How Much Reliance Should You Be Placing on Social Media Recruiting?
Social media recruiting has surged in popularity in recent years, allowing recruiters to reach a broader audience, including passive candidates, and more effectively target certain demographics. You may have even noticed the increase in the use of social media for recruiting and employer brand building and wondered if it’s a worthwhile recruitment platform to add to your hiring toolkit.
The extent to which you should depend on social media recruitment depends on a variety of factors, including how strong your brand presence is on social media and what type of candidates you’re trying to attract. If you’re still unsure whether this is a recruitment platform to pursue, this article covers the primary things to consider when determining how much reliance to place on social media, plus an overview of what social media recruitment is and its potential benefits for your brand.
What Is Social Media Recruitment?
Social media recruiting involves using social media to attract, engage, and ultimately hire candidates. Activities include using social media to build an employer brand, headhunt, and promote job openings.
While the business-focused LinkedIn is the most favored platform for social media recruitment, other platforms like Facebook and Instagram can be used as well. The choice of platform generally depends on your recruitment goals and target audience, which is discussed more later in the article.
Primary benefits of using social media for recruitment include:
Increased visibility for job posts.
Improved targeting of certain demographics, like Millennials and Gen-Z.
Better engagement with candidate pools and the ability to build a strong and enticing employer brand.
Ability to target passive candidates who won’t be interacting with job boards and other recruiting platforms.
Social media recruiting focuses on promoting job openings, headhunting, and building an employer brand via social media.
How Much Should You Rely on Social Media for Recruiting?
Once you’ve understood the benefits to be gained from social media recruiting, it can be challenging to determine if you should incorporate it into your recruitment process. You may also be unsure of how much reliance needs to be placed on social media recruiting.
The following can help you determine how much of your recruitment plan should focus on social media and what you stand to gain from adding this high-engagement channel to your recruiting tool kit.
1. Recruitment Objectives
When determining how much emphasis to put on social media recruiting, you’ll need to consider your recruitment objectives. Are you implementing continuous recruitment? Or looking to give an existing job post a boost? In these cases, an emphasis on social media can help with brand and vacancy exposure.
If you’re searching for candidates for specialized roles, however, your focus should be posting openings on niche recruitment platforms and working with a boutique recruitment agency, such as Lynne Palmer in the publishing and medical communications niches. When looking for a specific type of candidate, incorporating LinkedIn or industry niche groups on social media platforms like Facebook into your recruiting strategy can be useful.
2. Target Audience
Looking at your target audience is another important part of determining how much value you will place on social media recruitment. Social media is a good medium for reaching a broad audience and younger demographics, making it an excellent platform for promoting entry-level and junior positions (generally anything needing under seven to 10 years of experience).
Once you have an outline of your target audience of candidates, also think about what specific platforms they are active on. While LinkedIn is a strong platform to focus on for almost all recruitment audiences, different audiences will likely favor Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Instagram. Some employers are even making use of TikTok when using social media recruiting to reach younger candidates.
Passive vs. Active Candidates
You will also want to keep in mind if you are primarily targeting an active or passive audience. If you’re looking to reach an audience of people actively looking for a new job, recruitment platforms are your best bet (which can include LinkedIn along with the likes of Indeed).
However, if you’re aiming to reach passive candidates, social media recruiting is a great option for getting vacancies in front of those who aren’t actively looking for new opportunities.
Social media is an excellent platform for targeting passive candidates and younger demographics.
3. Job Positions
Along with the target audience for your job and the niche, the exact position you’re hiring for will affect how much reliance you place on social media. Highly specialized and senior roles aren’t very well-suited to social media promotion and need a more targeted approach (although head-hunting via LinkedIn is a good method for discovering talented potential candidates). As mentioned, more entry-level or junior positions and lower-skilled positions can benefit from social media promotions.
4. Brand Presence
Companies that already have a strong online presence, especially on social media, can benefit from placing a good amount of effort into social media recruiting. You’ve most likely positioned yourself as an employer of choice through this strong online presence and using social media platforms to promote job openings will get instant interest. Having a good social media presence will also increase the chance of your job posts reaching non-followers who are interested in your niche.
Social media can additionally serve as a powerful tool to showcase company culture, values, and employee experiences. If you highlight these things on your account, candidates can instantly learn more about working for the organization after discovering the social media job ad, which may encourage more applications.
If your online presence is not as robust, social media posts about job openings may not gain as much attention. However, if you have a small but highly engaged audience, you may end up with fewer but more qualified applications sent in by those who are highly invested in your brand. If you have no social media presence or a small and low-engaged audience, don’t put much, if any, focus on social media recruitment.
No matter how strong your social media presence is, social media should complement other employer branding and recruitment efforts, including posting on job boards and attending industry events.
If you don’t have a strong social media presence, social media recruiting may not have a big impact.
5. Diversity and Inclusion
Interestingly, social media can be an effective platform for promoting diversity and inclusion initiatives. It allows you to reach a diverse audience and share content that highlights your commitment to creating an inclusive workplace.
If you want to promote diversity and inclusion, showing company culture and posting job openings on social media is a good idea. However, to have a highly inclusive recruiting process, ensure that your hiring strategy is not solely dependent on social media recruiting. This is because some demographics may be underrepresented on certain platforms.
6. Cost and Resources
The last thing to consider when deciding how much emphasis to put on social media recruiting is your budget. If you have a smaller budget, social media can be cost-effective compared to traditional recruiting methods.
However, it's also important to consider the resources available to you. It’s essential to evaluate the time required to manage and maintain an active social media presence. You may need a team member with the marketing skill to create a strong social media presence that will allow your job postings to reach more people and receive more applications.
Balancing social media with other channels may be necessary to optimize the recruitment budget and resources available if you don’t have a team member who can dedicate time to social media recruiting and employer brand building.
You will need to dedicate a good amount of time to creating and maintaining an engaged social media platform that will make recruitment a success.
Additional Considerations Regarding Social Media and Recruitment
Algorithm Changes
No matter how strong your social media presence is and how good a fit the platforms are for your target audience, algorithm changes can drastically affect your reach and visibility, potentially harming your social media recruitment campaigns. If you rely solely on social media or put a lot of your recruiting efforts toward social media, sudden algorithm changes could impact the effectiveness of campaigns in a way that wouldn’t be seen via other recruiting methods.
Those who do want to focus on social media recruiting need to keep on top of social media algorithm changes. Also understanding the methods needed to stay ahead of them makes it more likely that posts continue to be seen by your target audience.
Integration With Other Platforms
An integrated approach, combining social media with other recruitment platforms, can provide a more comprehensive recruiting strategy. Leveraging job boards, niche career websites, and applicant tracking systems, and working with recruitment agencies alongside social media creates a holistic recruitment ecosystem.
You may also want to include traditional methods like networking, headhunting (which can be done in part via LinkedIn), and using recruitment agencies. This comprehensive approach allows you to increase your reach, making it more likely that the perfect candidate will see the job posting and be encouraged to apply.
It's also essential to adopt an approach that takes the above categories into consideration. Certain roles may be promoted predominantly on social media, while others — especially senior positions — might not utilize social media or may be exclusively promoted on platforms like LinkedIn or within specialized social media groups, such as industry-specific Facebook groups.
Analytics and Metrics
Once you begin implementing social media recruiting, you need to make use of analytics tools to measure the effectiveness of your social media recruitment efforts. Metrics to monitor include engagement, reach, and conversion rates (for example, how many people clicked links to job postings and how many applied due to social media promotion).
It’s also a good idea to ask candidates to mention in their application where they saw the job posting first. This tactic can help you determine which platforms are bringing the most applicants in general, which channels provide the best candidates, and which platforms are preferred for different roles and experience levels.
In Conclusion
While social media is a valuable tool for recruitment, it's essential to strike a balance and consider the unique aspects of your organization and the positions you're looking to fill. A diversified recruitment strategy, that leverages the strengths of various platforms, will likely yield the best results in attracting a diverse and qualified candidate pool.
If you are considering implementingsocial media recruiting, keep the information in this article in mind when determining how much emphasis to put on it over other platforms. Even a small boost in social media recruitment could lead you to your next great hire!