The Advantages of Social Media in Recruitment

What is social media recruitment?

Social media recruitment is the practice of utilising the tools social media has to offer to discover your new hires. From job ads to displaying your employer brand on your company page, it provides many advantages through an easy to use platform which can have a huge reach, aiding in your talent search for talent – from the most active of job seekers to passive candidates.

However, some are a little hesitant to recruit on social media…

If you’ve never used social media to recruit an applicant before, it’s easy to feel unsure of how effective it truly is for your hiring process and finding the best fit for you as an employer. Read on to learn all about the advantages of drawing the right job seekers in using social media, so you can evaluate if it’s the right fit for your hiring strategy and overall recruitment goals:

Enables Social Listening

Social media platforms allow you to see the most up to date and trending conversations and issues related to your company’s industry, your key competitors, as well as your target audience for job vacancies.

By actively tuning into these online conversations, you can identify passive candidates who may be dissatisfied with their current positions or seeking new opportunities, as well as revamp your employer brand to be better suited to any major changes in the job market. You may also discover talented people who choose to share the fact they are job seeking on social media, giving you a great opportunity to reach out and let them know you if you are hiring for any positions they may be interested in.

Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy can be one of the top advantages for using social media for recruitment. When you build a strong community on social media you can begin encouraging your employees to share job openings and company updates on their personal social media profiles.

Utilising employee advocacy in recruitment can significantly extend your reach as any vacancies and posts reflecting positively on your culture will be spread to their networks, allowing you opportunity to potentially recruit an applicant who would not have otherwise seen your job posting – or even been job seeking at all!

Targeted Advertising

Social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, offer powerful targeting options that allow you to reach specific demographics, interests, and professional backgrounds, so you can cast a net for candidates whose social media accounts match the desired criteria of your employer.

You can also promote job openings, company updates, and other relevant content to increase visibility among the audience where you’d like to go about hiring your candidate.

Employer Brand

Another mega advantage of using social media platforms, such as LinkedIn,  is the opportunity to showcase your employer brand to potential candidates you may want to recruit. Social media is one of the best available ways to showcase your company culture, values, and work environment, giving to you competitive edge as an employer people want to work for. Share compelling stories, photos, and videos that highlight employee experiences and success stories. By establishing a strong employer brand and showcasing your Employee Value Proposition publicly, you stand a better chance of attracting the attention of top talent.

Social media encourages two way interaction between s potential job applicant an employer. When it comes to your recruitment strategy, you don’t really get this kind of opportunity to communicate so consistently and personally with job seekers anywhere else.

Budget Friendly

Making your hiring budget stretch is not always easy, especially when competition for the top talent can be so fierce. As an employer, it can be difficult to make yourself stand out to job seekers amongst all the noise.

Compared to traditional recruitment methods such as job boards or job fairs, social media platforms often offer more cost-effective options for recruiters and hiring managers. Many platforms allow you to set specific budget limits and pay-per-click or pay-per-impression, enabling you to allocate your recruitment budget more efficiently.

Social Media Recruitment Best Practices

So, lets say you’re now sold on the benefits of social media becoming an integral part of your recruitment process. To best optimise social media for your recruitment strategy, reach a wider audience and connect with potential candidates in a more interactive and engaging way, here are some best practices for social media recruitment:

Monitor and analyse results

Regularly track the performance of your social media recruitment efforts. Use analytics tools provided by social media platforms to measure engagement, click-through rates, and conversions you get, and breakdown the data to see the difference between different groups, such as passive candidates compared to active candidates. This data will help you refine your strategy over time, so you can see what aspects of your chosen platform enable you to recruit the most effectively.

Use social media as a screening tool

Review candidates’ social media profiles not just to run background checks, but to also to gain additional insights into their skills, experience, and if they would be the right addition to the team they would be joining.

However, it always important in these moments of a hiring process to be mindful of potential biases and ensure that your screening process remains fair and objective for potential candidates going through it. All hiring manager’s will have their own view point of the kind of person they would like to recruit, but it’s important to make sure this doesn’t push into the realms of bias or discrimination.

Stay up to date with social media trends

Social media platforms and features evolve rapidly, so it’s important to stay informed about the latest trends and best practices. While social media is a brilliant opportunity to show everything you’ve got to offer to a potential applicant, it’s not going to be in your favour if what your showing is outdated or fails to show awareness of what’s expected of an employer today. From how the attitude you show when it comes to mental health, or diversity, it can really show when an employer hasn’t been tuning in to what their talent pool has to say.

By staying up to date with the trends on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram – whatever you choose! – you will enable you to adapt your recruitment strategies and remain competitive.

Are you convinced on social media recruitment?

Overall, there’s no doubt social media has become both a blessing and a curse in the eyes of an employer – what matters is how you use it, and your attitude towards it. If you view it as a way your applicant can learn more about what you have to offer as an employer with a vibrant culture, clear mission, and great hiring practices, you can’t really go wrong. It’s understandable if you feel that the world of recruitment right now is unpredictable and ever-changing, whether it be using LinkedIn versus job boards to reach your ideal applicant, or whether you are in a hiring freeze, there can be a lot to take in.

No matter what it’s important your strategy stays up to date. Just as our personal social media profiles are used to share important parts of our identity with friends and family, the social media profile of an employer does just the same, in terms of communicating their unique proposition to the talent they want to recruit.