In a recent post, we discussed why you should supplement recruitment marketing with social.
While you can read that post in its entirety in the link above, the gist is this: Social media presents a powerful tool for recruiters, but it doesn’t necessarily deserve the lion’s share of your recruitment marketing budget.
So then, how should recruiters leverage this recruitment marketing tool?
As we’ve mentioned before, recruitment marketing is a holistic approach to talent acquisition. It involves leveraging a number of marketing practices for recruitment purposes, such as paid advertising (i.e. advertising jobs online), as well as social media.
Therefore, in this post we’ll examine how you can best leverage these platforms without using any of your recruitment advertising budget. With that said, here are three ways to supplement your recruitment marketing strategy with social media:
- Employer Branding: Talent acquisition professionals need their approach to recruitment to reflect a marketer’s approach to “selling” to their consumer-base, because today’s recruitment marketplace is just as talent-driven as the product/service marketplace is customer-driven. Simply put, job seekers have a seemingly endless list of opportunities available to them. Employer branding, then, is one way to attract top candidates and have them wanting to work at your company rather than a competitor’s. Recruiters can leverage social media in a similar way marketers do to promote their product or brand. By posting about your company culture, corporate social responsibility initiatives and even original content, you give a personality to your organization that allows candidates to better identify with you.
- Referrals: Employee referral programs are a part of any good recruitment marketing strategy, and social media can help amplify this important tool. If your employees don’t know someone personally for an open job, chances are they know somebody who knows somebody. This six degrees of candidate separation is embodied by social media. Simply encouraging your employees to post about open jobs on their personal social media accounts will open up your applicant pool to hundreds or thousands of potential candidates who may not see your job advertisements otherwise.
- Active sourcing: Sometimes you can’t just sit back and wait for the applicants to come in. Certain hard-to-fill positions require some active sourcing to go out and find the best candidates. When actively sourcing talent, social media (especially LinkedIn) can be a tremendous tool. For instance, LinkedIn is a lot like “the Google for people”. Recruiters can use LinkedIn to search for people based on their qualifications, skill sets or even by place of previous or current employment. While this process is time consuming and difficult at times, it could lead you to your ideal candidate, whom you can then recruit for your open role.
When it comes to putting together a comprehensive recruitment marketing strategy, social is an important component to consider. While it may not be a best practice to put a ton of budget behind advertising jobs on social media, it can definitely help in this supplementary role.
Want more recruitment marketing tips, tricks, news and insights like this? Sign up for our newsletter today and get them delivered directly to your inbox.
