In the past few years, the recruiting industry has witnessed seismic changes in the labor market and the current labor shortage is far from over making recruiting increasingly difficult to say the least.

The good news? Today, the field of recruitment marketing offers an endless number of innovative solutions and strategies available to attract qualified candidates.

The not so good news? With the fast-paced evolution of recruiting, it may seem like a nearly impossible task to keep up with the pace of change and understand how to develop an effective recruitment strategy.

But there is hope! One of the most powerful advancements has been the rise of social recruiting to address the challenges associated with today’s competitive and candidate-driven market.

What Is Social Recruiting?

Social recruiting is the process of engaging and attracting candidates using a number of different social channels such as social media platforms, events, blogs and forums. While the practice has been employed for years, organizations are paying substantially more attention to social recruiting to attract talent. Recruiting on social media, in particular, has become incredibly popular. In fact, a survey done by Glassdoor found that 79% of job applicants use social media in their job search.

One of the biggest benefits of social recruiting is that it can cast an incredibly wide net that attracts job seekers and passive candidates who otherwise may never have seen the job listing. With more than 4 billion people around the world using social media, social recruiting can help hiring teams reach an incredibly deep talent pool.

Why Use Social Recruiting Strategies?

Social media sites are a part of daily life for a vast number of people and they’re accessible 24/7. If you want to get the attention of these job seekers, social recruiting is the way to do it.

Find More Quality Hires

Traditional recruiting methods limit the number of candidates who are likely to come across your job listing. Social recruiting gives you access to billions of people. You’ll also have a wealth of information at your disposal with social recruiting, which allows you to target job seekers based on their skills, experience, interests and more.

Share Employer Profiles

Unless your company is an international brand known by millions, odds are that there are great candidates out there who are unaware of who you are and what you have to offer.

Social media is an amazing way to get a ton of visibility for employer profiles on sites like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed and other popular sites. Using social media, you can share information about what makes you a desirable employer by recruiting on social media and connect with candidates faster than ever before.

Attract Passive Candidates

Finding a new job may not be top-of mind for some candidates, but through social recruiting, you can inspire them to learn more about your company. One great way to do exactly that is to post regularly to showcase the unique culture of your company. From posting pictures of fun team building activities to celebrating recent wins, social media can spread the word that your company is an exciting, innovative and supportive place to work.

By connecting with those who work in your industry through social media, you can highlight the benefits of working for your company.

Increase the ROI of Recruiting Budgets

Attracting qualified candidates is a worthwhile investment and social recruiting is often cost effective. When you encourage your existing employees to spread the word about your newest employment opportunities, you can leverage their networks to find high-quality candidates. Finding the perfect candidate through social media recruiting can even be done for free when employees are excited to share openings with their friends and their own social networks.

Social Recruiting Strategies

Now that you know more about the benefits that social recruiting has to offer, you’re probably curious about the kinds of social recruiting strategies that you can employ. We’ve listed a few of the most effective strategies along with some useful details about each.

Strategy #1: Evaluate Your Online Presence

Your organization is probably active on social media, and if it’s not, it should be.

The first step to building an audience and solidifying your brand online is to evaluate where your online presence currently stands. You can do this by looking at your social media interactions, determining your search engine ranking and looking at your website metrics with one of the many analytics tools available, such as Google Analytics. Knowing all of this information can help you identify both the strengths and weaknesses of your online presence.

Once you’ve got a clearer picture of where your online presence stands in comparison to your competitors, you can begin to lay the foundation of a strong social recruiting strategy.

Strategy #2: Optimize Your Social Media Presence

There is a lot of noise on various social media platforms that you’ll need to fight through if you want to be heard. Fortunately, there are a few effective methods out there for doing just that. Your best bet is to first narrow down your list of social media avenues to the ones that you think will be the most effective for your company. Focus your attention strictly on those networks and design content specifically for each platform you use. After all, something that brings in great results on Twitter might not be appropriate for LinkedIn.

If you should decide that Twitter is a great platform for your social recruiting endeavors, you should focus on using the right hashtags to attract the attention of those in your industry. The same goes for Instagram, but keep in mind that this social media platform is a visual one and is more suitable for attracting those who work in that realm such as video editors and graphic designers.

In every social media recruiting endeavor, the most crucial element is posting with regularity. To make this easier, you’ll want to create a social content calendar that lays out your social media posts well ahead of time. Always remember that consistency is key.

Strategy #3: Showcase Your Company Culture

On every channel you use for your social recruiting efforts, you need to highlight what your company is all about. Whether you’re outright describing it on your profiles or you’re expressing it through the content of your posts, you want anyone who engages with your company online to leave with a greater sense of what it’s like to work for your organization. Clearly communicate the values that you believe represent your company and the culture you encourage. One good example is Change Healthcare, a healthcare technology company, that regularly publishes posts that communicate the organization’s mission and vision and how employees are working to support those goals.

Strategy #4: Use Targeted Ads

Targeted ads on social media platforms like Facebook are an incredibly effective way to not only find a wide pool of job seekers but to find the right pool of job seekers. Using targeted ads allows for your job listings to be targeted. It also ensures that candidates can find your opportunities on the platforms they frequent on a daily basis.

Strategy #5: Engage 

While many of these practices flow one way (sending information from your company out to potential candidates) perhaps the most important factor in the success of a social recruiting campaign is engagement.

By establishing a personal connection with prospective candidates, responding quickly to questions, and allowing your brand voice to shine in your responses, you can establish trust with your audience. Connecting with your audience means allowing for a two way street of communication, so talk with your audience – not at them!

Investing in Social Recruiting

With the tightening labor market, staying on top of the latest advancements in recruitment marketing has never been more important. I hope that you have gained a few insights into how you can further invest in social recruiting and how to optimize your overall recruitment marketing efforts.