Social Media Recruiting: 9 Best Practices - ApplicantStack

We’re in the middle of the 2020s now. Recruiting has changed a lot in just this millennium. For example, 25 years ago, social media didn’t exist. And social media has changed a lot over the course of its relatively short existence. Social media platforms aren’t just for making jokes, sharing cat videos and arguing about politics. If you’re not considering how you can use social media to improve your organization’s talent acquisition strategy, you might be missing out.

What Is Social Media Recruiting?

Social media recruiting is the act of looking for qualified talent on social media platforms. It’s a recruiting and hiring strategy that utilizes platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and TikTok, to find, attract and engage potential job candidates. A social media recruitment strategy might involve sharing a job posting, networking with professionals related to your field or researching potential candidates for current or future openings.

Benefits of Social Media Recruiting

Here are some significant advantages of utilizing a social media recruiting strategy:

• ​Passive candidate engagement: Social media recruitment is an excellent way to attract passive candidates. The perfect fit for your company might have a job right now, so they’re not on job boards. But they probably are on social media, and they don’t know how great it can be to work for your organization.
• ​Enhanced job visibility: Boosting your social media presence exposes your business to more people.
• ​Attract a different and younger demographic: Social media makes it easy to interact with specific communities.
• ​Great for creative jobs: YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest can help you find creative candidates whose work relates to your organization’s field.
• ​It’s a cost-effective way to attract talent: An effective social recruiting strategy doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.
• ​It helps build your brand: This is true in the traditional, consumer-centered concept of brand building, and it also helps establish your employer brand.

9 Social Media Best Practices

Clearly, there are many benefits of a social media recruitment plan. However, it has to be a good plan. If you rush into social media recruitment without establishing guidelines, your talent acquisition will suffer. Following best practices can increase your chances of successful recruitment on social media platforms.

Take advantage of these nine tips to refine and perfect your social media recruiting strategy:

Define Recruitment Goals Clearly

This tip works for any hiring process, from traditional recruiting to searching for job seekers on a social media platform. If you don’t know what you want to achieve with your talent acquisition strategy, you’re unlikely to succeed. This doesn’t just mean knowing what type of candidate you want, but also how you want your overall hiring strategy to work.

Consider these questions:

• ​Do you want to speed up the hiring process?
• ​Are you hoping to find different kinds of potential candidates?
• ​Do you want to save money?

Knowing the specific key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that matter most to your organization will help you assess the success of your social recruiting.

Establish Your KPIs and Metrics

If your company connects with a suitable candidate on a social platform, interviews them, hires them and they become a model employee, then great! Your social recruiting strategy has been successful in perhaps the most meaningful way. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.

Maybe there was a more efficient way of finding that candidate. Or maybe you only found them by happenstance, and you’re letting other qualified job seekers slip through the cracks. By examining your current recruitment process and looking for areas to improve, you can establish metrics to track through your new social recruiting strategy.

Some important recruitment KPIs to consider include:

• ​Time-to-hire
• ​Cost-per-hire
• ​Number of applicants
• ​Number of qualified applicants
• ​Employee retention
• ​Employee satisfaction

There are also less tangible factors to consider. For example, if you’re only attracting one kind of candidate, such as applicants from the same ethnic or socio-economic background or those with the same education or work experience, then perhaps you should tweak your talent acquisition approach. You might also modify your employer brand to appeal to a wider base of candidates.

Identify Your Target Audience

A social network can be a great place to engage with potential candidates from specific audiences. If you post an available position on a traditional job website, you really don’t know what kind of job applicant you’re going to get. You can have a target audience in mind and narrow down applications based on credentials, experience, interests or geography, but there isn’t a great way to find a specific audience.

If you want to reach prospective candidates of a similar age or with similar interests, you can do so on social media networks. You can post from your company’s social media account and use hashtags to attract potential hires. You can also use a specific social channel, such as a subreddit or page on Tumblr, to engage with people from a specific audience.

Social recruiting is also a great way to connect with passive job seekers who aren’t looking for a job but are part of the online communities with which you want to connect. They may see your job posting on a social media site or even see your insightful or funny post on a topic and become interested in working for your company.

Choose the Right Social Media Platforms

One platform can be very different from the next. You may find success by automatically posting the same content to all social media channels, but you’ll likely benefit from catering it to the audience on each platform.

There are obvious differences: Instagram and TikTok are much more visual-based while Bluesky and X are text-based. But there are more nuanced differences, too. LinkedIn is very professional and workplace-oriented, while Reddit is more casual, facilitating back-and-forth or long-form communication which can occasionally be hostile. Figuring out where your target audience likes to hang out will inform which platforms you should pursue.

Cultivate Relationships

You can find a great job seeker by simply posting about an available position on social media. But this isn’t where the true value of social recruiting lies. These platforms are, at their heart, about relationships and communication. You can stay in touch with people on social media much more naturally than by email, for example.

If you interview a candidate you really like but don’t choose to hire at the time, there’s value in staying in touch. You can email them out of the blue and ask how they are, or you can stay connected with them on social media. The latter is typically a more natural and convenient way to keep in touch.

Use Your Strategy To Attract Candidates and Build Your Brand

Social media marketing can help you build your company’s brand. It can also help you develop your employer brand. You can post about what it’s like to work at your organization, what your company values are and what the hiring process is like.

Become a Thought Leader

A thought leader is a person or brand whose ideas, insights and work are respected in a given field. Being a thought leader is often good for business. For example, if a marketing company establishes itself as one in digital advertising, companies will hire it to run their campaigns. But that company also becomes attractive to those seeking employment in the digital marketing space.

You can make your business a thought leader on social media. This can be through posts on LinkedIn explaining complex topics related to your sector, posting YouTube videos describing what your business does or engaging in Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions on Reddit, answering people’s questions.

Consider Social Media Advertising

It can take a long time to build a social media presence. While there are strategies that have worked, progress is rarely linear. You can do everything right and still not get your content or job postings in front of enough eyeballs.

Paid social media lets you cut to the front of the line, so to speak. It can be especially valuable when just beginning or refining your social recruiting efforts. It can also help you establish your business as a thought leader.

Measure, Analyze, Revise

Whatever tactics or strategies you implement, it’s critical to measure your success. Without establishing benchmarks and goals and regularly checking your progress, you won’t know how effective your social media recruitment efforts have been.

It’s wise to measure a mix of general social media metrics and hiring-specific KPIs. These might include impressions, followers and engagement on the one hand, and number of applicants, time-per-hire and continued communication with potential candidates on the other.

All Good Recruitment Strategies Need the Right Tools

Whether you choose to go all in on social media recruiting or prefer to use it judiciously on the periphery of your hiring plan, having the right hiring tools can make your strategy a success. ApplicantStack is an applicant tracking system and recruitment tool that makes it easy to post job listings, attract candidates and track all your applications in one spot. You can use it to create tasks for new hires, share and e-sign documents, set reminders and download reports on metrics and KPIs.

With a centralized New Hire Portal and time-saving templates, ApplicantStack can make it easy to engage, hire and onboard any candidates you find on social media, or anywhere else.