The use of social media for recruitment purpose is at an all-time high demand. However, companies are still struggling to get the right fit for their organization. It is mainly because of two reasons – either the companies have not embraced it or lack the cohesive strategy to implement it effectively.
Social media recruitment can play a significant role in getting the potential candidate for your organization and it comes in very handy for all those struggling to find the right fit. This article can help you walk through everything you should know to get started with the social media recruitment.
Social media has become ubiquitous in today’s world. It is what prompts the HR professionals to include it as a formal part of the full cycle recruiting strategy and implement the same in their hiring process. Recruiters can target a mix of potential candidates with the help of social media as opposed to their traditional methods.
Using social media in recruitment has become a standard hiring tool for recruiters and employers. It helps them in gaining a better understanding of the candidate’s profile. Given the advanced search filters and automated suggestions, it becomes easy for employers to shortlist the candidates as per their requirements. Vetting the right individuals for the organization may be straightforward with the help of social media.
What Is Social Media Recruiting?
Social media recruiting is a methodology to hire the most prospective candidates for your organization using various social media platforms. It is basically a recruiting technology powered by social media. Several social media platforms that are used for this tasks include LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Upwork, and similar ones.
Social media recruiting also referred to as social recruiting, social hiring, and social media hiring is an essential recruiter skill that’s on the rise from past few years. The recruiters can utilize these platforms to their benefits if they are well aware of its functionalities.
According to the recruiting statistics, more than 35% of employees found their job via social media. If done rightly and effectively, it can help the company reach passive candidates, acquire more referrals, target the right audience, showcase the organization’s culture, and save time and money.
Why use social media for recruitment?
With an increase in the number of people socializing and engaging in social networking sites, it has become imperative for companies to leverage social media as part of their employee hiring strategies. In the traditional recruiting methodology, employers were limited to a small chunk of data provided in the resume. The modern social recruiting opens the doors to the candidate’s profile, interests, professional capabilities, and other characteristics.
As large number of workforces use social media for their job searching, employers have no other choice than to include social media in their recruitment strategy. As per the reports from Glassdoor, 79% of job seekers seek jobs through social media.
Top 5 Benefits of using Social Media in Recruitment
Given the surge in the use of social media in recruitment, all HR managers and professionals will be tempted to join the same bandwagon. If you are not aware of the benefits of using this mode of recruitment process, here’s a few that are listed below:
1. Promote Your Employer Brand
69% of the job seekers claim that the company’s reputation is an essential factor when considering new job opportunities. In addition to that, 84% of employed people say that they would leave their current job if a company with a better reputation came calling. So, using social media to promote your brand is the best way to attract potential candidates. You can use social media channels to promote your company website as well as post pics and videos in it.
You should be well aware of the tactics to be implemented when promoting your employer brand. You can showcase your company’s culture, perks and benefits, workplace environment, and a few other positive aspects using the social media platform. Employer branding is an important parameter that defines the future scope of the company. It helps the recruits get a virtual feel of the company they would work for before they get onboarded.
2. Reach passive candidates
There are several candidates who are not actually looking for a job but still browse through social media and use the social network. And you may never know some of these people could turn out to be an excellent fit. Your one post may drive them to rethink about their current job. All you need to do is expand the social talent pool and put them in front of the passive candidates.
You can interact and build relationships with the passive candidates before they begin to think about a job. Even though passive candidates aren’t on the job hunt, they are always open to new job opportunities. And social media is one way that keeps them glued.
3. Saves time & money for Employers
Traditional and typical recruitment is a very tiring and time-consuming process for both employers and employees. It involves a long process of shortlisting, interviewing, selecting, onboarding, and training candidates. But each of these things becomes a piece of cake when done with the help of social media recruiting. With everything virtual, you need not sit and do things manually. Most of the work is automated and can be achieved by a single click of a button.
With all the meetings set up on accounts like zoom, teams, cisco webex, etc., the recruitment costs have been cut. You can post the job openings with a detailed description on multiple social media platforms used by all. You need not spend a hefty amount on expensive job boards and recruiting agencies. Thus using social media for recruitment can help you save both money and time simultaneously.
4. Increase Your Reach and connect with more candidates
Social media can prove to be very useful for a company as it helps to connect with a large pool of people with different backgrounds, thus increasing the diversity of the applicant pool. If you are not one of the lucky companies with people queuing up for jobs, social media could become handy for you. You could increase your reach and connect with more candidates.
You can target niche personas and professional experts. All you need to do is start paid advertising opportunities on all the social platforms that they frequently visit and hook them up with your engaging content. It could help you to expand your networking in the social market.
5. Getting more insights into the candidate’s personality
As per the 2009 study by Donald Klumper and Peter Rosen, social networks can help get more insights into the candidate’s personality and other necessary traits. A candidate’s profile can help identify an applicant’s boldness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and similar characteristics that could prove to be really useful before recruiting.
It becomes easy to verify the information provided by the candidates and recruiters can verify the information and ensure that there is no discrepancy in the job titles, employment period in an organization, and other stated skills. A recruiter can get to know a great deal of information from a person’s LinkedIn profile. You can also look for a second or a third-degree connection to get a personal referral to ensure that you are recruiting the right candidate for your organization.
Which are the popular social media platforms, & how to use them?
If you want to connect with the best people for your organization, you will have to go wherever they go. There are countless social media platforms out there in the market, but you need to find out the ones worth investing in. It would be best if you tailor your efforts to each of the most visited platforms that could maximize your investment.
Here are some of the most popular social media platforms that you can use:
As per reports, 96% of companies use LinkedIn to recruit, and 79% of candidates got their jobs from the same platform. More than 11 million job postings on LinkedIn make it a go-to for most employers and employees. It offers deep insights into a candidate’s work history, which can be really helpful for employers.
Your action is not restricted to just posting a job as a recruiter. You can also connect with prospective candidates one-on-one. You can introduce them to yourself and your company. You can endorse and write recommendations for talented individuals, can ask for referrals, and reciprocate the same.
Although Facebook may not be a dedicated platform for job postings, its sheer size makes it indispensable for all employers and employees. Facebook has about more than 2 billion users, making it a big social media platform. It offers a job board that you can leverage for job posts and related content.
You can connect with candidates individually and look at an individual’s life when away from work. It may give you a deeper understanding of an individual’s lifestyle. You can either create or join job groups relevant to the job positions you have. You can promote your employer brand and company by creating and sharing relevant content in Facebook.
YouTube
YouTube is one such platform that is known for its videos. If you have the content in a video format, you are in the right place. It is an undisputed heavyweight container of videos and a perfect platform for your recruitment purpose, given the fact that 72% of people prefer video over text.
You just need to create a video that tailors your prospective candidate. You can repurpose the same from other social media platforms to enhance the media hiring and attention. There are about 2 billion monthly active users who actively use YouTube. So, creating good content here could pave a long way in the future.
Twitter is known for its short and precise content because of the 280 character limit. It is a one-stop for all the news and events happening around you. All the top professionals and celebrities use Twitter to share their experiences and engage with the outside world.
Hashtags originally originated from Twitter. So, you can search for your company’s hashtag and join the conversations. This platform could help you attract like-minded people and you can also do a commoner task of liking, commenting, following, tweeting, and retweeting to engage with the people. You can pin the relevant tweets and make them visible on your profile so that anyone who visits your profile can see the same. You also have the option of live-tweeting and live-streaming for your recruitment tasks.
The visual format of Instagram is widely popular among millennials and GenZ. Even though it is so popular, not more than 10% of recruiters use this platform for job postings. Some people are not even aware of the hashtags that are used rampantly.
You need to create a unique hashtag and tag the right audience. Using Instagram, you can curate a multitude of visual pages that can captivate your audience’s attention and encourage them to follow your page. The more followers your page has, the more attention it gets. You can also go live and host some Q&A sessions, which could attract a larger pool of job seekers.
Conclusion
Social media hiring is a great platform to showcase your company’s culture. This method of recruitment can give you an access to a larger talent pool, where making a connection could be a lot easier. Since Genz and millennials make up the maximum workforce currently, social media recruiting could come in handy for the recruiters. It’s just that you need to have the best of the social media recruiting strategy, and everything would fall into the respective place on its own.
