Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Angeline Licerio. Her opinions are her own.
Social media has a significant role to play in the modern-day recruitment process. It allows both recruiters and applicants to find suitable prospects. Small to large-scale enterprises have now incorporated social media in their efforts to pool and hire highly-skilled and qualified applicants that match the requirements for the job opening.
If you’re not yet integrating social media efforts in your recruitment process, you’re missing out a lot. And you’re missing the good stuff. Of course, while social media offers a significant advantage for recruiters in terms of professional rebranding, there are also risks that may affect the recruitment process if social media is not used correctly and professionally.
Let’s look at how social media can make or break your recruitment strategy.
The Reality of Today’s Social Media
Social media is undoubtedly a double-edged sword used in different industries. From private manufacturing companies, retail stores, government offices, to schools or universities, each sector is utilizing social media to reach more clients or expand the business even more. Each industry employs social media to their advantage and that is what the recruitment sector should adopt.
A quick look at the statistics will help you to see why you can’t ignore the power of social media:
- Every day, 890 million people use Facebook
- Every month, 300 million people use Instagram
- Every month, 288 million people use Twitter
These social media platforms are sites where many users spend a significant time of their day. Thus, making social media a high starting point in the efforts to recruit is a good idea. Social media platforms serve as a great channel to communicate and deal with people in the same niche no matter how near or far they are.
Just like social media, the recruitment process as we know it has changed drastically. “Social Hiring”, the process of building relationships with potential employees through online or social media platforms, is a rising trend in the recruitment industry. Through social media platforms, companies can express why job seekers should consider applying and working for them. These platforms also allow recruiters to build the brand and message that fits the target community’s culture. Recruiters and company owners can encourage people to look at the job opportunities that are available within their companies through organic, boosted and even paid social media ads.
Utilizing Social Media to your Advantage in Recruitment
Social media can shorten the time that recruiters normally spend on headhunting and acquiring the best talents. With thousands of job openings for people with the same skills available online, recruiters need to be clever in finding the best talent.
Social media can help make your recruitment strategies become successful because:
- It builds your brand
Having a rock-solid social media brand is vital to attain overall success in the world of recruitment. Authentic branding is an excellent way to help your company sell your employer brand, a critical element of a recruitment strategy. With people, especially millennials, becoming more passionate about the causes they support, being the brand that can communicate directly how your company can make a difference in the world would surely set you apart from other companies and can help you win the war of talents.
- It encourages current employees to participate
An excellent recruitment campaign published in social media platforms should be backed by employees to be deemed successful. These employees serve as the real representatives of the company as they can share their experiences and positive views about the company, the policies, the other employees, and the management.
Through social media, employees can entice their friends and acquaintances to apply to job vacancies and speak about the benefits of working with their current employer. While you as a recruiter may decide whether or not to incentivize current employers for referrals, the fact that they can help make noise by ‘Sharing’, ‘Liking’, or ‘ReTweeting’ posts for job vacancies is enough to thank them. The recruitment strategy that involves current employees is cost-effective, and it saves recruiters’ time because candidates’ common questions can already be answered by the employees who shared the posts about the vacancy.
- It allows recruiters to create a compelling campaign to entice qualified job candidates
Recruitment teams are creative when it comes to creating compelling social media campaigns. These social media campaigns are effective in persuading potential applicants as it gives them a preview of what they can expect from the company.
The social media campaign can be a simple contest that may showcase the company values and work ethic of the employees. Or you can use the drive to give potential candidates a glimpse of what it feels like working for the company. The campaign must be fun, engaging, and relatable, even for those who are not part of the organization just yet.
- It showcases what happens behind the scene
If creating a compelling campaign gives a preview of how fun it is to work in your company, showcasing what happens behind the scenes or while the employees are at work is even better. With social media pages, you can show a meaningful manner of introducing your company and employees to potential applicants.
The behind-the-scenes don’t have to revolve around the office set up. It can also include company events, meetings, and other occasions where outsiders can take part in. Many companies are already doing it as it’s a useful tool to reach like-minded individuals who are interested in working with you.
Common Pitfalls of Using Social Media in the Recruitment Process
While an employer and recruiter who uses social media to find qualified applicants can effectively increase its candidate pool, not all job seekers use social media to their advantage. There’s still a percentage of qualified applicants who are not utilizing social media and prefer the traditional methods of applying for the job. Those at the lower level of the economy may not have the ability to access computers easily. Aside from that, older applicants may choose to avoid social media sites altogether.
Public social media pages offer employers a wide range of potentially useful information about applicants. Through these pages, recruiters can do a background check and determine whether a potential candidate posts racist or hateful comments or verify if he can be a team player. Although some social media platforms, most notably Facebook or Twitter, are not as formal as Hootsuite and similar pages, it will give recruiters a glance of the applicants’ attitude.
Social media is not the end-all and be-all of the recruitment processes. It provides excellent benefits and poses risks if not properly utilized. As a recruiter, it’s good to take advantage of these technological advancements not just to widen your applicant pool but to showcase your company’s new side.
The smartest recruitment strategy is to implement a social media integration over multiple channels to reach your target audience. Focus on the factors that are right for your industry and your brand. Last, track results and check how social media effectively helps your company’s recruitment process.
Author
Caitlin Mazur
Caitlin Mazur is a freelance writer at Zippia where she has written 140+ articles that have reached over 1 mil viewers as of June 2023. Caitlin is passionate about helping Zippia’s readers land the jobs of their dreams by offering content that discusses job-seeking advice based on experience and extensive research.
