In this third part of our five-part series on recruitment marketing, we’ll focus on the best practices for recruitment marketing using social media. The previous two parts focused on Recruitment Marketing: Definition and Strategy and Best Recruitment Marketing Software, Tools, and Platforms.
A large percentage of the U.S. workforce now lives out part of its life on social media. For those to whom people conducting their work business on their phones in public still seems alien, the times aren’t just a-changing, they have totally and completely changed. The social media applications most of use these days to stay in touch with family and friends and to go shopping is also – quite inevitably – going to be the site of much job seeking by candidates who have made a point to stay on top of the latest in social media trends, no matter their age or experience.
A company attempting to unleash a potent recruitment marketing campaign can sooner ignore social media than they can depend on the telegraph to get the same work done. But the rules of social media – how to appeal to top candidates, how to make them curious, draw them in, get them to apply – are many and in near-constant flux. Here are several basic good practices for leaning on social media during a recruitment marketing campaign.
Know Who Your Audience Is – If you’ve taken the steps to foster and maintain a good employer brand, then you should have already dealt with creating an ideal employee template, where you decide on the image of the perfect candidate for your company culture, and use that aggregated personality to market to. If you haven’t, the point is this: you’ve got to know just who you’re trying to reach with your recruitment marketing campaign, because determining who that is important for the next step, where you determine the best platforms to focus on for those ideal candidates to hear good things about your company.
Make Sure You’re Using the Right Platforms – Different people in different age groups and different areas tend to use prefer one social media platform over another for job searching. You can harvest this data during interviews with candidates by asking where it was that they saw your job listing. If you’re looking to find candidates in other countries, this is doubly important, as their favored social media job platforms can be radically different from domestic choices.
Keep the Focus on the Position – And be specific about job details. If you’re not specific enough, it may result in a lot of time wasted on unqualified applicants, or job seekers who couldn’t tell from the job posting whether the job was what they were looking for. And that’s wasted time you would be creating for your own organization as well as for the job seeker, who could potentially form a bad opinion of your company’s employer brand via the experience.
Make Compelling Employer Brand Content Available – Use your social media channels to get the word out on the compelling elements of your work culture. Your best bet here is content focusing on positive and specific examples of your employees’ experiences while working for your company.
Make It Personal – Beware of sounding anything like a hustle in your recruitment marketing campaign, and remind yourself as often as possible that younger job seekers have likely grown up with extremely sharpened defense mechanisms that protect them against perceived insincerity. The answer, of course, is to be sincere. Those employee stories mentioned above tend to come off as authentic. If you’ve done the work of growing a great employer brand, it won’t be hard to speak in an authentic voice, and even one that is identifiably belonging to your organization.
Make It Stand Out – The sky is the limit when it comes to how compellingly crafted and stylized your actual job postings can be. Taste is of course an issue, but a huge field of words, colors, and imagery are at your disposal when it comes to expertly crafting and designing the social media posts that will zero in on as you ideal candidates. If you’ve got a great company logo, interpolate that into the design.
Make Sure Posts Are Mobile-Friendly – Remember, they’re not just looking for work on social media, they’re likely doing it during the day on their phones. Active job seekers might check their preferred social media sources multiple times a day. You don’t want the job post you’ve designed to look great on a laptop but look too small or densely packed on the smaller screens we associate with mobile phones.
Get Your Team to Share Job Posts – It’s never going to be an employee’s favorite thing to promote your company on their social media accounts. People tend to use their accounts for very different reasons, however, and those who are willing will probably share a job post on the social media account they use most for business communications. Regardless, promoting your company isn’t always on the mind of your employees while they’re also trying to get their day-to-day jobs done for your organization, but there will always be a certain number that are all in and will post job-related information when asked nicely.
Keep The Experience Inviting From Beginning to End – In a search for top talent, the candidate is a customer. Treat them with as much thoughtfulness as you might a prized customer as they pass through the hiring process, and they’ll be sure to remember the consistency of the experience – whether they become eventual employees or not.
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Tomorrow, in part four of our five-part series on recruitment marketing, we’ll focus on several examples of great recruitment marketing campaigns. The previous two parts focused on Recruitment Marketing: Definition and Strategy and Best Recruitment Marketing Software, Tools, and Platforms.
We recently completed a 5-part series on employer branding. The parts of this series are available here: I: Employer Brand Definition, Strategy, & Benefits. II: 12 Examples of Great Employer Brands III: The Best Employer Branding Software Solutions. IV: New Employer Branding Ideas.V: Employer Brand vs Recruitment Marketing
