Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, Reddit—these social media platforms have become a daily essential in everyone’s life. Research has shown that an individual spends an average of 865 hours of scrolling on social media a year, which amounts to 36 whole days! We use these apps for a multitude of reasons including entertainment, education, awareness, and communication. So, why not take social media to the next level and incorporate it into your business too?
Whether you’re a startup or a multinational conglomerate, you can use social media for more than just establishing your online brand presence. One of the significant areas that social media plays a pivotal role in today’s digital age is Recruitment.
Why is Social Media important in recruitment?
With social media becoming an essential in several aspects of life, social recruiting has emerged a new and important process in every organization. Social media recruiting has expanded to beyond networking on LinkedIn or posting job updates and requests on Facebook. Here are a few reasons why you need to use social media in your recruitment processes:
- The current workforce is made up of GenZ and Millenials, who spend a substantial amount of time on social media
- With social media platforms finding newer and innovative ways to keep their audiences engaged, they are gradually venturing into features for recruitment too. For instance, you can curate your Instagram post to include job details and use targeted marketing to reach the right candidates
- Social media helps spread a brand awareness not only about your organization’s services but also about work culture, important milestones, awards and recognition—all of which can attract an inclusive and diverse pool of talent with an expanded set of skills
- Social media recruitment has proven to be a cost-effective solution with higher ROIs and better results that conventional recruitment channels
- With access to the candidate’s social media profile, screening candidates can be more effective as you now have insights into their personality as well
- Since most individuals are active on social media, it works as a better medium to reach passive candidates too
How can you use Social Media to help optimize recruitment?
Social media platforms release new updates almost every fortnight, and by staying up to date, you can find creative and strategic ways to implement these features to optimize your recruiting process.
- Create engaging videos
Videos are the most common and powerful media of engagement in the current world, with Instagram Reels, TikTok Videos, and YouTube Shorts reigning supreme among all forms of social engagement. Choose from a variety of video types that could be as simple as using text to share your message or creating fast-paced engaging videos with transitions and other attractive effects. Studies have shown that videos reach over 92% of internet users across the world and have a global average consumption of 17 hours a week. Top recruitment agencies in USA are using this strategy as it’s one of the fastest ways to share more content while retaining the viewer’s attention.
- Advertise on social media
Advertising tools on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn have evolved to become powerful harnessing a large volume of user data including their age groups, locations, interests, shopping behaviour, and other demographics. These data sets can be easily used in ad campaigns to target relevant sets of audiences based on different objectives like traffic, engagement, leads, sales, and promotions through simple and user-friendly dashboards. The added advantage is that you can control the ad spends and tweak your campaigns at any point based on the results achieved.
- Humanize your brand
Maximize your reach and network by involving employees in your posts. Whether it’s a sneak peek into a day in your organization, a celebration, a party, an award, or showcasing your star employees, the human touch makes your brand more relatable. It creates a positive impact on potential employees who use social media to gauge your organization as their future workspace. Employees can also share your posts on their social media and enhance recruitment by finding trusted candidates within their network, which can also positively impact work culture. Many placement agencies in USA have noticed positive outcomes of employee-centric posts and as consultants to organizations, highly recommend this strategy. If you are worried about your brand reputation, develop a clear corporate policy that the employees can adhere to.
- Go live
The Live feature on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn can be used to share real time broadcasting of important events. It can also be used in creative ways like having a simple AMA (Ask Me Anything) session, where your organization can be portrayed as a knowledge hub. This not only spreads brand awareness, but also improves your brand reputation and works as a medium to establish connections and relationships with potential candidates, collaborators, business partners, and investors. If these sessions are successful, you can even venture into podcasting and open up a new channel for revenue generation, and be branded as one of the best recruiting and staffing agencies in the USA.
- Monitor your profiles
Assign a person or a team, depending on the size of your organization and social media activity levels to monitor your profiles on a regular basis. You could also use the latest AI tools that make monitoring easy and efficient. Make sure to give prompt and relevant responses to comments on posts and DMs. Keep an eye on the comments section to avoid any negative engagement or unnecessary communication to ensure the credibility of your brand. Also pay attention to social media analytics. Most platforms have dedicated tools that help you track the performance of your ads and the levels of activity on your profile, which give detailed insights like quantity and quality of conversations, reach, engagement, clicks, and comparison with competitor brands. You can alter your posts based on these analytics and optimize recruitment for your organization. It also helps in reviewing the problem areas that you could avoid or remedy and ensure enhanced brand reputation.
Some of the other social media recruiting strategies include conventional yet effective measures like joining relevant groups, posting blogs and other informative content, building a community that could support a cause, and following the viral trends.
By creating a strong brand presence that portrays your brand as an active member of social media through knowledge exchange and regular activity, you can ensure optimal results for recruitment too. Get creative in the ways to employ the social media features to enhance recruitment processes with strategies that are innovative and engaging.