Talent acquisition can happen on many online and offline platforms, and there’s no denying that creating an omnichannel strategy is probably the best way to maximize lead generation. But when it comes to attracting the best of the best, you have to spend time and resources mastering individual recruitment channels and lanes.
One of these is social media, given that all the leading platforms continue to grow in popularity across the globe every year. From the non-professional platforms like Instagram and TikTok to the specialized, professional ones like LinkedIn, you can find some of the most talented job-seekers on these networks.
The problem is, however, creating a social media strategy that will generate interest and buzz, drive talent to your business, and help you recruit the best of the best.
Let’s put that in the proper perspective and share the top lead generation tips that you can use to find and recruit talent on social media.
Top Benefits of Social Media Talent Acquisition
If you’re already posting your job openings on your site and across many online job boards, you might ask yourself, why should I bother with social media recruitment?
Well, there are several key benefits to this approach.
Segmentation and Personalization
Social media recruitment allows your team to get very granular with their approach, both in terms of posting and outreach–and communication in general. Depending on the positions you have open, you can run specialized posting campaigns and target the right demographic. Extensive knowledge of algorithms of social media, such as the Instagram algorithm, is extremely helpful.
This lets you boost engagement from the right audience types and personalize your messaging.
Put Yourself in Front of Your Audience
Social media is just another way to expand your talent pool, giving you more candidates to choose from while opening the door to a worldwide talent demographic.
The more social networks you’re present on, the wider the pool becomes, potentially granting you access to the people you would have otherwise missed entirely.
Find Out More About Your Prospects
Social media recruitment tends to fill in those gaps you’d typically find in resumes and applications in general. Reaching out to people on social media allows you to get to know them better and ascertain their culture and potential fit for your organization.
Less Recruitment Spend but Faster Acquisition
Brand building on social media is a powerful way to cut recruiting times and expenses because powerful brands attract candidates organically. What’s more, the top talent will feel more inclined to apply if they get to familiarize themselves with your brand and culture beforehand.
Now that you understand the benefits let’s move into the best practices you can use to dominate social media talent acquisition.
6 Tips to Find Talents on Social Media
1. Understand Different Social Channels
Without a doubt, you can use all of the social networks out there to find talented employees. It comes down to the resources you can devote to these networks and your brand’s identity and focus points.
For example, some brands can’t compete on non-professional networks simply because they operate in highly professional and culturally regulated industries. In other words, you might jeopardize your brand’s reputation if you try to advertise a job position for your law firm with a TikTok dance.
With that in mind, it’s important to choose the social networks that fit your brand and your industry and then follow up with market research to narrow down your approach. Find out where your ideal candidates reside online and what networks they interact with the most.
Know your brand’s voice and personality, and use your brand’s style guide to ensure consistency across all professional and non-professional platforms. This will be key, and we’ll talk more about branding in a bit.
2. Develop an Effective Outreach Strategy
You can divide social media recruiting into three categories:
- Organic posting
- Job ads
- Direct outreach
Organic posting is all about leveraging existing profiles in your organization to create and share posts on open positions. On the other hand, you also need to post professional job ads on LinkedIn in the Jobs section to gain visibility and tie your job posting to the platform.
But what about outreach?
Outreach messaging is one of the best ways to engage with prospects directly and get in touch with your ideal candidates before your competitors snatch them up. You can conduct outreach at scale as a part of LinkedIn automation, but it’s essential to personalize your messages and make them relevant to the specific talent groups you’re after.
You can use automation on LinkedIn to connect with the right people quickly and then follow up the invite with a personal opener to engage them and spark their interest. After that, you can follow up on the platform, or if they’ve already shared your email address with you, you can go into more detail via email.
3. Build a Talent-Focused Value Proposition
Speaking of personalization, whether you’re reaching out via direct messaging or creating recruitment-focused posts, you have to think about your brand’s unique value proposition (UVP).
This is not your customer-centric UVP but your UVP as an employer. Always remember that top talent out there are not just looking for a paycheck. Things like culture and fit, benefits and perks, and specific internal processes and policies, are at the top of their list of priorities when selecting potential employers.
But this is a good thing–it allows you to connect with your ideal applicants by letting them get to know your company, your culture, and the perks you offer.
Speaking of which, these are the things you should always start with when creating posts and job descriptions on social networks. Instead of focusing primarily on the role and its responsibilities or what you’re looking to get, focus on what your brand is about and what you have to offer as an organization.
This way, you will capture their attention faster and retain their attention throughout the post until they get to the part about what you’re looking for.
4. Expand Your Reach through Influencers
Influencers can be valuable tools for customer acquisition and retention, as well as brand building and reputation management.
But have you ever considered using influencers to boost your recruitment strategy on social media? The fact of the matter is that both macro and micro influencers can help you expand your reach and build up your employer brand as well as promote open roles more efficiently.
Macro influencers, or influencers with more than 100k followers, are generally good for all-purpose brand building, but they’re usually more expensive, and their audience is typically less engaged. This means that their CTAs might not lead to more clicks and traffic on your job posts.
On the other hand, micro-influencers are people with a following between 10k and 100k, making their reach weaker overall but their engagement higher. Micro-influencers tend to have a more active and devoted following, people who share their posts and interact with them regularly, which increases the chance that they’ll follow the influencer’s advice.
5. Create Steps for Your Follow-Up Strategy
When it comes to communicating with the best prospects on and off social media, you need to have a clear follow-up strategy in place.
This is important because you don’t want different team members to overlap with their messaging and because you want to move the prospects between communication channels. After all, you don’t want the communication to stay on the platform where they can see other job ads or get interested in one of your competitors.
With that in mind, you should find their email address as quickly as possible so that you can suggest moving your conversation there. You can use one of many robust email finder tools to bypass this completely and immediately follow up via email after they’ve responded to your initial message.
This is also great for those cold leads when people are just not checking their social inboxes or are apprehensive about talking to an unknown brand representative on socials. You’ll find this happening on professional networks like LinkedIn, where it’s best to approach people via email immediately, if possible.
6. Focus on Personal and Corporate Branding
On a final note, make sure that you’re devoting time to building your employer brand, as well as the personal brands of the decision-makers in your organization.
The top talent in any industry will not only want to connect with your corporate brand and do their research on it, but they’ll also want to get to know the people behind it. What’s more, building up the personal brands of your higher-ups is a great way to kick-start a personal outreach strategy.
This means you can send connection requests and cold messages to your ideal candidates from your CEO’s profile, for example, immediately giving weight to the message. Use this tactic to improve your open rates and boost engagement from your ideal prospects.
Over to You
Social media recruitment is one of the best ways to expand your brand’s reach, build engagement and buzz, and reach out to talented job-seekers worldwide. That said, it takes careful planning and consideration to create a winning talent acquisition strategy on all of your relevant channels.
Be sure to use these tips to leverage the full potential of social networks for talent recruitment and start bringing the right people to your brand in 2024 and beyond.
