More companies are returning to a pre-pandemic head count, and recruiters need to look at other avenues to manage the hiring frenzy. This has created more job opportunities for top talent while removing preexisting geographic barriers. Remote work has allowed a recruiter in St. Louis to expand his or her candidate search from coast to coast. As a result, the role of the recruiter is undergoing a significant evolution.
Finding and hiring qualified candidates has become increasingly more difficult. And with so many opportunities for talent, it’s now the candidate who gets to choose the employer he or she wants to work with. If organizations want to attract top-level talent, social media should be their initial and primary destination. Here are three important ways social media could and should be leveraged to successfully navigate this new era of recruitment.
Use Your Social Presence to Build Your (Employer) Brand
Hiring is not easy. But hiring without a brand identity is close to impossible. A strong brand identity needs to be the backbone that drives a company. It should steer how you do business, create a compelling company narrative, and provide a stellar company culture that can be used to recruit top talent.
Social media are incredibly powerful tools that can highlight all of these attributes. Leveraging them allows recruiters to share cornerstone company-owned content—videos, photos, events, testimonials, and more—that showcases what it’s like to be part of their company. When all of this comes together, you can cultivate a powerful employer brand, making the company an appealing place to work.
By proactively building your brand on social media, candidates are (much more) easily able to discover and envision what their life at your company would look like. And when a candidate finds your company, showcasing that strong brand identity only drives up the appeal in the recruiting (and retention) stage.
Share Openings with Your Community and Networks
Once you have job openings, numerous examples and methods can be used to capitalize on your brand’s identity and social presence within your community and network.
A simple tactic is to share a link to career pages or job postings directly on your company’s social accounts. Or, you can go a step further like Marriott, which created a careers-specific Facebook page. On this page, a consistent stream of content is published for potential employees. The content gives candidates something they could relate to and feel inspired by and includes current employee achievements, a day in the life of an employee, and general day-to-day updates from across the Marriott network.
Additionally, you can incentivize current employees to help in the recruiting process by having them share job listings on their accounts. This is why word of mouth is such a successful marketing tactic. We are more likely to trust news or ideas if they come from friends or family we trust. This also rings true when that news is a new job listing. If a friend or peer you trust is actively trying to grow the company he or she works for by bringing his or her network into the fold, it will only strengthen the appeal for potential employees.
Building a strong brand will allow you to turn both passive and active jobseekers into actual applicants when an opportunity to join your team arises. Leveraging both your brand and your social presence can be a great way to find new talent and refine talent pools.
Reach Out to Targeted Candidates
Once you have the talent pool, there are a couple of ways you can connect with potential candidates in a targeted manner on social media: Listen to your network, and join online communities. By using these tactics, if you proceed respectfully and on a highly personalized basis, hiring success can be easily achieved. Inversely, automation and spam will hurt your brand more than they will save you time.
Just as your employees can be your best asset, leveraging already established connections can do your job for you. As much as 80% of jobs are filled through connections, and the best candidates often never have to formally apply. You can make lemonade out of those lemons by paying close attention to your social media network and keeping an eye out for connections.
Joining online communities is another important way to utilize social media to help with recruiting efforts. From LinkedIn Groups and Subreddits to Hacker News boards dedicated to employment, many specialized/verticalized communities provide informal opportunities to connect with talented professionals who may be looking for, or even just considering, their next career move.
In a Nutshell
Social media are changing the way recruiters do their job by making the process more efficient and personal. In a competitive, candidate-driven job market, where talent shops for employers, recruiters can leverage their company’s strong brand identity to meet and identify potential candidates where they already are: scrolling through various social media platforms.
Thibaud Clément, CEO and Cofounder
Thibaud Clément is CEO and Cofounder of Loomly. Since graduating from both Grenoble Ecole de Management, France and the University of Ottawa, Canada back in 2011, Clément has worked with his wife and business partner, Noemie, launching four successful businesses.
A self-taught programmer, Clément began building software to make Noemie’s job easier in 2015. Back then, the pair was managing a marketing agency and struggling with the process of creating and sharing editorial calendars with their clients through spreadsheets. Encouraged by early feedback from their own customers and peers about their prototype, Clément and Noemie decided to make it available to other marketing teams; thus, Loomly was born.
Along with devising the overall company strategy and vision, Clément actively leads all fundraising and product development efforts.
Thibaud Clément is the cofounder and CEO of Loomly, a brand success platform empowering marketing teams to collaborate, publish and measure.