Are you worried about not getting suitable candidates for your requirements through general interview strategies? Or do you need to think more about whether using social media for recruitment is profitable? Yes, it is. Even using social media for recruitment is an outstanding idea. Now the question is what exactly social media recruiting is and how it is executed properly.
So, let’s chat about how social media recruitment works and what’s good and not-so-good about it. Because, like everything, there are pros and cons to consider.
What is Social Media Recruiting?
Social media recruiting is not merely about posting job listings. It is a platform showcasing visually appealing posts or videos about vacancies for particular domains. Sometimes, the content includes engaging organization portfolios, vibrant infographics, and authentic employee testimonials, offering a glimpse into the work environment and fostering a sense of community.
Candidates also showcase their expertise on social media to get noticed by different companies. It is a two-way street where the employees and employers showcase their knowledge of hiring using the press.
- You must maintain some strategies to choose the right candidate using social media.
- First, you should have a minimum good reach to the right candidate profile.
- Second, although social media provides precise results, handling it is tricky. So, research before recruitment is essential as well.
- The final tip is that your organization should have a good marketing team to execute your company on social media.
How is Social Media Used in Recruiting?
Randomly posting jobs and waiting for a good response is not the only task on social media; reaching the target audience is one of the most important and challenging tasks that must be done. If your social media has a high reach every day, your vacancy post will reach worldwide; otherwise, you have to send push notifications promoting your vacancy news.
So, now the question arises of how to get the right candidate using social media. Or how to utilize social media purposely. Here is the in-detailed answer.
1. Job Postings
Recently, people have spent hours online on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Suppose your company has a social media site with proper company details. Use social media to post the vacancy, as it is free, and your post can be shown directly on candidates’ timelines.
So, the social media recruitment post allows recruiters to reach a broader audience and tap into passive job seekers who may not actively be searching on traditional job boards. Compant often use the recruitement management system for smoothening the process.
2. Employer Branding
People follow you more if your employer’s branding is attractive. Social media is a powerful tool to promote your employer’s brand. People love to work in an amicable work culture. The company showcases its workplace culture, values, and numerous achievements through posts and videos to attract candidates for their required domain.
3. Networking and Relationship Building
In some scenarios, a company often needs consultants or experts for specific tasks. In this case, hiring gig workers can be the best option.
Continuing communication with people online makes it easier to identify and approach tasks when relevant job opportunities arrive. The right networking and building good relationships with people online can be an outstanding plan for future requirements.
Moreover, maintaining a bond with them increases employee engagement and keeps the retention rate even if those are gig workers.
In this scenario, recruiters can use platforms like LinkedIn to connect with potential candidates, industry professionals, and thought leaders.
4. Candidate Research
Employers don’t need to dig into CVs to get valuable insight into candidates. Candidates’ social media profiles help them acquire valuable details like professional backgrounds, skills, interests, etc. For checking candidates’ backgrounds, skills, and expertise, employers often use platforms like LinkedIn to review candidates’ profiles.
Even using the social media platform, you can learn about their lifestyle, past work details, and other additional information beyond what is included in their resumes.
5. Social Media Advertising
Companies may invest in targeted social media advertising to promote job openings to specific demographics or individuals with certain skills. This can help them reach a more relevant audience and generate more qualified applicants.
6. Analytics and Metrics
Social media and online analytic tools easily give you an idea of recruitment analytics. These tools also allow recruiters to measure the effectiveness of their recruiting efforts.
They can track engagement, click-through rates, and other metrics to assess the success of their social media recruitment strategies.
Tips for Social Media Recruitment
Often, social media recruitment goes wrong, as companies frequently get the wrong candidates. Conversely, candidates may usually face ghost job issues on social media. Here are quick tips for using social media while processing recruitment.
➔ Know your Business Goal
What is your recent target for hiring a graphic designer, salesperson or engineer? It is essential to confirm before posting a job on social media platforms. Cause every social media comes out differently. Moreover, each platform shares different strategies to meet specific goals.
Let’s explain the point briefly. Suppose you require an experienced graphic designer and are looking through Twitter or Facebook instead of Instagram or LinkedIn. You won’t get proper candidate portfolios over there.
On the other hand, if you require an experienced coder, it is better to post on LinkedIn rather than on other social media platforms. Additionally, some logistics companies often require vendors; they can just post on Facebook. LinkedIn or Instagram are not the right platforms for this kind of recruitment.
Knowing and communicating your business goals sets the foundation for an effective and targeted social media recruitment strategy.
➔ Tailored Job Postings
Vacancy post design is one important tip that must be followed. A relevant post design not only builds company branding but also attracts candidates who focus on the post. The company can craft compelling and concise job descriptions that clearly outline the position’s qualifications, responsibilities, and benefits.
Employers can use eye-catching, relevant visuals, such as images or graphics, to make the post stand out in crowded social media feeds. As an add-on, HRs can highlight unique selling points about the role and your company to make the opportunity more appealing.
When posting, adding relevant hashtags and a call-to-action can further increase the post’s visibility and engagement.
➔ Leverage Social Media Advertising
Running paid advertisements can be an outstanding way to reach your target audience. You can target the required candidates through targeted ads based on their demographics, interests, and locations.
Using social media, experimenting with different ad formats like carousel ads and other sponsored content enables you to precisely select the target potential candidates. Employers can run ad campaigns on any platform, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.
➔ Keep on Trend
When it comes to using social media for recruiting, staying on top of trends is crucial. Social media is constantly evolving, and it’s essential to keep your company profile in line with the latest trends. This ensures that you can quickly reach your target audience.
And More than that, if any of your posts go viral, you can get even a thousand visitors in minutes. Keeping your profile trending helps the company reach relevant candidates quickly and constantly improves your company branding.
➔ Use the Right Social Media Tools
How to use social media tools and understanding their features is essential before posting any job vacancy. Some social media platforms, like Instagram or Facebook, are appropriate for creative jobs such as videographer, graphic designer, photographer, etc. On the other hand, LinkedIn sounds better than other platforms for some operational tasks or IT-related jobs.
Unlike social media platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram, Twitter is great for academic recruitment as employers can get ideas about candidates’ expertise on related topics.
Some Trending Social Media Platforms for Social Media Recruitment
The top social media platforms a company can use for vacancy posts, relevant candidate searching, and hiring are follows:
1. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a highly efficient platform for posting jobs and finding candidates for your vacancies. Its streamlined process allows employers to post jobs, review candidate profiles, select the best fit, and send interview invitations. The platform’s post-boosting feature further enhances efficiency by promptly ensuring job posts reach potential candidates.
2. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
Though LinkedIn is the universal job posting platform, employers use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to find relevant candidates in some domains. When searching for a creative field, looking for genuine candidates on LinkedIn is a waste of time. Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter can be effective platforms where employers get a fair idea of the candidates’ personalities.
3. YouTube
Specific industries often visit YouTube to search for genuine candidates for vacant positions. More often, when companies search for video specialists and graphic designers, some specialists with enough knowledge in motion graphics, YouTube can be a fair option.
What are the Advantages of Using Social Media for Recruiting?
Although social media recruitment is very popular right now, it doesn’t mean you have to target candidates through social media without being aware of its advantages and disadvantages. In this section, we share some benefits of hiring through social media.
➔ Wider Reach
Although social media recruitment is very popular right now, it doesn’t mean you have to target candidates through social media without being aware of its advantages and disadvantages. In this section, we share some benefits of hiring through social media.
➔ Cost-Effective
Organizations have to pay a lot on different recruitment platforms to post vacancy updates and manage them. Moreover, Interviewers remain unaware of the candidates’ backgrounds until they take the interview.
Social recruiting can be more cost-effective and well-managed than traditional recruiting methods. Posting job openings on social media is often free, and even when utilizing paid advertising, the costs can be lower than those of traditional job boards or recruitment agencies. On the other hand, companies can get a rough idea about the candidates’ expertise using social media.
➔ Brand Promotion
As you get to know candidates’ expertise through exploring the candidates’ social media timelines, likewise, they can learn about your company’s brand through your social media page. So innovative branding is indeed essential.
Your branding serves as a powerful tool for social recruiting. Using social media, the employer can showcase their culture, values, work environment, and employer-employee relationship and make their workplace more attractive for attracting candidates. This positive brand image of an organization contributes to higher employee engagement and retention.
➔ Faster Hiring Process
Social media recruitment can accelerate the entire hiring process. Job postings can quickly reach a wide audience, generating a faster response from potential candidates.
Through the platform, you can easily search for requirements and directly chat with candidates and tell them about their needs. You can say that a healthy chat conversation with a candidate helps you know more about their career, expertise, and related knowledge. You don’t even need to organize the preliminary interview round for them. Company often use talent management system and related performance management tools to conduct smooth hiring.
➔ Reach Right Candidate Profiles
Instead of digging through resumes, you can reach the suitable candidates you require using social media.
Gain a wealth of information about candidates from their social media profiles, often more comprehensive than traditional resumes. It allows recruiters to make more informed decisions, with insights into candidates’ skills, work history, endorsements, and even mutual connections.
➔ Global Reach
Social media can reach worldwide. It breaks down geographical barriers, allowing companies to attract talent worldwide.
For companies welcoming gig workers or freelancers, using social media is the best option. It is particularly beneficial for organizations with global operations or those seeking specialized skills that may not be readily available locally.
What are the Disadvantages of Using Social Media for Recruiting?
While social media recruiting can seem straightforward, recruiters must remain vigilant at every step to avoid potential pitfalls. This proactive approach can help prevent issues such as low productivity and employee turnover in the future. Here are some key areas that require careful attention.
1. Privacy Concern
Social media is free for all, but it can also harm recruiters. Using social media for recruiting raises privacy issues. Companies often face challenges when detecting whether candidate profiles and related information are real or fake. On the other hand, employers must be cautious not to invade candidates’ privacy rights when accessing non-relevant personal information.
Additionally, updating the company profile to improve branding is essential to maintaining company privacy so that the company doesn’t face a data theft or loss challenge.
2. Bias and Discrimination
Using Social Media, recruiters can attract candidates of different ages, genders, and years of experience. However, they must be careful not to make hiring decisions based on these factors, as this can lead to unintentional bias and potential legal issues.
Otherwise, as per anti-discrimination laws, bias and discredited hiring leads to serious issues.
3. Fake Profiles and Misrepresentation
Some candidates may create fake profiles on social media platforms to mislead employers. Recruiters may be misled by inaccurate information, potentially leading to poor hiring decisions, etc.
Moreover, during social media recruitment, recruiters should rightly take care of the incomplete information regarding their qualifications, skills, and experience about the candidates. Relying solely on social media for candidate evaluation may result in an incomplete assessment.
4. Negative Publicity
A negative candidate experience or perception of unfair hiring practices on social media can damage the employer’s reputation.
Let’s take an example. First, suppose recruiters hire a fake candidate through social media recruiting, but later, they have to terminate that candidate due to some unethical issues. There may also be an opportunity for negative publicity over social media by the candidate. So, properly handling this type of issue is mandatory for organizations as it affects the company’s brand.
5. Legal Compliance
Keeping up with evolving privacy laws and regulations can be challenging, especially in different regions. Failure to comply with these laws can result in legal consequences for the employer.
End Note
As we are moving forward, keeping your company on trend is essential. Adapting emerging technology and maintaining a genuine and authentic online presence foster a positive employer brand and create an inclusive and diverse workforce. However, before starting social media recruiting, every HR should know about the online recruitment strategies and timing. So that organizations can gain a competitive edge in attracting top talent and creating a vibrant and dynamic work culture.
