Social media has become an incredibly valuable tool for talent acquisition. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have been leveraged by recruiters for years to reach talent. However, a new platform has recently emerged that offers immense potential for recruiting the next generation of talent—TikTok.

With over 1 billion monthly active users, TikTok has quickly become one of the most popular platforms in the world. Its user base consists primarily of Generation Z and Millennials, making it the ideal channel for attracting young talent. Brands and recruiters that embrace TikTok for talent acquisition early have a valuable opportunity to connect with top candidates for open roles.

This ebook will provide readers with a comprehensive guide to using TikTok for talent acquisition. It covers the benefits of using the platform, best practices for creating engaging recruitment campaigns, tips for collaborating with influencers, and key metrics for measuring campaign success.

Whether you’re new to TikTok or already have an established presence, this guide will give you the knowledge needed to excel at TikTok recruitment. Let’s dive in!

The Power of Social Recruiting

Social recruiting has changed the talent acquisition process. By expanding beyond traditional job boards, recruiters can increase their reach and exposure to qualified candidates. Social platforms enable building talent communities, showcasing company culture, and nurturing relationships with potential hires.

What Is Social Recruiting?

Social recruiting refers to the practice of attracting, engaging with, and hiring job candidates through various social channels. This includes platforms like:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• YouTube
• TikTok

Rather than waiting for candidates to find job listings, social recruiting takes a proactive approach to talent acquisition through social engagement.

With billions of people actively using social media, leveraging these platforms offers immense exposure for open roles. 79% of candidates use social media in their job search, making it crucial for recruitment strategy.

There are many benefits to using social media for recruitment marketing.

Reach More Candidates — Social media provides access to billions of users. This significantly expands reach beyond job board postings alone. Targeting by skills, interests, location and more helps connect with relevant talent.

Build Your Brand — Social platforms enable showcasing company culture, values and employer brand. This cultivation increases candidate interest and applications to open roles.

Attract Passive Candidates — Quality candidates often aren’t actively searching for new roles. Yet they engage with industry topics on social media. Recruitment marketing exposes great fits to your openings.

Boost Employee Advocacy — Your employees are your best brand ambassadors. Encouraging sharing of open roles within their networks stacks exposure.

Enhance Candidate Experience — Fostering real connections, not just job listings, improves talent sentiment towards your hiring process.

Decrease Cost Per Hire — With wider reach and employee sharing, finding strong fits becomes more efficient. The focus shifts from spend to strategy.

Social Recruitment With TikTok

As one of the fastest-growing social platforms in the world, TikTok presents huge opportunities for recruiters. With over 1 billion monthly active users, it has incredible scale and its young demographic makes it ideal for engaging Generation Z talent.

What Makes TikTok Different

Unlike other social platforms, TikTok is all about fun, entertaining, user-generated short video content rather than professional personal branding. Users are looking to be delighted rather than sold to directly. This emphasis on shared experiences and engagement makes content creation and audience building different from other networks.

Additional unique TikTok features include:

“For You” Feed — A personalized feed optimized to serve engaging content from creators that may be undiscovered, allowing videos to go viral easily.

Hashtags — Make content easily discoverable by those interested in specific topics. Useful for participation challenges.

Duets & Stitching — Ability to collaborate on content, building on trends in new ways. Fosters an active creative community.

Influencer Marketing — Like other platforms, creators with large loyal followings can promote messages to engaged audiences.

Ads Manager — Self-service ad platform with robust targeting based on interests, behaviors and more. Streamlined campaigns.

Why TikTok for Talent Acquisition?

With its explosive rise and loyal user base, TikTok holds great potential for connecting with future top talent. Reasons to consider TikTok for recruitment efforts include:

Reach Gen Z & Young Millennials — Core user base is Gen Z, perfect for engaging future workforce. Also growing with young millennials.

Build Your Brand — Showcase culture and employer brand to build awareness and interest among high-quality candidates.

Increase Applications — Influencer collaborations, hashtag challenges & ads can directly encourage users to apply for open roles.

Go Where Talent is Engaging — People are actively using TikTok daily for entertainment and community. Meet them in the platform they love.

Cost Effective — Organic content creation and influencer collaborations are typically more affordable than traditional recruitment marketing.

TikTok Recruiting Best Practices

Recruiting successfully on TikTok does require an understanding of the platform and audience. It differs greatly from simply posting job listings and hoping candidates apply. Here are several best practices to employ:

• Post Authentic Content — Resonates better than polished corporate videos. Be creative, fun and engaging.
• Use Hashtag Challenges — Encourage user-generated content with branded hashtags connected to open roles.
• Partner With Nano & Micro-Influencers — Align with creators with smaller but targeted, engaged audiences in your industry.
• Participate in Trends — Leverage popular sounds, dances, memes etc connected to your industry/culture.
• Focus on Your Employer Brand — Share what makes your company culture special, fun and meaningful.

As TikTok continues rapid growth, it should play an integral part in recruitment strategy focused on engaging Gen Z talent. In the next sections, we’ll cover more ways to maximize TikTok for talent acquisition through influencer collaborations and measurement best practices.

Chipotle TikTok Recruitment Marketing Case Study

Chipotle’s use of TikTok for recruitment was groundbreaking and successful. They leveraged the platform for:

• Viral Challenges: Chipotle initiated a lid-flip challenge which went viral, resulting in over 110,000 video submissions. This challenge not only increased brand awareness but also showcased the fun and engaging work environment at Chipotle.
• Employee Engagement: Videos featuring employees in engaging and entertaining scenarios, effectively portraying the company’s culture.
• TikTok Followers: The campaign was so successful that Chipotle gained a massive following of 1.4 million on TikTok, significantly enhancing its brand visibility.

By using TikTok, Chipotle was able to create a strong employer brand presence and attract a younger demographic to their workforce. Their strategy focused not just on job postings but on engaging potential employees with the brand culture​​.

How to Plan a TikTok Talent Acquisition Strategy

Planning for a TikTok Recruitment Campaign

1. Content Creation and Strategy

• Create Engaging Content: Focus on showcasing your company culture, behind-the-scenes glimpses, employee testimonials, and career advice. Utilize captions, text overlays, and catchy music to make content visually appealing and engaging​​.
• Use Hashtags and Trends: Leverage popular hashtags and participate in challenges to increase visibility and engagement​​.
• Encourage User-Generated Content (UGC): Launch challenges or campaigns inviting users to showcase their skills or perspectives, and engage with their content to build a community​​.

2. Influencer and Employee Collaboration

• Partner with Influencers: Collaborate with TikTok influencers whose followers align with your target candidate persona. Their endorsement can extend reach and attract potential candidates​​.
• Employee Participation: Encourage employees to create TikTok content highlighting their experiences, making your company relatable and attractive as an employer​​.

3. Advertising and Promotion

• Utilize TikTok Ads: Use different ad formats like in-feed ads, brand takeovers, and hashtag challenges to reach a wider audience. Target ads based on demographics, interests, and location​​.
• Virtual Hiring Event Promotion: Advertise your virtual hiring events on TikTok to drive registrations and attendance​​.

4. Monitoring and Measuring Success

• Analytics and Optimization: Utilize TikTok’s analytics tools to measure video views, completion rates, shares, comments, and click-throughs. This data helps refine your strategy and increase engagement and conversions​​.
• Set Campaign Goals and Metrics: Define specific metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track progress towards your recruitment goals​​.

5. Engagement and Interaction

• Respond and Engage: Actively respond to comments and engage with the audience to build a community around your brand​​.
• Leverage Influencers and Hashtags: Use influencers and specific hashtags to increase the discoverability and reach of your recruitment ads​​.

6. Showcasing Company Culture

• Spotlight on Culture: Use TikTok to introduce potential candidates to your company culture, work environment, and brand values​​.
• Authenticity: Ensure that your TikTok presence is authentic, relatable, and aligns with your overall brand messaging​​.

7. Budget and Resource Allocation:

• Allocate Budget for Ads: Decide on the budget for TikTok advertising and influencer partnerships. This will depend on how much you want your campaign to stand out​​.

8. Starting and Sustaining the Campaign:

• Get Started: Create a professional TikTok account for your company and invest in good lighting and editing for your videos​​.
• Long-term Engagement: View TikTok as a long-term investment for employer branding and continue creating and posting content regularly to establish a strong presence​​.

9. Adapting and Evolving:

• Stay Updated with Trends: Keep an eye on current trends and challenges on TikTok and adapt your content strategy accordingly to stay relevant and engaging​​.

By following this plan, you can effectively manage your TikTok recruitment campaigns, leveraging the platform’s unique features to attract top talent, enhance your employer brand and engage with a new generation of job seekers.

Engaging with Influencers

TikTok influencers can become powerful partners for talent acquisition. Creators who have cultivated an audience that matches your target demographics and values can promote open roles to engaged potential candidates.

Finding Relevant Influencers

TikTok’s Creator Marketplace makes finding aligned influencers much easier through search filters like audience interests, content topics and location. You can also search related hashtags for creators making compelling content.

The key is identifying influencers who create content relevant for your roles and already have an established trusting audience. Micro and nano-sized followings often convert better than those with millions of broad followers.

Partnership Best Practices

When collaborating on recruitment influencer content, best practices include:

• Clear Brief — Provide expectations, goals, deadlines and guidelines for content while giving creativity room.
• Co-Create Content — Brainstorm video ideas together combining the insights from both brands.
• Optimized Calls-to-Action — Ensure video descriptions, captions and graphics encourage applying.
• Performance Tracking — TikTok provides campaign analytics to optimize future efforts.
• Creative Development — Multi-video stories tend to nurture audience relationships best.
• Compelling Incentives — Contests, discounts or other perks help drive applications.

Influencer Manager Portal

TikTok’s introduced portal gives talent managers ability to negotiate partnerships and directly access campaign performance data to optimize content.

Managers can align creator content to your brief or suggest adaptations based on metrics. Establish expectations and KPIs upfront to enable adaptation for optimal conversion.

The influencer manager route provides added oversight though direct creator relationships can work just as effectively for smaller brands.

Measuring Success

Properly tracking key performance indicators enables continually optimizing your TikTok recruitment campaigns for improved conversion and ROI.

Key Metrics & KPIs

Critical metrics to track for TikTok initiatives include:

• Time to Hire
• Cost per Hire
• Conversion Rate
• Applicant Quality

Compare across different video creatives, captions, calls to action, etc to determine what resonates best with your audience.

1. Time to Hire

• Pre and Post TikTok Campaign Analysis: Compare the average time to hire before and after implementing the TikTok recruitment strategy. This involves tracking how long it takes to fill positions advertised through TikTok campaigns versus those filled through other channels.
• Tracking Specific Campaigns: For positions promoted specifically on TikTok, monitor the time from the campaign launch to the acceptance of a job offer. This will give you a direct measure of the effectiveness of TikTok campaigns in speeding up the hiring process.

2. Cost per Hire

• Calculate Total Recruitment Costs: This includes costs related to TikTok campaign creation, management, and advertising spend. Don’t forget to include the labor costs of the team managing these campaigns.
• Number of Hires Attributed to TikTok: Track how many successful hires were made through TikTok campaigns. This might involve asking new hires how they found out about the job or tracking application sources if your application system allows for it.
• Cost per Hire Formula: Divide the total cost of the TikTok recruitment campaigns by the number of hires that came through TikTok. This gives you the Cost per Hire for TikTok campaigns.

3. Additional Metrics

• Conversion Rate: Measure the percentage of viewers who apply for a job after viewing your TikTok content. This helps understand the effectiveness of your content in motivating potential candidates to apply.
• Applicant Quality: Assess the quality of applicants coming through TikTok. Are they a good fit? Do they progress to interview stages? This qualitative measure can be as important as quantitative ones.

4. Long-term Brand Impact

• Employer Branding Effect: While harder to quantify, note any changes in the number of unsolicited applications or expressions of interest in working for your company. An increase might indicate improved employer branding due to TikTok campaigns.
• Follow-up Surveys: Conduct surveys with new hires sourced from TikTok to gauge their perception of the recruitment process and how well the TikTok content represented the company culture and job expectations.

5. Analyzing and Reporting

• Regular Reporting: Establish a regular reporting schedule to analyze these metrics. This could be monthly, quarterly, or in line with your hiring cycles.
• Comparative Analysis: Compare the effectiveness of TikTok recruitment against other channels. This will help in allocating resources more effectively in the future.

By effectively tracking and analyzing these metrics, you can gain a clearer picture of the ROI of your TikTok recruitment marketing efforts. It’s important to remember that while some benefits, like enhanced employer branding, might be more qualitative, they play a crucial role in the overall recruitment strategy.

Conclusion

TikTok has cemented itself as one of the most influential social platforms today. Its foundation of entertaining short video gives it truly mass appeal, especially with younger demographics. This massive reach makes it a prime channel for connecting with the next generation workforce.

Recruitment marketers who embrace TikTok early have an advantage with the opportunity to organically build their employer brand and attract qualified candidates at scale. Through humanizing cultures and values via engaging video, companies can spark interest and talent pipelines.

While TikTok differs greatly from traditional recruiting mediums, it enables forming authentic relationships with prospective hires in the space they are already embracing. By taking the time to understand the details of content formats on TikTok and collaborate thoughtfully with aligned creators, recruiters can maximize their talent acquisition ambitions.

The demand for talent is not slowing down anytime soon. This guide provided strategies, examples and best practices for excelling at TikTok for talent acquisition. By supplementing existing channels with the unique benefits of TikTok, recruiters can diversify their efforts to appeal to various demographics. Stay ahead of the next big platform shift by embracing communities passionately engaging the future leaders of your evolving workforce.