How Recruiters Should Use Social Media to Attract Talent

Where do you spend most of your free time? Come on, don’t be shy, we all do it - on social media! Whether it is checking messages on WhatsApp, sharing pics on Instagram from our latest vacation, looking at what our friends and family are up to on Facebook, or sharing hilarious videos on X / Twitter, this is the way our digital lives are! Guess what - even the candidates you need to hire to close those open positions spend time on social media! In fact, 86 % of young job seekers use social media extensively in their job search! Makes sense though.

So, doesn’t it make sense that you should be engaging them on social media platforms? Why should you waste your time and effort on old-school cold-calling, emailing, or trying to activate passive candidates? Why should you list your job posts alongside thousands of other similar job posts, with nothing to set them apart? Why not attract candidates by changing the way you recruit?

In this article, you will learn immediately actionable tips from real examples of two of the biggest brands in the world: Disney and Google. You can build a great reputation as a future-ready recruiter by leveraging social media, and become a 10x recruiter so that you too can start wowing candidates and build a strong candidate pipeline that reaches worldwide with these practical tips right away!

If you are asking, “Why should I use social media for serious recruitment?” then we have not 1 or 2, but 5 hard hitting points for you!

With social media, you can show that you have a great company culture to attract candidates.Your whole company can re-share your job posts to increase their visibility. This will widen your candidate pipeline with both active & passive candidates, with a minimal impact on your hiring budget!

Every social media platform is targeted at different users. Youtube is for videos, X / Twitter is for microblogging, Instagram is for photos and short videos, and Facebook is for sharing life events. So, first , discuss with your team about which platform is aligned with your company brand, and which platform is more likely to have the kind of users who can become your ideal candidates.

Disney just keeps getting bigger & better with every acquisition they make! You can see how they keep their Facebook careers page aligned with the latest trends, just like Google. This tells us that Facebook careers pages are great to hit all the right spots in candidates’ minds and attract them into your pipeline. Here’s a bonus tip: always add the call-to-action “Tag someone you think might be perfect for this role” in your Facebook job posts to engage more people and broaden your candidate pipeline to include everyone!

If you need to hire millennials, you need to be where they are: on Instagram. Why? Because Instagram is the perfect example of a habit-forming product, as written in No Filter by Sarah Frier. See how Disney has not duplicated their Facebook page on Instagram - they use it to showcase great real-work-life photos, so that their target candidates get a feel of what it is like to work at Disney. On the opposite side, Google has recreated their Facebook posts on their Life at Google Instagram page. Experiment to see which approach works for you!

As we mentioned earlier, discuss with your hiring managers to figure out the best social platform to target the ideal candidates you need to hire. Note how Google and Disney’s X / Twitter bios redirect potential candidates to their career websites. What does this tell us? In a nutshell, you can be very descriptive on Facebook, visually engaging on Instagram, and very to-the-point on X / Twitter. Voila!

The new generation of job seekers expects you to seek them out on Special Interest User Groups, like Reddit, Stack Overflow, Github, and Sourceforge. They are very happily building code and experimenting with programming languages on these sites, waiting for an offer they cannot refuse. That is why future-ready recruiters need to use AI-based platforms that use tech to find highly skilled tech talent!

So, what do we know? Let’s face facts while we recap this chap - social media is where tech-savvy young talent spends a lot of time. It follows that you should first decide which platform suits you best in terms of attracting the ideal candidates. This includes specialized websites that are frequented by highly skilled tech talent. Learn from what industry leaders like Google and Disney are doing on SM. Thank you so much for reading! the next step towards becoming a 10x recruiter is to get certified in Instahyre Academy! Make sure you finish the free recruitment courses & share your recruiter certificate on your CV and here!