Recruitment & Social Media: A Love story

You are scrolling on Instagram, LinkedIn, or even Facebook.

Here’s an ad.

Could I interest you in a pair of stylish sunglasses? Or perhaps this new sustainable, 100% bio coffee… No? What about a weekend off to a glamping spot away from the city, half the price? Still no?

Alright, last offer. Try something new, and boost your career, with all resources you need to succeed. Interested? Now, this is something…

Forget about traditional means of sourcing. I mean, as of today, they are still key in the recruitment processes. But we don’t post ads on the newspaper anymore, and we’re almost at the point where maybe we won’t be posting them on the companies’ recruitment section page either. I don’t quite believe in broad categorization terms. Still, the so-called “TikTok Generation”, or Gen-Z as it is widely accepted, will probably be expecting a job offer to come to them like any other product offer or service – via their screens on their hands while consuming content that they already want. Social Recruitment is a term that has become especially relevant in the most recent years.

Companies, and their recruitment teams, have now little choice other than to shift focus toward this new concept of Social Recruitment – that is a focus on the utilization of social media platforms specifically for the purpose of talent sourcing and acquisition. I’ll be sharing some food for thought that I collected from my journey at Prime Group and on Social media.

A recent study by careerarc concluded that 92% of employers are using social and professional networks to recruit new talent, and this is now on the top of tactics employed today for recruitment efforts. 82% of job seekers look for a new job on social media.

I’ll be sharing 4 main advantages and 4 main topics of concern that you should keep in mind whether you are already employing a social recruitment strategy in your company or not:

• At the moment, social media reach is unbeatable. You have access to a tremendous size user base that is already tagged and profiled for you (LinkedIn is the perfect example of this). Just pick the appropriate filters and you got yourself the next batch of candidates. Not only that, social media as means to propagate your message is also quite the advantage over traditional alternatives. You are even able to sponsor your message to ensure visibility and a better outcome. I’ll get back to this a bit later…

• Social media profiles, specifically on LinkedIn are comprehensive and offer plenty of information to advise the recruitment effort. Some of the information is provided by the user, and other is inferred by the platform. Either way, you have profiling tools at your disposal like never before.

• Your team members can have a role in the promotion of your opportunities on social media. This will help to spread the message and tap into different audiences that you otherwise wouldn’t reach.

• You can use the power of social media advertising to promote your opportunities. This means that with little investment you are able to boost the reach of your message or even create KPI-oriented campaigns to serve a more specific objective.

Now, joining the above advantages are some key points that we should address if we are to turn to social media as our main tool for recruitment:

• Not every social media platform will help your efforts in the same way. Instagram might not seem the perfect spot for talent hunting as LinkedIn, for example. The truth is that recruitment benefits a lot from an employer branding strategy. And when you combine it with a great content strategy, Instagram can help to build good brand awareness and reputation. YouTube is also a place to develop more infotainment content that will capture your audience into topics like culture, values, and company know-how.

• Make sure that your social media messaging builds the correct expectation. One of the main causes of early departure from recruitment processes comes from expectations not being met. Think about it: How would you feel if you booked a hotel room with a view of the sea only to arrive and actually be facing the rear parking lot. Expectations matter.

• Beware of the ethical grey areas when using social media. When people used to hand-deliver or email their CV, before social media profiles were a thing, the recruiter would only have that piece of information to go by before an actual interview. Now, you can access people’s lives just by tapping some buttons. What your candidate does on a Saturday night, where they spend their holidays, what’s their view on the current political hot topic… All this information, whether you like it or not, might build some bias.

• Social media platforms are closing the circle on tools and means that result in discrimination. For now, Meta has removed targeting options for ads that concern job opportunities. We might agree with the principle behind this, but ROI is permanently affected nonetheless. Removing demographical segmentation is highly damaging to recruitment strategies. LinkedIn still allows for a wide range of demographical targeting, albeit at a higher cost overall. It just doesn’t make sense to me, for example, why I am forced to include in my ad campaigns +65 age groups when in theory most people of that age are expected to be retired. Especially since this is possible in other types of ads, like products or services.

Social Recruitment is an everchanging effort as it is now connected with the mutating organism that social media already was. The Social Media Manager, concerned with the social recruitment strategy, will have to interact more and more with the HR Manager and align their goals, but most of all they must be willing to experiment and test new approaches.

And of course, don’t forget to follow our social media pages – we are on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and this is where we have been exploring and employing such social recruitment tactics (but most of all experimenting!). And feel free to interact with us if you have any questions!