Social media recruiting: The complete guide
The strategies and tactics you need to really succeed in recruiting on social media, without the overwhelm.
ON THIS PAGE:
- What is social media recruiting?
- How to set impactful social media recruiting goals
- How to build the business case for social media recruiting
- Social media recruiting stats every talent professional should know
- How to establish your social media presence for recruiting talent
- Social media recruiting: Why collaborate with marketing?
- Checklist: What you’ll need to establish a social media recruiting profile
What is social media recruiting?
Social media recruiting is the art and science of finding, attracting, engaging, and hiring job candidates through social media—and it has never been more essential. New social platforms are popping up every few years, and established social networks are growing more complex. Knowing what to do, and what not to do, can make or break your social media recruiting efforts.
Whether you hope to expand an existing program or are just getting started, this guide is meant to orient you to where you are on your roadmap, decide where you’re headed, and determine which step to take next.
The number one cause of death for any new endeavor: never starting.
This guide is for talent professionals like you who wisely suspect they can be reaching more talent, expanding employer brand awareness, and ultimately converting more quality candidates into applicants on social media. But just as wisely, you want to know what it’s really going to take before diving in.
This is the comprehensive primer on social media for busy talent acquisition employer branding pros who want to start reaching great talent on social media today—no social media marketing degree required.
But first, at this point, you’re probably wondering . . .
Why social recruiting is essential
If social media isn’t actively a part of your recruiting strategy, you’re missing out. Social media is far more than just another way to share your open jobs.
Social media recruiting is a powerful employer brand tool that can increase the effectiveness of all your recruiting efforts.
Here are just some of the many benefits of social media recruiting.
Gets better quality candidates
Passive candidates aren’t on job boards. But they are on social media (a logical deduction: 90.71% of mobile users are active on social media). With an attractive employer brand, you can catch the attention of candidates that aren’t even looking for a job.
Boosts the effectiveness of your job boards
Social recruiting doesn’t work in a vacuum. An effective social recruiting strategy increases the effects of your employer brand, which in turn increases the effects of all your recruiting efforts. Including job boards.
Builds an employer brand that can withstand even the craziest of changes
The Great Resignation, remote work, retention problems. It’s not easy being in the TA field now. But though the root causes of these challenges might change—from lack of diversity to a desire for remote work to a growing need for purpose—here’s what doesn’t: social media remains the best way to show candidates and employees that they can find what they’re looking for with you.
Accesses an ever-growing network FOR FREE
You don’t have to pay to access the power of social media. Well-crafted social media posts have a life of their own, encouraging shares and engagement that just keeps growing. For free.
Helps retention by making your employees feel seen and valued
There are so many ways social media can help boost retention. Like sharing employee spotlights that make employees feel valued. Or building an employer brand that makes them feel proud to be a part of it. Or showcasing the strides you’ve made in growing your diverse talent.
Attracts diverse talent
Like in storytelling, showing is always more effective than telling. A job post might tell your candidates that diverse talent is welcome, but social media will show them that.
Allows you to effortlessly shift messaging to address changing needs
Have a retention problem? Post employee spotlights. Have sudden vacancies? Post more job posts. Want to increase overall excitement in your brand? Share some great storytelling. Social media allows you to constantly shift to meet new priorities.
Helps you attract talent to “unattractive” industries
Some industries just don’t sound so exciting. And yet, we’ve helped multiple clients see incredible results in their traditionally “unattractive” industries. And with the right messaging, you can harness the power of social recruiting to do the same.
The other brands in your space are on social media
To stay on top of the ever-shifting challenges of today’s recruiting, social media recruiting is no longer optional.
And the other brands in your space know it.
It’s good news, in a way. You have a whole bunch of trailblazers to draw inspiration from as you chart your own social recruiting journey.
But it also means you can’t afford to snooze on this.
Which companies use social media in their recruiting efforts?
We can’t speak for all the brands in the world, but here are just some of our current and past clients who are on social media—and how we’ve helped them find success.
All set? Let’s go.
Chapter 1: How to set impactful social media recruiting goals
Most social media and social media recruiting guides immediately launch into the how-to’s, overlooking arguably the most important step in the process: goal setting, consensus building, and planning.
These steps are important for any new initiative, but they are critical for any effort involving social media—perhaps the most mysterious and misunderstood public medium today. Now, in order to create a successful route, you need to decide on the right destination. So, what are your goals for social media recruiting? And how do they align with the company’s overarching goals and initiatives?
Let’s build your business case for social media recruiting.
Building the business case
Whether you need leadership buy-in for this effort, or if you already have the green light to push forth, this exercise is crucial. Tying your efforts to business objectives will help align and unify your efforts towards a shared goal.
Reverse engineer your plan
Too often people begin at the starting line, eager to take their first step. In a way, that sounds intuitive. But when you think about it, how all of us navigate from point A to point B—when using a map or GPS—is by first specifying the destination.
Only after supplying this information can a map or tool assess how to make the journey.
For hiring and talent professionals, it comes down to one question:
What talent goals can you realistically achieve with social media recruiting?
Here are some results which our clients have credited to social media recruiting:
- Social media recruiting generated over 400k applicants in 12 months and the lowest cost per hire. Watch the Texas Roadhouse video testimonial.
- YOY 53% increase in hires through social media recruiting alone during the holiday hiring rush. Read the Ulta Beauty case study.
- Decreased time-to-fill, cost-per-hire and turnover in a highly competitive, highly regulated industry. Read the DRS GES Case Study.
- 85% retention rate for hires sourced from social media recruiting. Watch the Boston Market video testimonial.
These are just some of the many real-world examples and measurable results our clients have achieved from recruiting on social media. We’ve helped companies of many sizes and industries get more top applicants, hire smarter and faster, and be the brand people love.
So ask yourself: what are your goals? Do you want to increase retention? Find better quality candidates? Speed up the hiring process? Improve diversity in your applicant pool? Perhaps do it all? If there’s one thing our clients have proven, it’s that social media can achieve your goals.
You just need to decide what they are.
And if you’re struggling to figure that out, check out this page for some inspiration. It’s about the ways CareerArc can help you, but it can also serve as a good starting point for pinning down your overall social media recruiting goals.
Now that you know what’s possible, learn the remarkable stats around social media platforms, growing usage, and job seeker trends that help drive these results. Below are some compelling social media recruiting statistics you should know.
Social media recruiting stats every talent professional should know
Only a little over a decade ago, Facebook surpassed Myspace as the dominant social networking site. In that same year, 2007, Glassdoor was founded.
Fast forward to today when both Facebook and Glassdoor have evolved into go-to sites for job seekers to research a brand’s reputation.
Among Fortune 500 companies, only 4 lack a social media presence. 98% use LinkedIn, 91% use Twitter, 89% use Facebook, and 63% use Instagram.
(Source: UMass Dartmouth Research)
Facebook tops the list as the go-to site to research employer brand and reputation, followed by review sites like Glassdoor, then LinkedIn.
(Source: 2021 CareerArc Future of Recruiting Study)
Social media offers unprecedented potential for reach and connection with people all over the world—be they friends, family, customers, or candidates. If you’re in the business of people, social media is a necessary medium.
Consider these facts, stats, and demographic data on the top social media sites.
How do Americans use social media?
- 90% of Americans between 18 to 29 years old use social media. 82% of adults between 30-49 years old and 69% of adults between 50-65 years old are social media users.
- Facebook is the most popular social media site, with over 2.7 billion monthly active users worldwide. 69% of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups are Facebook users.
- The average American spends 2 hours and 6 minutes on social media every day.
- 92% percent of the world’s internet users now connecting via mobile devices, and 50% of mobile usage is on social media and communications apps.
- In 2020, 61% of job seekers increased their social media usage.
How do job seekers use social media?
- 73% of job seekers between the ages of 18 and 34 years old found their last job through a social media platform. (Source: Aberdeen Group)
- 86% percent of job seekers use social media in their job search.
- Job seekers rank social and professional networks as the most useful job search resource compared to job boards, job ads, employee referrals, recruiting agencies, and recruiting events. (Source: CareerArc Future of Recruiting Study)
- 68% of millennials visit a company’s social media properties specifically to evaluate an employer’s brand. (Source: CareerArc Employer Branding Study)
How do employers and recruiters use social media?
- 92% of companies use social and professional networks to recruit talent, ranking above employer referrals (87%), job boards (82%), and job ads (72%).
- The top reason cited by organizations for using social media to hire candidates? Recruiting passive job candidates (82%).
- Majority of employers reported social media recruiting was effective in decreasing time-to-fill: 71% reporting improvements in time-to-fill for non-management, salaried positions, and 67% reporting decreased time-to-fill for management positions (e.g. directors, managers).
- Social media and social media recruiting software top the list of increased and/or continued technology investments in 2021.
- 35% of employers increased their social media recruiting efforts in 2020.
As you can see, the question is no longer if, but how you are going to engage. From here, you can choose the path that fits you best:
If you’re already recruiting through social media and want to know how to enhance your program and get more tangible and measurable results, then take this short quiz to learn your social media recruiting score and receive tailored tips for how to improve.
If you want a refresher on the basics of social media account setup and launch, we recommend reviewing chapters 2, or you can skip to chapter 3 to ensure you’re up-to-date on today’s increasingly social and mobile job search experience and the latest best practices when recruiting via social media.
If you’re ready to learn how to launch a social media recruitment presence successfully, you’re in luck! That’s what the next chapter is all about.
Chapter 2: How to successfully launch a social media recruitment presence
Now for the fun part. You have a good idea of the resources that are required and outcomes to expect from social media recruiting. Time to start collecting assets, hit early wins and milestones, and make your presence known on social media.
But first, a check-in: Are you feeling a bit of nervous energy, a pinch of confusion, all mixed with excitement? This is common at the start of any project because it’s the moment you have the most unanswered questions, some of which you may have to answer to the best of your abilities just to be able to move forward. Questions like…
Wait. What is our brand?
Other familiar headscratchers include:
- Should we determine our Employer Value Proposition (EVP) before we start social media recruiting?
- What should we post to communicate that EVP?
- What tone should we convey that in?
These questions are of the soul searching kind, and while they are good questions that naturally pop up during this process, beware of the impulse to answer them immediately or “perfectly” at this stage.
Questions like these can spur a team into a thoughtful discussion, but they can also spiral groups into a larger, interdepartmental exercise that becomes bigger than the task at hand requires.
Blink once and half a month can pass by without much tangible progress made to establishing your social media properties.
Aim to navigate with an acceptable amount of uncertainty. Waiting for the “perfect” route may mean never moving at all.
To keep pushing a project forward, balancing the known and the unknown is key. Before you go down a long and winding road, we recommend the following:
- Determine what questions must be answered now, and what can wait.
- Look inward, and then outward. Do you have existing collateral on company values that can provide a direction?
- If you lack a point of reference, arrive at an acceptable answer that can help build consensus at the moment but leaves some room for revision or reinterpretation at a later point in time.
Prioritize a proof of concept
At the start of any new endeavor, you will have more questions than answers. We suggest working towards a proof of concept that can be improved upon over time. That proof of concept also serves as a tangible working concept that helps ground the more existential questions and topics related to brand identity.
In social media recruiting, that first proof of concept is establishing a social media property—the Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages through which you publish content, build community, and reach potential applicants.
You might have the autonomy to establish a company page right out of the gate, or you may decide to apply these best practices on your own social media account to first gauge the potential and achieve a viable proof of concept.
The next step is about helping you achieve this proof of concept thoughtfully and quickly so you can make the best first impression on social media both with your candidate community as well as with your internal stakeholders. We will cover what type of social media profiles to establish, the type of content to post, the recommended post times and frequencies, and more.
Still somewhat nervous, a pinch confused, and altogether excited? Great! You’re exactly where you need to be. On we go!
How to establish a strong social media recruiting presence
If you build it (and optimize it with keywords, geo-tags, and hashtags), they will come.
Facebook was founded in 2004. Three years later, they introduced brand pages from where companies can establish a social presence and engage directly with “fans,” or what we now call “followers.” Now there are over 60 million active company pages on Facebook.
Social media has given companies unprecedented opportunity to engage with the public more directly and more often. From that engagement, they can nurture a powerful community that spurs new customers and candidates alike.
But what if you don’t have that engaged following right now?
While building an active online community is something to aspire to, rest assured that it is still possible to reach the right candidates without an active social following at the start. This brings us to one of the biggest myths in social media recruiting.
Social media recruiting myth #1: You have to have a large online following or a recognizable brand to win at social media recruiting.
Social media recruiting truth: Social networks act as search engines. In one day, Twitter users log “hundreds of millions” of tweets, but perform 2 billion search queries. Searching and consuming content on Twitter is the most popular activity, and that content includes job postings.
The goal is to exist–to have a presence and share relevant content–on that network when candidates search for you, your jobs, your industry, or your relevant keywords and hashtags. This is a best practice you can employ from the start and is not dependent on your number of followers.
But before we get into the anatomy of a social media recruiting post, let’s first talk about a more fundamental question…
Where should you establish your social recruiting presence?
Selecting which social media sites to use for recruiting talent comes down to one core principle known by marketers, recruiters, and entertainers alike:
Know your audience.
Which social media platforms do people use most?
Outside of YouTube, the top social networking sites used by job seekers today are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
How diverse are these social media platforms?
Some of these networks serve some of the most diverse user populations online. According to Pew Research:
- Black, Hispanic, and white Americans have near equal representation on Facebook at about 70%.
- Facebook is as likely to be used by Americans between 18 and 27 years old as someone between 30 and 49 years old.
- On Instagram and Twitter, there is a larger share of Black and Hispanic Americans using these platforms compared to white Americans. About half of Hispanic (52%) and Black Americans (49%) say they use Instagram, while only 35% of white Americans who report the same.
Because of this, simply adding social media to your recruiting channel mix can enhance your diversity hiring and other DEI initiatives.
On which social networks are your talent spending their time?
Social media platforms can be overwhelming to navigate at first. There are so many people, with so much to say, all at once. How could you possibly know where and how to reach the right talent?
Social media can feel like an ocean, but don’t try to boil it! Know that there are ways to find the pockets of communities who engage with and follow brands, recruiters, and influential employees and brand advocates every day.
The sea of social media is made up of groups that gather and converse around topics and themes relevant to them. These topics and themes are often identifiable through a hashtag, which is used across all the social networking platforms mentioned.
We’ll cover hashtags in more detail in another guide, but for now let’s go through some fundamental questions you should be asking when learning about your audience.
There are three fundamental questions to consider when making this choice, in order of importance:
- Where are your candidates? Seems like a no-brainer, but really take a moment to consider where your candidates may be actively looking for jobs, as well as where they are passively spending their time online. Strive for early wins by considering which platform may serve candidates for (1) your most common requisitions and (2) your hardest-to-fill positions. Hiring and growing a candidate pool for either of these categories of positions will produce the best proof of concept for your overall social media recruiting effort.
- Where are your employees? If you don’t know where your candidates might be on social media, ask your employees—especially those who serve in the role of your most common open requisitions and your hardest-to-fill positions. Your employees play an important role within your social media recruiting efforts by acting as Brand Ambassadors that help spread your employment brand and opportunities. Knowing where they reside online is critical to the success of your social hiring initiative.
- Where is your company? By “where,” we mean where they may already have a presence, as well as “where” they are culturally as a company with adopting social media. If your company has a corporate Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn page, then the effort of expanding that online brand awareness is ideologically an easier pitch. But if your company is less familiar with one platform—especially if it is a platform that answers the prior two questions above—then this is your opportunity to use this guide to educate the key stakeholders to the platform’s potential for hiring and brand awareness.
While CareerArc publishes to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Glassdoor, this guide focuses on the three most commonly used social media sites employers use for social media recruiting: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Many companies build an online community across all three sites as one platform may supply more fitting candidates for one job type or location over another platform. If you have limited resources at the start, establish your presence on the social site which you’ve determined through research could serve the largest share, or the most in-demand role, of your candidate population.
Now that you have a sense of which platform you intend to plant your first flag, the next question is…
Which type of social media recruiting property should you establish?
When we say “types” of social media recruiting properties, we are referring to accounts that are specifically tailored to speak to a candidate or employee audience, as opposed to most corporate social accounts that were established to primarily reach a consumer audience.
Here are the types of social media accounts hiring teams typically establish that are separate from marketing-focused social media properties:
Company Pages, Career pages, jobs pages, & recruiter profiles
What is a company page or business page? A company page or business page is a branded social media page, property, or profile that serves as the primary profile for a particular brand on a given social media site. There are Facebook business pages, LinkedIn company pages, Twitter business accounts, and Instagram business accounts.
Outside of LinkedIn company pages, these business accounts and pages are typically established as consumer-facing properties that post content that speaks directly to and helps nurture a buyer audience. However, these channels can be powerful for social media recruiting as they often attract the most followers and can help you reach and activate candidates among that buyer community with posts about your open jobs, employer brand, and culture.
What is a career page? A Career Page is a separate social media page, property, tab, or profile founded for talent acquisition and retention purposes and typically posts employer branding content—company culture, employee events and perks, general job seeker tips, etc.—that speaks directly to potential candidates and current employees. Career pages often publish both employer brand posts and job posts, the two types of social media recruiting posts that we’ll cover in another page.
What is a jobs page? A jobs page is a social media page, property, tab, or profile founded primarily for talent acquisition and retention purposes. Here, you typically post job openings that speak directly to potential job candidates and current employees. These posts are often optimized for search and can even be indexed by search engines, like Google, so that they can display as Google Search results. See Nintendo’s Jobs Page on Twitter.
The beauty of variety
These separate social media recruiting properties afford HR teams a more dedicated channel to communicate employment brand and opportunities. They also provide a solution to hiring teams who may have limited collaboration or access to marketing-owned and -led social media accounts.
While having an independent social property for talent acquisition and branding has its benefits, we recommend forging a partnership with marketing as you launch your social media recruiting program. Marketing can serve as a powerful ally in this effort and can greatly benefit from recruiting and employer branding content and activity on social media.
Social media recruiting: Why collaborate with marketing?
Common goals and shared wins
HR and marketing have a lot to learn and gain from one another in the context of social media and social media recruiting. HR teams who are just starting out their social hiring initiatives have a lot to gain from the already established exposure that existing social media accounts are garnering. It is much easier to build upon an existing audience than to start completely from scratch.
These are quotes from marketers who ❤️ us:
Job posts are now one of our highest drivers of traffic; they consistently perform better than ads promoting products and services.
MANAGER OF CREATIVE SERVICES AND DESIGN, SECURITY PROVIDER WITH 3.5K+
Beyond optimizing the delivery of our jobs on social media, CareerArc also helps us reinforce our brand. As a marketer, I like being able to create, save, and schedule social media content all within one platform.
CLARE HOGANMARKETING COORDINATOR, HYDE ENGINEERING + CONSULTING
The marketing team, on the other hand, is always in search for more ways to increase overall engagement and traffic to social media sites. Often, what marketing teams come to discover is that company photos that highlight employees, chronicle company events, and show company culture are among the most popular pieces of content that attract likes, shares, and followers.
Marketing can also benefit from adjacent HR projects that invite participation from an employee base that may not be as active on corporate social media accounts.
If you focus the conversation around the potential successes HR and marketing can reach together, you’re more likely to form a powerful ally for a more formalized social media recruiting effort.
Other reasons to collaborate with marketing early in your planning stage include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Gain insight on marketing metrics such as impressions, engagement, clicks, and more, which you will soon be tracking.
- Build an alliance that helps provide marketing support for projects outside of social media recruiting, such as employer branding video production, launching candidate surveys, and more.
- Lead and educate on the impact of employer brand reputation on the consumer brand and the bottom line.
Another top reason to collaborate with marketing? They can help supply the assets and resources—such as logos, pre-approved images and copy, existing style and brand guidelines, and other necessities—for the journey ahead. (Trust us, you’ll want that.)
Checklist: What you’ll need to establish a social media recruiting profile
Below are the typical elements you will need to complete a social media profile or page.
Profile name and handles
Aim for a simple and straightforward name (also referred to as a “handle”) that is easy to understand, search, and remember.
For Twitter, companies should always claim their Twitter handle @[company name]. If that is already established by your company and you wish to launch an independent talent-focused account, the most common variations are @[company name]Careers or @[company name]Jobs. Learn more.
Naming your Facebook company page is a little different. Once you establish a page, you are first assigned a generic URL (e.g. http://www.facebook.com/pages/[company name]/857469375913?ref=ts). However, once you have just 25 followers, you will be able to assign a vanity URL. Learn more.
On LinkedIn, you can specify your unique URL as soon as you create a page. Learn more.
We take a closer look at each social network later in this guide, but since establishing your unique handle and URL on each platform is one of the first tasks to complete and should be done as soon as possible, we’ve provided the quick links below. Make sure to also have a valid work email address and designate a password to be shared with other members of the team.
Create a Twitter Profile >>
Create a LinkedIn Company Page >>
Create a Facebook Business Page >>
Images and logos
You will need an official company logo for a Career, Company, or Jobs page. A recruiter profile will of course require a profile picture of that individual. Social media sites also provide a secondary branding opportunity with a banner image that spans across the top of the page. Each social platform has specific image size requirements for any assets you upload, so be sure to note those as you request assets from your team.
Profile description and bio
You will need to develop copy for your profile description or bio. Each social media platform will have specific character limits for this section. But for now, what is most important to note is that these words, alongside your brand image, act as a welcome message. They are the first impression you will leave with anyone who visits your site.
When drafting your company profile and bio, we advise to first look at your existing assets and see if there is approved copy that you can pull from or reuse. But also, remember to think beyond the standard, filler text.
Do your research on companies in your space and employers who may be competing for similar talent. Observe how they summarize who they are and what details they choose to highlight in this limited space.
Make sure to also include a link in your bio to your career site or other social channels. Links serve as a “call-to-action” for candidates to click and learn more about your company, your values, and your open jobs.
Seed content and a realistic post schedule
In the first few weeks after you establish your social media profile, you want to also develop “seed content.” This content refers to the first few posts that you will be publishing in your feed soon after you claim your profile. These posts will welcome your first visitors, show them that your site is live and being managed, and will also serve as the first posts to gauge interest and test what content gets visitors clicking.
Getting a case of writer’s block? Or perhaps stage fright? Don’t worry: Both are very common before hitting “post” on your first social media update.But don’t overthink it. Instead, do your research.
See what companies in your space are doing. Evaluate both tone and messaging and see how yours compares side-by-side—an exercise your candidates may already be doing to you. Find what types of posts are getting engagement, and see where you might be able to add a different spin to something familiar.
For more ideas, we cover the best practices for social media recruiting content in the next chapter of this guide.
Approvals and guidelines
Depending on your corporate culture and structure, getting sign-off on any project can either be a roadblock or an opportunity to ally with other departments and leaders of your team.
Especially in highly regulated industries, social media is often perceived to be more of a potential liability than a benefit to the company. However, you would be surprised to learn that industries where you expect the most strict oversight are not only participating in social media recruiting, but they are leading by example. Check out how the National Security Agency has raised the bar for all social media recruiters.
Nevertheless, it is common for marketing, legal, and even fellow colleagues in HR or Talent Acquisition to have questions about how you and your employees will be interacting on social media.
The first step is to always determine which approvals, if any, are absolutely necessary to move the project forward.
If approvals are required and you anticipate questions that could challenge the launch of a social media recruiting program, we advise that you prepare to address these objections with a little bit of research.
Ask yourself:
- Do you have competitors that are already promoting jobs on social media?
- Does your HR or marketing team already have a social media guideline in place that you can easily apply or repurpose for your social media recruiting?
- If none exist, are there social media guidelines freely published by other companies from which you can expand on and adopt?
Lastly, sometimes you can find guidance from fellow colleagues and even vendors who are well-versed in launching and powering social media and social media recruiting efforts.
Learn how we partnered with this healthcare organization to successfully implement social media recruiting and boost their hiring efforts.
Detour: Keep it personal or professional?
Perhaps there is no other rule more advised, repeated, and abused on social media than this: Be authentic.
The virtue of being authentic on social media remains the ideal that many—including, and especially, companies—are expected to adopt.
While honesty is the best policy, remember that you do have a choice on how much you reveal and the tone in which you choose to communicate.
Tone: Personal v. professional
While maintaining professionalism is key, social media often gives organizations some license to relax their corporate tone, which is often welcomed and celebrated by many on social media.
Candidates will often come to your social media site in search of the more “human” and, well, “social” side of the brand that they may have already encountered on your website or careers page.
When done right, sharing this more personal side of your brand will garner one of the most highly coveted characteristics in a successful recruiting strategy—trust.
Whenever you find yourself evaluating whether your social media post or profile is too casual or too buttoned up, we find the “cocktail party” scenario applies to most situations:
Think of your social media platforms as an ongoing cocktail party where you and your audience are engaging in an endless series of conversations. What kind of cocktail party or mixer would your industry host? What kind of topics are fair game at these events, and what are definitely off limits? The key is to present topics that inspire thought, engagement, and (for those who are talented enough to pull it off) even laughter.
Lastly, see what tone has already been set by those in your space, and consider how you can add to, and also safely deviate from, the established norm so you can stand out at the party.
Profile: Personal v. professional
Aside from inquiring about the right tone and content, talent and recruiting professionals often ask whether they need to incorporate their own personal social media profile or establish a new professional profile.
To decide what’s most suitable for you, consider first the followers you currently have on your personal account. Would your followers find your recruiting content engaging or worthy of sharing with their own network? If so, leveraging your existing profile and earned network of followers may help your social media recruiting efforts, especially as you establish a presence.
However, if your followers on your personal profile are mainly family and friends in which you would refrain from sharing job seeker content and job information, then you may want to establish a separate profile to support your brand’s social efforts.
With that said, many talent professionals find that job- and employee-related content often generates the most engagement from their community.
Why? We believe it’s because content that features your employees and your open jobs are typically viewed as positive. Employer brand posts that celebrate as well as tag or mention employees often gartner a lot of support and attention from those employees’ networks. Jobs can also generate a like or share from your network who want to pass along the opportunity to their network.,
Now, the way in which you share those opportunities can increase the engagement on your post and overall page even more, and lead to greater brand awareness both within and beyond your existing social network.
For example, phrasing your post as a question such as “Can you recommend anyone for this job?”, as in the example above, can help generate more reactions, and even referrals, from your community.
Variety. Frequency. Consistency.
As a talent professional, adding job-related content to your personal and professional social feed is not only welcomed, but expected. The issue is not whether you share this content at all, but more so what frequency in which you should share it so as to not exhaust your network with job posts.
This is why content variety is key. Crafting content beyond the job posting can add dimension to your content stream, attract different members in your networks, and nurture trust in you and your brand.
Next, we’ll discuss the best practices in creating quality content—both social job posts and employer brand posts—that are optimized to reach more high-quality candidates, engage new audiences, and expand your community on social media.