then, share your job post in Facebook groups. You can find these by simply searching for your target keyword and filtering the answers by “Groups”.
NOTE: before posting your job opening in Groups, carefully read the group rules to make sure your post is relevant for the group. And post only once or twice — no one likes spammers.
Choose Your Wording Carefully
When you post something like, “We’re hiring an Office Manager! Join us now!”, it only resonates with people who are interested in that opportunity. Try wording the same post as follows: “Hey, Office Manager — we’re looking for you! Join us if you like organizing events and keeping everything in the office under control. And if that’s not your thing, please tag a friend who might be interested”.
Adding this one sentence can make a huge difference as you’re also speaking to people who aren’t interested in your offer but might have a friend who is.
61% of job seekers use Twitter’s site in their job searches, and 74% look at company profiles for opportunities. Like the other platforms mentioned in this guide, Twitter is completely free and user-friendly, making it a great tool for attracting applicants. Here’s what you can do with a Twitter account.
Discover Candidates and Start Conversations
You can use the advanced search feature to search for candidates and discover their interests. Before reaching out, it’s very easy to tell what kind of people they are by just reading their last few tweets. This can give you an idea of if they might be a culture fit for your company. In addition, keep an eye out for ‘retweets’ that users have forwarded on to their followers. This is a way of seeing the kind of people that candidates respect and the ideas that they’re enthusiastic about.
When you’ve found candidates you’re interested in connecting with, you can easily reach out to them with information about the role and a personalized message based on the information learned from their profile.
Highlight Your Staff
Your employees are your secret weapon. They’re the most trusted influencers when communicating to candidates about your company, and can be the key to a successful Twitter strategy. Show them you appreciate their hard work by shouting them out on Twitter, just like Arcalea did for this associate’s birthday.
You can incentivise your top performers to engage with candidates on Twitter by offering referral bonuses for people that apply after interacting with them. Give each employee a unique link to your open roles or careers page that they can share in their interactions with candidates, so when the candidate does apply, they will be tied to your current employee.
Consider a Second Account
Many companies create a separate recruiting Twitter handle to announce open positions, post company culture videos and articles, highlight key employees, and advertise upcoming recruitment events. This is to not overwhelm their main page with information about recruiting, but also gives job seekers a targeted stream that they can follow to stay in the loop with new opportunities, ask career questions and learn about company culture.
If you’d like to go this route, use a naming convention like @LifeatHireology or @WeWorkattHireology to differentiate your accounts. Create shorts videos about your company or short employee testimonial clips to get around the character constraints imposed by Twitter. Twitter lets you embed video directly into your stream, so candidates can watch entire clips without ever leaving the platform. And hashtags make it easy for Twitter users to cut through the noise and find what they’re looking for. Users can search for specific hashtags and then filter all the tweets that fit the bill.
#Culture
“We’re hiring” photos are not enough to attract talent. You have to show the day-to-day of life at your company so that people can imagine themselves working there.
Use photos or videos to include the following:
- People: New employees, milestones and celebrations, achievements, employee stories
- Environment: Office space, comfy couches, the coffee machine
- Events: Charity efforts, team outings, tutorials, conferences
Fox Motors Group showcased their philanthropic efforts on Instagram in the image below, making use of hashtags.
You can enter up to 30 hashtags per post in the caption or the comment section, but make sure they are relevant and will actually drive leads, similar to Interim Healthcare’s post below.
Additionally, you can search for candidates using hashtags by searching #hireme and #jobhunting. And with Instagram’s direct message feature, it is easier than ever to message potential candidates.
Get Employees Involved
Endorsements from a third party are often deemed more credible and help spread your talent pool even further. To encourage employees to post about your business on social media, you should take a direct and indirect approach.
All employees should be made aware of the brand values, hashtags, and guidelines, and should be prompted to promote company posts from their platforms. You can place social media links and hashtags on any corporate office material to ensure employees know the business has an Instagram page and encourage them to interact with it. You can even hold work events with particular hashtags, post team appreciation photos, and offer rewards for any social media efforts.
Next Steps
Getting started with social media recruiting can seem daunting, but whether you have a dedicated social media expert on your team, or you’re running the show, you’ll be able to get these user-friendly platforms set up with ease.
The benefits thoroughly outweigh the time and effort spent, so regardless of the industry your business falls under, put some power behind your social media recruitment to help you hire the right people for every role.
And if you want to see how Hireology can help you with recruitment and hiring, schedule a demo today. We can help you transform your process in no time.