6 Things to Consider When Using Social Media for Recruitment Marketing

Shifting your recruiting tactics into a recruitment marketing strategy is the best first step your TA team can make to meet candidates where they are and build an engaged talent pipeline.

Recruitment marketing refers to the strategies a TA team can use to find, attract, engage, and nurture talent before they apply for a job. Effective recruitment marketing can find best-fit candidates that are culture fits for their company.

There are numerous tools your team can use, such as email and SMS campaigns, but should you be using social media as well? Or should you focus your efforts elsewhere?

Communicating Your Employer Brand Through Social Media

Social media marketing contributes to creating an online employer brand that attracts and engages potential candidates. In fact, 92% of companies use social media for recruiting, and 62% of job seekers use social media channels to evaluate the employer brand of a company.

While LinkedIn is most commonly used for recruitment marketing, other channels include Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Each platform serves a different purpose, so it’s important to only pick platforms that enhance your company’s brand.

By solidifying which channels your company should build a presence on, you can shift your focus to testing what types and styles of content resonate best with your intended audience.

Every piece of content is not going to be a home run. But every post can give you insight into what’s working well — and more importantly, what’s not working at all.

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Resource: Filling Mission-Critical Jobs with Innovative Campaigns

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What to Consider When Using Social Media for Recruitment Marketing

Although it seems like everyone is on social media, certain audiences and age groups are heavily prevalent on certain channels and non-existent on others.

Your candidate personas will determine which channels to prioritize. For instance, advertising job openings on TikTok is a strategic move to attract a younger audience for internships and entry-level roles, as 60% of TikTok users are GenZers.

But what social media channels your audience prefers isn’t the only thing you should consider before creating your accounts. Here are six things to consider when using social media for recruitment marketing.

1. Set up separate social accounts to support your recruitment efforts

Because your recruitment personas and marketing personas are likely very different, consider assessing which social media channels would speak best to each one. This exercise helps narrow down which audiences and platforms align best with your company so you can create separate social accounts to speak to and engage with candidates.

If your audience is prevalent on Instagram, for example, but you want to create a feed that highlights your company culture and one that speaks to HR leaders, consider creating two separate accounts to more actively target those intended audiences.

Your company culture feed can highlight user-generated content, whereas your HR leader feed can showcase HR trends, leadership quotes, and other relevant information.

2. Include a link to your career site in your social bios

When potential candidates find your social media profiles, make it easy for them to learn more about your employer brand and job openings — include a link to your career site in each of your social media bios.

This creates an easy-to-follow breadcrumb trail to your content and available roles so job seekers can explore what your company has to offer, regardless of which social platform they found you on first.

Pro tip: Use social media posts to highlight your Talent Community and turn passive job seekers into engaged potential candidates in your pipeline.

3. Create social content that reflects your employer brand

It’s one thing to use social media to advertise available roles, but a well-executed recruitment marketing strategy focuses on attracting, engaging, and nurturing potential candidates before they fill out an application.

When you create social media content that highlights your employer brand, you can position your business in a way that’s helpful, engaging, important, and memorable. Here are some examples of social content that can positively highlight what your business has to offer:

• Employee video testimonials
• Highlights from company events
• Quotes from your leadership team
• Images of your office and company culture

This approach can keep your company top-of-mind for passive job seekers and contribute to the feeling that you want followers to have about your employer brand. Leveraging social media to showcase your employer brand can create a positive first impression. After all, 86% of women and 67% of men in the U.S. won’t join a company that has a bad reputation.

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Resource: Scroll-Stopper: How to Tell Click-Worthy Brand Stories on Social Media

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4. Encourage employee referrals to help fill critical roles

Your employees are your greatest asset and resource! Leverage their existing talent networks to reach your ideal candidate and help fill open roles faster.

An easy way to do this? Make sharing job postings and events easy by providing content for employees to post on social media. Giving employees easy access to content they resonate with will make it easier for them to share information about your organization to their social networks.

To really amplify the results, consider adding an incentive to reward employees for successfully referring a candidate. This can be anything from winning a gift card to earning a catered lunch in the office. It’s important to recognize the impact of referrals and show your appreciation.

5. Evaluate paid social advertising and allocate a budget

After building your social presence, curating an audience, and having a few social media wins, consider elevating your presence by allocating a budget towards paid media. Social media advertising — especially on platforms like LinkedIn — can help you promote available jobs to a targeted audience.

Social advertising can also be used to promote upcoming events and influential pieces of content for lead generation. The more ads you run, the more information you can gather on the types of content your audience responds to — and the overall impact social media has on your bottom line.

6. Measure results and adjust course of action

Nothing is ever set in stone, but this is especially true for social media. Trends are predominantly what social media highlights because feeds are always changing.

It’s okay to go back to the drawing board if you don’t see results from your organic or paid social posts. If static posts aren’t performing well, try incorporating more video clips into your feed. If people interact well with long-form content that doesn’t feature images, try creating new content in that style.

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Resource: Metrics that Matter: How to Leverage Analytics to Make Data-Driven Decisions

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If you really want to get precise, take a poll! Creating polls on social media gives you direct access to your followers so you can learn more about them in an engaging way. Regardless of what channels you use, be sure to measure, iterate, and try different tactics to discover which methods work best for your employer brand.

Pro tip: Compare a handful of previously run ads to see what types of content, what topics, and what audiences performed the best so you can replicate those results in future ads.

Recruitment Marketing Can Set Your Company Apart

While these are just some of the many ways recruitment marketing can enhance how your team attracts, engages, and converts top talent, using social media to enhance your efforts can create great results and build an engaged talent pipeline. It allows you to meet job seekers where they are, communicate your employer brand in a meaningful way, and target specific audiences using paid social advertising.

Ready to kick your recruitment marketing efforts into high gear? Download our Definitive Guide to Recruitment Marketing!