What is social recruiting?

What are the top social media networks used in social recruiting?

Most organisations use Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn in their social media recruitment strategy. And TikTok is growing in importance here as well.

However, social recruiting can also take place on blogs, online forums, and job board websites. It all depends on where you can proactively engage with the most high-quality candidates.

For example, when looking to recruit job candidates for technical roles, take advantage of the go-to social networks for developers like GitHub or Stack Overflow.

What are the benefits of social media recruiting?

Regardless of company size or status, social recruiting adds benefits to the overall recruitment process.

Here are a few of the ways recruiting on social platforms supports your recruiting efforts:

1. Establishes a strong employer brand

Social recruiting allows an organisation to create a unified brand message and amplify it across many social media platforms.

You can use your social media presence, to share a more personal side of your company and demonstrate what is valuable to your organisation.

Social media profiles that truly showcase your company culture help your company build and maintain a positive reputation.

2. Reach a wider talent pool and engage passive candidates

Many people use social channels for all their activities, including those in the professional realm. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon for candidates to source new opportunities from social media platforms, so companies need to be active where job seekers are present.

With social recruiting, you can also increase your reach to passive candidates as they browse social media sites in their free time. These potential candidates might not be actively looking for a job but might be interested in a new opportunity if the right one came along.

Getting your company and job ads in front of these users gives you a chance to attract them into your talent pool.

3. Referrals from employees

Everyone who follows your organisation on social media has the potential to bring more candidates into your network.

But employees are the most powerful in-house brand ambassadors. When employees share interesting posts or job openings from your company page, they send a strong, positive signal about working for your company.

4. Targeting

Another benefit of social recruiting is leveraging the tools available on each platform. Most social media platforms have advanced features that allow you to find or target specific demographics.

This helps narrow your searches for potential candidates to add to your watch list or successfully promote posts or ads to target audiences.

What are some social recruiting best practices?

Social recruiting is just that: social. For a social recruiting strategy to be successful, it has to include more than posting job ads to your social media profile pages.

Make sure you are consistently engaging your audience with content that encourages interaction by: 

• Posting questions or polls to start conversations
• Actively participating in relevant groups or starting groups yourself
• Establishing a plan for responding to messages and comments posted on your social media profile pages

How can you measure the success of your social recruiting strategy?

Some metrics you can use to analyse your social recruiting efforts:

• Referral traffic from your social media pages
• Number of followers
• Number of clicks
• Number of reactions to your posts (engagement)