How to create a robust social recruiting strategy in 7 steps
Over the past decade, social media has increasingly become more and more important as part of an organization’s overall talent acquisition strategy.
This is because an effective recruitment approach requires that we meet our target talent audience where they’re already spending time online. According to research by the Global Web Index, people today are spending an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes on social media per day, with Millennials clocking in an average of two hours and 38 minutes daily, and Gen Z using social for two hours and 55 minutes. That’s a significant amount of down time spent on these apps!
So, if we want to get in front of the right candidates, we need to have a presence where they are. And candidates today are looking to social media to get info about job opportunities and an organization’s employee experience.
This is why a robust social recruiting strategy is key to competing for talent against other organizations — and this is even more so the case given that with the rise of remote work, you may be competing against more organizations than ever before! To help you stand out from the pack and attract talent effectively in the current climate, this blog covers seven steps for building your social recruiting strategy.
But first, before diving in, let’s cover exactly what social recruiting is and why your organization should take the time to focus resources here.
What is social recruiting?
Social recruiting is the practice of using social media to attract qualified candidates. Social recruiting today is about more than posting jobs on social media platforms, it also involves sharing your company’s employee value proposition (EVP) and culture with candidates. Social recruiting can involve a mix of paid ads as well as organic posting strategies.
Why is social recruiting important?
As mentioned before, social recruiting is more important to your recruiting strategy than ever before because this is where candidates are spending time online, and this is how they want to consume information about career opportunities. If your talent acquisition team isn’t active on social, you’ll be at a big disadvantage in comparison with your hiring competitors. Here are a few statistics that offer some additional insights here:
84% of companies use social media for recruiting purposes — which means your competition certainly has a presence there even if you don’t (SHRM)
68% of millennials visit an organization’s social media properties specifically to evaluate the organization’s employer brand (CareerArc)
Nearly half of all professionals (49%) are following companies on social media to learn about job opportunities (LinkedIn)
73% of millennials found their last job through social media (Aberdeen Group)
We hope these stats make it clear why it’s worth investing in your own social recruiting strategy… so let’s cover where to get started!
1. Conduct an audit of the current state of your social channels
To start off, you’ll want to have a baseline understanding of the current state of your social media activity. To do so, you’ll want to conduct an audit to look at your company’s presence across social platforms. Here are some questions you can ask yourself:
What channels are we currently actively posting to?
Do we have a separate channel for careers/corporate content?
What type of content are we posting?
How frequently are we posting?
What do our audience and follower numbers look like?
You can capture this information using the in-platform analytics of each social channel and by using Google Analytics. You can then compile all the information together in one spot, to view holistically at a glance. We tend to prefer using a PowerPoint or Google Slides deck so that we can pull in some of the visuals to really capture the full landscape.
Once you’ve collected your data, you can do a SWOT analysis to figure out what makes sense for your path forward. A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning technique used to identify your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
During this research phase, it’s also a great opportunity to conduct a hiring competitor scan, as you’ll want to make sure you’re differentiating yourself from other company’s social recruiting approaches. You can read more about how to conduct a hiring competitor scan in this blog: How to Conduct a Hiring Competitor Scan and Stand Out From the Crowd.
2. Set objectives and metrics
Next, you’ll want to establish objectives to ensure that your strategy is structured to meet your people goals. For example, do you want to increase employer brand awareness? Attract new leads for hard-to-fill roles? Really thinking through exactly what you’re aiming to get out of your social recruiting efforts is important because that will dictate many of the other choices you make — including which channels you use and what type of content you post.
Here are a few examples of metrics you might track on an ongoing basis, depending on your objectives:
Impressions, career site visits from social channels, and your follower count can help you to track employer brand awareness growth over time
Engagements, clicks, and UTM tracking can help you understand how well your content is actually resonating with your target audience
Increases in qualified applicants can show whether your content is attracting more candidates who meet a certain quality bar (because you don’t want to just attract a huge volume of candidates that aren’t the right fit!)
New leads in your talent community can show if your social efforts are helping you to pipeline more talent
Once you have identified your goals and measures of success, you’ll be able to better track and report on the ROI of your content strategy.
3. Determine your strategy for organic and paid social
Organic social media refers to content that you’re posting for free, without any ad spend behind it. Your audience in this case is seen as growing organically over time, rather than through paid means. This method works a bit like a slow cooker, in that you grow an audience and see results over time. In this way, organic social is great for building employer brand awareness and driving qualified applicants over a longer time period.
Paid social media, on the other hand, relies on sponsored content or advertising to boost results more quickly. While paid social can speed up your general efforts to build employer brand awareness, the paid approach is more typically used for more specific talent objectives like:
Driving qualified applicants to hard-to-fill roles
Creating buzz and building pipelines in a new geographic market
Attracting recruiting event attendees
If you’re new to social, you might want to start with organic posts until you’re comfortable and you’ve gained some initial analytics to see what’s working well for you.
Determine if organic social, paid social, or a combination of both is the best approach for your goals
From there, it’s time to think about which channels make sense for what you’re trying to achieve.
The channels you choose should be contingent on the audience you’re trying to reach. Think about which talent segments you’re targeting and where they hang out online. There’s existing research, such as the Stack Overflow Developer Survey and Universum data, that you can leverage to gain insights here. The aim though is to really think through candidate behaviour online and form your strategy around that.
After figuring out which channels you want to use, you’ll want to think about what posting frequency makes sense. Keep in mind that the recommendations you see online for posting best practices are typically made for marketing teams that have a lot of bandwidth. You don’t need to go from zero to hero overnight. Even posting twice per week is better than not participating in social at all, and then you can build up from there as you demonstrate the impact of your efforts and secure more resources.
4. Develop content series that communicate your EVP
From there, we get into the fun part: thinking through the actual content that you’ll be developing and pushing out on an ongoing basis!
A great approach for thinking about content is to develop some regular content series that you can create on an ongoing basis. This develops a sense of continuity for your followers and also helps you to come up with content ideas. Examples of content series might include: day in the life posts, team culture spotlights, diversity and inclusion features, etc.
These content series should tie back to your employee value proposition (EVP). For example, if one of your EVP pillars is growth and development, you can create a content series showcasing how team members have grown in their careers through your L&D programs or internal mobility opportunities. If you haven’t yet uncovered your EVP, take a look at our blog to get started as this should ideally be the precursor to determining your content approach for social.
Your EVP should come first since the aim of your social recruiting efforts (in part) should be to show candidates what life is like at your company so they can make an informed decision about whether your org is the right fit for them. This informed decision is key because it will help you to attract candidates who are likely to thrive in your unique work environment, thus increasing engagement and decreasing turnover.
To do so, your content should effectively work to bring your EVP to life over time by showcasing it in action. This is the “show don’t tell” approach, which is much more authentic than stating something explicitly.
You might also think about ways you can encourage employees to create their own content (aka employee generated content) that you can share or repost on your channels. If you can source and publish a blend of corporate-created content and authentic employee stories, you will have a robust feed in no time that gives candidates some great insights into why they should work with you!
5. Create your visual templates
Visuals are ultra important for many social media platforms. They help to increase visibility and attract better results. It’s important from a brand perspective that you choose visual templates for social media that align with your corporate brand; however, you can also work with marketing or/and an external partner to choose a few elements that might be unique to your people brand too.
The important part here though is that for initial visual direction and template choices, you do really need to partner up with someone with design expertise or you could risk damaging your brand externally. One great approach for talent teams though can be to have an expert develop some templates for you within Canva, and then you can go and just make easy adjustments on an ongoing basis.
6. Determine your processes and tools
We recommend using a content calendar to plan out your upcoming content (Source: HubSpot)
To make sure that your social recruiting efforts proceed as smoothly as possible, you’ll want to divvy up responsibilities and document your best practices so that roles are clear and you understand how the work will be conducted on an ongoing basis. A few things to think about here include:
Who is responsible for creating the content?
Who is responsible for approving the content?
What days and times are you going to post?
Who is responsible for posting?
How will you post content (ie. within a social platform directly or using a social media management tool like Buffer or Hootsuite)?
How are you going to plan out upcoming content? (Note: we recommend using a content calendar template, like this one.)
How will you identify which employees and leaders to feature and engage in your content
Think about what other teams you may need or want to get involved with over time. Typically getting marketing and communications on board is a great idea to ensure the calibre of content remains high. However, those teams often have other objectives — far removed from TA team objectives — so it can be challenging from a capacity standpoint to get their help sometimes.
This is why a lot of organizations end up working with an external partner (like The Employer Brand Shop 😊 ) for additional help to elevate their content while not overextending team capacity.
7. Go live and promote your social channels internally
At this point, you’ll want to present your full plan (developed from steps 1-6 above) to leadership and other stakeholders and make any necessary tweaks based on their feedback. From there, you’re ready to launch your channels or start posting employer brand content to pre-existing channels!
Once you start actively posting, you’ll also want to socialize your new content and communicate the initiative with the wider organization. You can do this in partnership with your communications team via internal communication channels like town halls , emails, and other primary channels you use. This way you can encourage employees to follow your accounts and get involved!
This can help promote employee advocacy (activities that employees do to advocate for your brand, like re-sharing your corporate social media posts or sharing their own employee-generated content) which is an effective way to stretch the reach of your content. Don’t worry — we’ll create another blog post in the future about how to create a solid employee advocacy program!
In the meantime, we hope this blog provided some concrete tips to help get you started on your social recruiting journey. Good luck and if you have questions along the way, our team is here to help!
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About The Employer Brand Shop
The Employer Brand Shop is a boutique recruitment marketing and employer brand agency located in Kitchener, Canada. Our team helps organizations around the world attract and engage talent using creative marketing strategies.