How to leverage social media to become a social recruiting expert

What does social recruiting mean?

Social recruiting simply means recruiting using social platforms. This includes outreach to candidates or making them come to you thanks to your employer brand. Social recruiting can also include networking (either face to face or through social networks).

Build your employer brand

Social media is a great place to showcase your employer brand. It’s not a secret that candidates tend to want to work with companies that they know before applying for a job. But if you’re not the likes of Nike or Google, you may not attract as many potential candidates to your company’s website as you would want to. Our first piece of advice is: If you don’t have a company page on Glassdoor, go create one now!

Nowadays, it’s super easy to find information about a company. Chances are, before applying for a role, candidates are going to Google your company. They want to know as many things as possible about your company. You have to make sure that the information they are going to find is accurate, up-to-date and if possible, positive. By having a Glassdoor company page, you can gather employees reviews. Most of them would be happy to share their review so don’t be afraid to ask! It’s also important to respond to negative reviews and maybe keep a list of any negative feedback that comes up — it may be constructive and something that can be addressed. If you are responding, it shows that you are open to engaging with people.

By leveraging your social media platforms and sites such as Glassdoor to communicate about your employer brand, you get an opportunity to show how amazing your company is! Talk about the company’s values, and show candidates what they would get if they come to work with you. The goal is to show potential candidates how it is to work in your company.

Communicate about your values

Beware: saying that you have chocolate bars and a Playstation in the office isn’t enough anymore. Candidates are seeking benefits that go beyond fun stuff in the office, so if your company offers a great work-life balance, flexibility in working hours, a free gym membership or monthly days off to help charities, that’s what you want to talk about. Take a bit of time to explain your company’s values, as they want to know more about the people they are potentially going to work with.

Your social media platforms give you the perfect opportunity to do this. Don’t forget to share all the exciting stuff happening in your company! For example, Instagram is a great platform to share insights into the company life with potential applicants. Everybody likes to see fun photos of team lunches or team bonding exercises! You could even focus on different employees and describe their role in the company. Facebook and Twitter could be a great mean to share employees interviews from your blog (if you have one) or quotes from people working in the company. In a nutshell, share stories about who your organisation is and its beliefs!

Recruiting with LinkedIn

LinkedIn is probably the first social platform you think of when talking about social recruiting. As an international social network, LinkedIn can definitely help you reach new talent, so you don’t want to neglect it when implementing a social recruiting strategy. A lot of job seekers use the platform to network with people in the industry they’d like to find jobs in and to share their CV with professionals from their industry. That’s why LinkedIn is a great platform to share your jobs.

You actually have two options when sharing your jobs on Linkedin: publish it as a job (which is a paid option), or on your own profile/company page (for free!). When posting your jobs on your personal profile, they are automatically shared with your network, and every ‘Like’ or share helps you increase the reach of the job offer. LinkedIn is also a great platform to network — our advice is to work on building and growing your network, as this could help you reach more and more candidates!

Recruiting with Instagram

Over the years, we’ve come across many companies who have a great strategy when it comes to sharing their jobs on social media. People might think that Instagram isn’t the best platform to share job opportunities as the main goal of Instagram is to share photos, but bear in mind that Instagram is now the fastest-growing social media platform! Of course, it might not suit all types of jobs and positions, but it is definitely worth a shot.

The most used hashtags on Instagram to promote open vacancies are #hiringnow #werehiring #workwithus (we made a full list of hashtags that can be used on Instagram and Twitter down below!). As Instagram is more a visual platform, that’s how you should go about promoting your jobs. If you don’t have a designer that can create stunning visuals in the blink of an eye, don’t worry! There are plenty of great tools out there that don’t need any design skills to create beautiful branded images. Here at HireHive we love using Canva, but just do a quick Google search and you will find plenty of alternatives. That is the first way of sharing your jobs on Instagram.

Instagram recruiting best practice

The second way, that our lovely customers Linguatrip completely master, is to share your jobs in your Instagram stories. For those who may not be too familiar with this term, Instagram stories are images or short videos that you can share for people to see during 24 hours only. This requires a decent audience on your Instagram page as stories do not appear when searching Instagram for hashtags.

Why should you use Instagram stories instead of Instagram regular posts? Simply because they get a lot more reactions and shares than regular posts. You might be wondering how you could share your jobs this way? Well, Linguatrip record short videos of one of their team members describing the role, and candidates can just swipe up to have access to the application form and submit their CVs. Easy peasy! Instagram Stories can also be added as ‘Highlights’, which means that instead of disappearing after 24 hours, these stories will be saved on your Instagram profile, above your regular posts.

Linguatrip have a Highlight called ‘Work with us’ that allows candidates to find their jobs super easily:

Recruiting with Twitter

Recruiting using Twitter might seem tricky at first because of the limit of characters you are allowed to use, it is a great platform to share your jobs because sharing is pretty easy with the option to ‘Retweet’ only taking a few seconds. Twitter is also a great platform to reach potential candidates by using plenty of hashtags.

Here is a list of hashtags you can use on Twitter (and on Instagram!):

• #hiringnow
• #werehiring
• #workwithus
• #joinus
• #recruiting
• #hiringnow
• #tweetmyjobs
• #jobs

Along with these hashtags, you can try to find some that are specific to your industry or to your location. Certain actions and organisations have special hashtags. We’re mainly thinking about the #jobfairy hashtag that is extremely popular here in Ireland. If you are hiring people in Ireland, this is one you definitely need to check out. We recommend using a maximum of three hashtags in your tweet, as you definitely don’t want to have more hashtags than words!

We hope this post will help you to reach out to more candidates!

Originally published at hirehive.com on November 21, 2018.