In a recent survey only 28% of in-house recruiters said social media was a key element of their recruitment process.

But why is this the case when there is an assortment of social media platforms available, shouting out to be used to attract and source candidates?

Today we’ve decided to focus on 3 of the most effective social media channels and explore the benefits of social recruitment.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become an essential platform for individuals and businesses to connect with others on a professional level and build relationships with people of interest. This means that it’s also a great device for sourcing new recruits, a pool of talent readily available. For recruiters LinkedIn is gold dust, helping them locate the ideal candidates for job openings.

A personal LinkedIn profile can be considered a virtual CV, allowing users to share their employment and educational history along with personal achievements and projects. There is also the opportunity for candidates to find your business and is therefore a great platform to advertise vacancies through a company profile. The benefit of this vast array of data is that your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) should be able to capture this information and automatically transfer all details from a candidate’s profile into your database, generating a CV PDF document.

Facebook

In recent years Facebook has made a shift from a personal networking site to becoming more business orientated. Despite a drop in users, Facebook is still considered the most popular social networking site and is a brilliant platform for promoting your organisation through a business page. Unlike LinkedIn, Facebook is not an obvious tool for sourcing candidates but instead could be utilised to share your employer brand and company culture, a way of attracting potential recruits and showing them why they should work for you.

You can use your Facebook business page to advertise job openings through a careers application and, using your recruitment software, you should be able to embed social media buttons within your job descriptions. This offers additional opportunities to promote your vacancies via Facebook which will open these up to a wider network of people.

Twitter

Twitter has become an integral part of the social media mix over the last few years and now plays a key role in aiding recruitment. Twitter is a great platform for encouraging engagement through its Like and Retweet tools and can open up your brand to a global audience. You can use your Twitter profile to share your company culture through written and visual posts as well as sharing news, promoting what you do and your expertise within your industry.

Twitter is an inexpensive way to promote job vacancies to a large audience and with Automatic Job Tweets you can save time by setting up your account to automatically tweet your jobs instead of having to schedule regular posts. Another benefit of promoting your vacancies on Twitter is that you can improve your search engine rankings making it easier for potential candidates to find your openings when searching.

Getting the best out of your social recruiting

Although it is important to remain consistent across all social media platforms, it is essential to remember that each social media channel targets a slightly different audience and serves a different purpose. Therefore, when planning social content make sure you focus on exactly who you are trying to reach out to. When you are looking for candidates think about where you are most likely to find your pool of talent. For example, is Facebook the correct place to be sharing detailed industry specific posts or would this content be better shared on LinkedIn where you are more likely to attract industry expects and those who work in this field?

Nonetheless, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are all great channels for advertising your job vacancies as they allow users to share posts with friends and colleagues, enable you to freely promote your job openings at little to no cost and can enhance candidate engagement and employer branding.

About the author

Tristan Potter

Tristan has a decade's worth of experience writing content and copy for organisations across Bristol and the Southwest of England. He has written on a diverse range of topics, including technology, philosophy, politics, and recruitment. His writing has appeared in The Drum, HR Grapevine, and The Guardian, among other publications. He joined Hireserve in March 2022.