5 Ways Social Media Can Help You Find The Right Talent

Intro

Recruitment is always changing, and social media is becoming one of the most effective ways to find the best talent. A good social media recruitment strategy allows you to reach candidates you couldn’t with traditional recruiting.

Social media opens you up to a wide range of active and passive job candidates. If used strategically, these social platforms could be what your organization needs to build a high-performing team.

Read on to find out how social media can help you find the right talent for your organization.

Social media recruiting is a hiring process that uses social media platforms to accurately identify suitable candidates for vacant positions and engage with them.

Social media recruiting allows you to reach a wider audience when compared to traditional recruiting and helps you widen your candidate pool.

To find high-quality candidates, you need to go where they go, which is social media. You can no longer expect to find the best talent by posting a job on your website alone. For example, 73% of millennials found their current job via social media, and this trend is likely to continue.

Typically, social media recruiting decreases your company’s cost per hire unlike traditional recruiting which may include job fairs, or require travel and staffing costs.

Effectively recruiting on social media channels requires a good social presence. Your social profiles need to be optimized and your employer brand needs to showcase your company culture and values.

You need to be searchable and potential employees need to know you're a good company to work for. Engaging with your audience is a vital recruiting process too, you are on social media after all. You should also understand the different social media platforms and how to find your ideal candidates there.

Further, it’s best to proactively identify future vacancies and have a strategic recruitment plan in place. If you don’t, you won’t find the optimum candidate—even with these techniques.

Now, let’s discuss the above-mentioned tips in more detail.

1. Build a Strong Employer Brand

Building a strong employer brand is crucial for social media recruiting. According to Glassdoor, 69% of job candidates say they wouldn’t take a job at a company with a poor reputation.

To build a stronger online company profile, start by sharing your company culture on social media.

Use various social platforms to show the rewarding aspects of working for your company. Let potential employees see your company's values and traditions. Doing this will serve as a strong incentive for people to desire to work with you.

Here’s an example of video content that promotes company culture:

In the above video, Dell Technologies uses visuals and powerful storytelling to reveal the company culture and values that current employees experience. Creating social media posts like this will effectively promote your company culture and help you build a strong employer brand.

Other good ways to build a strong employer brand include advertising employee benefits, showcasing employee testimonials, and hosting Q&A events. All these social media strategies will show job seekers the benefits of joining your company.

Although active candidates aren’t the main focus of social media recruiting, you still want your social media profiles to be easily searchable. You can achieve this by using the right keywords based on your industry and location. You should also ensure your keywords are relevant to your job seekers and the roles you’re actively recruiting.

SEO tools like Ranktracker’s Keyword Finder can help you identify the best keywords. For instance, when you type in a keyword like ‘marketing job’, the keyword tool will show you some data about that keyword. It’ll also show you other relevant or related keywords. Additionally, you’ll see details like the location where the specific keyword is used and the keyword difficulty.

The keyword difficulty shows how hard it will be to rank in the top 10 organic results for that specific keyword. Ideally, you should target keywords with medium or low difficulty. Another detail to look out for is the keyword volume, which reveals the average monthly searches for that keyword. Use high-volume keywords to optimize your social profiles for search engines.

You should also include the job title and general location when advertising jobs on your social media accounts. If possible, include the information in the text component of the post, as search engines aside from Google won’t be able to read it. These details will make it easier for potential applicants to find your listings.

3. Choose the Right Platform

Every job listing will be suited to a different social media site, so you need to choose the right one for an optimal recruiting process. For instance, Facebook is used by nearly all working-age demographics, it’s good for reaching passive candidates and effective for targeted ads.

Twitter is good for reaching specific candidates as you can easily connect without sending a friend request. Another advantage is the ability to gauge the candidate’s personality so you know how to initiate conversations with them.

Being a professional network, LinkedIn offers detailed candidate information like career history and level of education. The talent pool also has active job searchers.

For a more effective choice, you need to research your ideal candidate profile to determine which social media site they are most likely to spend their time. For example, if you are hiring a photographer, you will want to assess which platforms have the most photography content.

Determining which platform involves some common sense; in our example, it follows that a photographer is more likely to use image-based platforms. But if you want empirical evidence, you can choose a leading figure in the field you are hiring and see which platforms they perform best on. For example, photographer Theron Humphrey has 1.3 million followers on Instagram.

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Whereas his Twitter account has 8,439 followers. That’s a big difference!

(Source)

So if a photographer like Theron Humphrey were your ideal prospective employee, you would want to choose the Instagram platform.

As the name suggests, successful social media recruiting needs to be social. So instead of passively posting a listing, you need to engage with your potential job candidates on various social media platforms. You need to monitor your replies, ask questions, and answer any questions from job seekers.

Here’s an example of Marriot Hotel’s career page doing just that.

(Source)

The page asks questions and provides feedback on the job seeker’s answer.

Also, don’t focus your engagement solely on the job listing, work on establishing a strong social media presence too. Engage different groups on different topics, share high-quality content and resources, and promote the company values.

Using social media like this means top talent will engage with your pages even when jobs aren’t available. When you do have a job listing, a greater pool of quality passive candidates will be available.

You should also be active in social communities like Facebook groups. When you do have a listing, you can post it in the Facebook group without coming across as purely promotional. The likelihood of positive reception from online communities improves if you utilize social media groups this way.

5. Use Advanced Search Technique

Most social network platforms have advanced search features that allow you to find the perfect people for your role. Facebook’s Graph Search lets you filter profiles based on:

page likes
location
interests
education level, and more.

So if you need a graphic designer from a specific location with a certain level of education, you can find the most appropriate passive candidates with this solution. If you need to hire a remote worker, “Graph Search” allows you to select the relevant categories so you can select one that’ll help you find the ideal candidate.

LinkedIn has a similar advanced search feature that is very effective. You can search by location, current company, previous companies, industries, seniority level, and more. Saving and receiving updates on potential candidates is easy as well.

Twitter is far less advanced than Facebook and LinkedIn, but you can still use it efficiently. The best way to search for qualified candidates using Twitter is by searching for relevant hashtags. Potential candidates will be interacting with the hashtag, and you can interact with them in a more informal way, which some candidates prefer.

If your target audience is young people up to date with the latest social media trends, you should also use TikTok.

TikTok Resumes allows companies to post job openings that candidates respond to with video content. Although an unconventional recruitment strategy, using this technique helps you to reach out to candidates you wouldn't be able to reach on other social networks.

In Closing

If utilized correctly, social platforms can help you find the right talent from both passive and active candidates.

To use social media networks for your recruitment efforts, you should build a strong employer brand so that ideal candidates will want to work for you. Also, optimize your social media profiles so they’re easy to find.

Additionally, you should choose the right platform for connecting with your ideal candidates and engaging with your social audience. This allows you to answer questions and provide more information on job roles. Don’t forget to use each platform's advanced search techniques to increase your chances of finding the perfect candidate with ease.

So implement these techniques into your social media recruiting strategy to find the right talent effectively.

5 Ways Social Media Can Help You Find The Right Talent