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Recruiters on Social Media. Here's What You're Probably Doing Wrong
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Book a free demo91% of recruiters are using Social Media for recruitment, but only 18% can claim to be experts at it. There might be a couple of reasons.
Recruitment on social media is no different from a real-life networking event or a job fair that you go to. You set up your stall, print your brochures and to say who you are and explain why they should be interested in joining you, dress well, get some giveaways ready, and then wait for them to come to you.
And like a real-life networking event or job fair, everyone is desperate to hire some people, but just as you must do your homework on who you’re about to hire, so must future hirees. A fresh college graduate may be desperate for a job, but they will still make a decision based on who you are and what you’re saying.
Likewise, in the social media setting of, say, Linkedin, if you’re a recruitment business that only keeps putting up job posts, you may be coming on too strong.
Smaller HR agencies can face a bigger problem. A new Linkedin page would mean a smaller network of followers, meaning a smaller audience that sees new job posts on your feed. It’s like shouting into the wind. Sure if you get lucky, someone on the interwebs might come across your business page and then maybe share it, but the chances are slim.
You can adopt a better strategy for attracting candidates with social media. I’ll try to outline it in this article.
A healthy strategy for recruiters on social media
The strength of an HR agency is in the networks of its star recruiters. There is a gold mine available to recruiters if they play their cards right. To take advantage of your network of potential candidates, you want a strong presence on your Linkedin. What does that even mean?
Let’s break that down.
More transparency
Successful recruiters and recruitment agencies come across as professional and human. Too many times have candidates been lured into a job opening posted on the Linkedin feed by a recruiter, applied to it, and been pushed into an automated process, often resulting in no response. This can affect your network poorly in the long run.
What you should be focusing on, on your personal Linkedin profiles, is posting job updates that pertain to your business focus, that lead back to you personally. If it does push candidates into an automated process, make that clear beforehand. Transparency builds trust.
Be human
As recruiters, you want to show people that you’re human. You want the candidates to get the job as much as they want to get hired. You know what an ideal profile looks like, and you know what a bad profile looks like. Your Linkedin feed should be a reflection of all of these emotions and experience, so not only do they trust you and relate to you.
Show them you’re an expert
Your experience as a recruiter should shine through your social media presence. You’re an expert, and you often have to sift through CVs and profiles, conduct interviews. Every once in a while, share tips with candidates about how they should prepare for an interview, what they should wear, and what can help set them apart on paper and in person when they appear for an interview.
You can do this with a short video, a carousel with tips like this one. Or just write an article on Linkedin.
This makes you seem more three-dimensional than a recruiter who doesn’t care to engage their follower network on Linkedin.
A healthy strategy for HR agencies on social media
Staffing and recruitment agencies stand out on social media because of their expertise too. It’s not the number of jobs they share on a regular basis. It’s building a relationship of trust and professionalism with candidates and prospective clients.
Show your Expertise
Recruitment Agencies that understand the concepts of Employee Burnout, Career counseling, and Happiness on the job for instance show that they have a deep understanding of the people they hire, and the values they hold dear.
Linkedin is a great platform for this. HR Agencies can share their opinions alongside top tier articles such as this one on burnout on their channels. And then engage people in a discussion around such topics.
Engage with the recruiters
As mentioned above, an HR agency’s biggest resource is the network its recruiters have built. So instead of only posting about jobs, they should engage with the recruiters every now and then. Tag them in the posts, make a short video of them celebrating when successfully placing a candidate.
Smiling faces on a company’s page can be great for the HR Agency’s own employer brand too. But more importantly it can humanize the agency, make it more approachable and grow the company page’s following.
If they then post jobs on their feed, it will be seen by more people, and will attract better applicants who aspire to a similar work environment.
Share your recruiters posts from the company page to give their content a boost, as well as encourage them to share yours.
Holistic Strategy
Think about the whole lifecycle of your target audiences.
Businesses
Companies which are looking for recruiting agencies will need to know that:
- They require recruitment services
- You offer those services
- Are a trusted business in that field
This makes for at least 3 different streams of content targeting these three goals that you can create and post on your Linkedin business page. Providing value at each of these stages (as opposed to advertising your services) will make your business stand out, and get genuine interest from decision makers.
Candidates
Candidates that you’re looking to hire for yourself or for your clients need:
- To know what an ideal job can look like & awareness to know that they’re looking for such a job
- To know where they can find good resources around finding good jobs that match them (your business)
- A push, that ensures that with your business they’re in safe hands, and can apply with confidence that you offer a good match, an employer that is considerate etc.
Here again, in the first 2 phases, you can come up with more helpful content, articles, videos, infographics that you can share on your Linkedin business page. In the second and third phase, they’ll already have the realization that they need your services to go and check out the jobs that you have posted and hopefully then apply!