Social Media and Recruiting: Everything You Need to Know

Social media can be one of the most effective recruiting tools at your disposal, but social recruiting isn’t automatically going to deliver great results.

To get the benefits that social media can offer your recruiting, you need to use these tools strategically, understand your audience on each social platform and use good social media etiquette when talking with candidates.

These social recruiting trends should demonstrate the importance of using these tools in your recruiting process:

• 94% of recruiters use or plan to use social media in their recruiting this year.
• 69% of candidates would not take a job at a company with a bad reputation (your social media reputation is your actual reputation).
• 73% of millennials found their last position through a social media platform.

By using best practices for developing candidate relationships and social media sourcing strategies in this post, you can tap into the ever-expanding use of social media, and use these platforms to great effect in your recruiting.

Creating and Using Your Social Recruiting Profiles

The recruiting profiles that you use when reaching out to candidates need to be highly professional, but they should not lack personality. When you appear in a candidate’s inbox, you want to be recognized as a recruiter, but not easily dismissed as “just another recruiter.”

Your profile on each of the social recruiting sites you use should be tailored to the primary use of the social network (sharing images on Instagram vs. sharing industry articles on LinkedIn), and the candidates you hope to reach on this social network.

Here are some pointers for the top social networks:

LinkedIn – Known as the professional social network, LinkedIn is one of the best social networking sites for recruitment  because A) people display their entire careers on LinkedIn and B) people create LI profiles to network for job opportunities and to be contacted by recruiters. Your LinkedIn profile picture should be of you dressed like you would at an industry event: not so formal that you stand out, but definitely nicely dressed and appropriate for the crowd.

Facebook – Your Facebook profile should not be as formal as your LinkedIn profile, but you should still look professional. Joining industry, job or skill set specific groups can be a great way to connect with talent. Additionally, Facebook Jobs (Facebook’s job board platform) will be a great candidate source to leverage in recruitment projects for your clients.  

Instagram – Though this social network is less often associated with recruitment, Instagram is used heavily by millennial professionals and creatives in particular. Becoming popular on instagram can make the career of designers and other creatives, and contacting a talented digital artist through this network can be a great way to get their attention.

Twitter – Twitter is all about what’s trending and its 280 character format can be a great way to generate interest in your jobs. The profile you create should be named something like “Your_Name_YourRecruitingFirm,” so that people interested by your tweets know they’re looking in the right place for a job. Keep your tweets short and snappy, and use hashtags popular in your client’s industry for a chance to go viral when sharing job descriptions on twitter.

Here are some general guidelines for creating your social network recruiting profiles on different social networks.

• Consider the industries you recruit for when choosing your profile pictures.
• Find out which social media platforms are used most heavily in your industry.
• Research which social networks will be most effective for recruiting candidates for various roles, seniority levels, skill sets, etc.
• Find online forums that correspond with popular professional groups on social media.
• Join groups on social platforms that talented candidates and fans of your clients have joined.  

Client Employer Brand and Social Media

Most candidates will research your client’s company on their favorite social platforms to evaluate their “employer brand,” or the work experience they can expect when joining the company. Because social media is so influential to candidates researching your clients, your clients need to have current content on each social profile that positively portrays their employer brand.

Here’s what candidates need to see in order to decide that your client’s company is a great place to work:

• There need to be pictures showing what it’s like to work for your client’s company (office space, facilities, office building, company outings, etc.).
• There need to be stories shared by employees about how great it is to work for your client’s company (video will engage more viewers).
• There need to be positive experiences shared online by former and current employees.
• There need to be positive feedback on professional networks like the company’s LinkedIn and Glassdoor profiles.
• It should be easy to find your client company’s career page from any social profile.

With all of this content in place, it will be easy for candidates who see your client’s job description to research the company on social media and decide they want to work there.

Using Client Social Platforms and Social Content

The better supported you are by your client’s social media team, the more successful your social media recruiting efforts will be.

Always coordinate with your client’s social media manager to promote your job opening and to post content that will be enthusiastically received by candidates in your client’s industry.

For example, by learning which posts have received the most engagement from your target audience, you know what kind of content will help you get the interest of qualified candidates.

Your client’s social team will undoubtedly be posting the job description for your client’s open jobs, and sharing these posts using your recruitment profiles is a great way to expand the reach of these posts even further and monitor their popularity.  

Here are some best practices for coordinating with your client’s social team:

• Always coordinate with client social media experts to learn about their social strategy and the content they post that is most popular.
• Always consult with client social media experts to ensure your social promotion of their job opportunities is in-line with ongoing social marketing activities and correct for their target audience.
• Always emulate and incorporate the brand and employer brand of your clients, but do so subtly and never as a cheap imitation of their own social recruiting efforts (this makes both of you look bad).

While you should never try and replicate the brand voice used by your clients on social media (this is often heavily managed), your tone should be similar enough to appeal to the target audience of your clients: the people they want to recruit.

For example, when recruiting for a game studio, your Twitter post should be similar to their internal promotion of an open QA job, but your promotion should be the “recruiter version” of their brand voice. This way, you can attract the interest of the kind of candidates they are looking for, and expose candidates to a post from the company that is even more in line with their interests than your introduction to the opportunity.

Here’s how your post can emulate a job promotion post from your game studio client:

@GameWorldJobs – Do you have the courage to face runtime bugs and other denizens of our QA cavern? GameWorld is hiring QA engineers for projects like Dragonworld 2 and we need your swords, arrows and enchantments in our intrepid QA team, who love playing RPGs as much as they love making them jobdescriptionlink

@Patricia_Davies_ABCRecruiting – Ever wanted to join a team that loves playing RPGs as much as they love working on them? This opening at GameWorld could be for you… linktoclientpost

By emulating the brand voice of clients, but not trying to copy it, you can attract the kind of candidates your clients want for their open job. By linking to your client’s posts promoting the job, candidates can see that your client’s company is the kind of place they want to work.

Understanding Your Audience on Each Social Network

People use different social networks for different reasons, and you should understand the audience of your clients on each social network you use for social recruitment. This way, you can get more interest for your client’s job openings.

For example, by looking at the profiles of professionals who have commented on your client’s page or liked their posts, you can see what professional and industry groups these highly engaged fans of your client’s company belong to. Then, by joining these groups, you can:

1. See what kind of social content is enjoyed by and is being shared by people who are active fans of your clients.
2. Learn what topics and professional concerns are top-of-mind for this highly engaged demographic.
3. Get access to professional groups likely to contain people who would be highly interested in the job you are promoting.

You should also understand the general audience demographics you are reaching on each social network. For example, while you will find a broad demographic range when viewing Facebook users who have liked your client’s company, you will typically find a much younger demographic when viewing Instagram fans of your client on Instagram.

Here are some questions that will help you when researching your client’s target audience on social networks:

• Which posts by your client have gotten the most positive attention? What kind of content did they post?
• Which of the people who have liked or commented on your client’s page seem to be of the right skill/experience level to be considered a good candidate?
• Which online industry/professional/job/skill groups are these potential candidates part of? What is top-of-mind for people in these online groups? What are they talking about? What are they posting? What are popular and unpopular opinions in these groups?
• What other pages and companies are being followed by your client’s followers?

Social Media Recruiting Tools

Social recruiting tools are tools created to help recruiters get the most out of their time invested in using social networks for recruiting. By investing in social media tools, you can level up your ability to discover and source candidates on social networks, but you should be sure that you’re choosing the right social recruiting tools for your needs.

You should use social recruiting tools that:

• Save time while researching candidates on social platforms.
• Help you uncover great candidates throughout one or multiple social networks.
• Easily extract information from social networks to your ATS.
• Give you tools to enhance communications with candidates on social networks.

Here are some social media recruiting platforms that are proven to deliver results:

LinkedIn Recruiter – LinkedIn Recruiter is one of the most popular social media recruiting platforms, giving recruiters advanced filters and suggestions for candidates based on their skills and “signals” that these candidates are more open to job opportunities. The social recruiting platform also allows you to monitor top candidates for updates to their profiles, allowing you to reach out at the perfect time. This LinkedIn social crm for dummies is frequently used by social media staffing agencies, for example a social media agency in New York.

Loxo –  Loxo is an all in one recruitment platform that has features of the best social recruiting software, allowing you to source from multiple social networks and post job openings to the social networks used most heavily by your target candidates. Powered by AI, Loxo takes your social media sourcing to the next level by searching social networks for the high quality candidates you’re looking for, then automatically sourcing them into Loxo’s ATS and collecting their contact info and social profiles.

To see how Loxo can boost the results of your social media sourcing and your recruiting efforts,  you can schedule a demo here.