If you manage your company’s social media profiles, you may face challenges with organic reach and engagement. When creating content for careers/recruitment social media channels, we encourage you to focus on what is of interest to your candidates and followers. Consider creating content that is useful and entertaining for your target audience, even if it’s not job-related. Make sure that you are aligning your content with your company culture to tell a story!
With social media for recruitment, you want to ensure you’re competing to captivate potential candidates – even if they are not job searching at the time, they may remember you in the future. After all, why are people on social media? According to Globalwebindex, it’s not for job searching, but to find entertaining content.

In some cases, companies only have access to job opportunities for content. If companies are only posting “we’re hiring” all the time, it becomes redundant and may not elicit engagement from followers. We recommend a well-rounded content strategy that showcases company culture and job opportunities. This strategy may include humor and interaction posts that align with your company’s employer brand.

If you need an example of a company doing just that, let’s look at CH2M, a professional services firm acquired by Jacobs on December 15, 2017. They had a good mix of content that was focused on employees, company culture, career success, job opportunities, as well as posts that encourage interaction. The company was not afraid to test different engaging and interactive content that might resonate with the civil engineering community. Once the content was live, they analyzed likes, comments, shares, and clicks on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Let’s take a look at some of the content that performed well on these social channels.

Skills-related Interaction

Knowing your candidates, and the skills they will use in their roles, can help you develop interactive content. Since CH2M was interested in hiring engineers, creating content that included math or logic can encourage them to interact.

Example of Content

Inspired by a post that referenced McDonalds food items, see the post below shared on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. It was adapted to speak to the company’s target audience. See the results from these social channels. It was the most successful non-careers piece of content for the year.

Facebook

• 23,410 people reached organically
• 103 likes
• Reactions: 1 “love” and 1 “haha”
• 611 comments
• 16 shares
• 2,750 clicks

LinkedIn

• 122,790 impressions
• 3,767 interactions
• 8% engagement rate

Twitter

• 1,729 impressions
• 80 interactions
• 6% engagement rate

With this post, people who were not familiar with the company’s brand were exposed to their brand. If a brand can create content that is engaging, it will start a relationship with potential candidates who may not have had that brand on their employer radar.

Humor

Engineers are the target audience for the organization, and sometimes their humor is different than a person in marketing or communications. We took to Reddit and reached out to a coworker’s husband who is an engineer to gauge what engineers found funny. To develop content, you should become familiar with the skills that a candidate may need to work for a company.

In this case, the company’s jobs focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), so we often try to find humorous content that speaks to these focus areas. Also, there were opportunities to share workplace humor (jokes about the struggles of sharing an office refrigerator, printer jam, etc.) so that anyone could relate and share the post with their network, as well as engage.

Examples of Content

While some humor doesn’t necessarily pertain to engineers, we thought it would be fun to share content that would also spark engagement and be somewhat aligned with either skills (math, science, mechanical, etc.) or interests of an engineer or someone that works for an engineering firm.

Facebook

• 23,410 people reached
• 26 likes
• 5 comments
• 7 shares
• 35 clicks

LinkedIn

• 127,217 impressions
• 2,220 interactions
• 17% engagement rate

Twitter

• 982 impressions
• 109 interactions
• 10% engagement rate

Career-related Interaction

CH2M doesn’t only hire engineers, they also hire for administrative, construction, architecture, and other departments. For that reason, it was important to ask general career questions. Asking career-related questions such as “Why did you choose a STEM job or company to work for?” or “Do you have a mentor?” provides opportunities for everyone in this field or job seekers to participate in the conversation. The company appears on their radar as a company they may want to work for, all from posing a simple career-related question.

Examples of Content

Not all content performs well on every channel, but it’s all about testing. For instance, Facebook is a pay-to-play model, so not all content is seen by followers/fans of the page. For this reason, posts on Facebook may not always receive high numbers of organic engagement due to its algorithm.

Facebook

• 3,496 people reached
• 10 likes
• 16 comments
• 16 shares
• 125 clicks

LinkedIn

• 116,947 impressions
• 1,348 interactions
• 3% engagement rate

Twitter

For Twitter, we know that polls perform well and will often ask more career-related and job-searching poll questions to our followers.

• 660 impressions
• 14 votes
• 1 retweet, 2 clicks

Takeaways

By not only posting company culture, careers, and employee profiles all the time, it gives its current and new followers reasons to interact with their brand. This type of content resulted in conversations among followers, positive engagement, sharing the content (ultimately sharing the brand), as well as reconnecting with various colleagues, classmates, etc. through tagging on posts (such as the mentor question).
When setting out to have a careers social media content strategy, consider the following:

• Understand the roles you are hiring for and the skills needed for these roles. This will help you develop content.
  • Math is something everyone does every day, whether they work in engineering or accounting. Math is in almost every aspect of every industry.
• Visuals play a huge role in developing content.
  • Develop graphics or find graphics that could garner interaction from your followers or prospective followers because it resonates with them.
• Look for inspiration from other companies – relevant to your industry or not. From McDonalds to engineering firms, every company can inspire another company based on the content that is being shared on social media.
• Have fun! It doesn’t matter what field you are in — have fun with social media and bring value to your followers by sharing relevant content.

By making content fun and relevant, people are more likely to engage and pay attention to other types of content the company is sharing and may even be inspired to click on that ‘apply’ button.

Nathalie Cano

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Nathalie is a leader in social media, social media marketing, content development, and social media analytics. She has experience with public relations, social media content, social advertising, brand reputation, and recruitment marketing. She has worked within a variety of industries, including civil engineering, entertainment, television, culinary, hospitality, consumer, non-profit, and healthcare. When she’s not overseeing social media strategies, you can catch her spending the day at Disneyland or watching a game at an MLB park.