Social Media Recruiting: definition, benefits, and success factors in practice

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Contents

• What is Social Media Recruiting?
• The reach of social media
• Social Media Recruiting: reaching active and passive talent
• Why social job ads also reach passive candidates
• Audience-specific targeting in Social Media Recruiting
• Challenges when running a social job ad
• A social job ad has to stand out from the crowd
• Which paths lead to Social Media Recruiting success?
• Conclusion
• Frequently asked questions

TL;DR

Social Media Recruiting means hiring through social networks like Facebook and Instagram, where companies publish open roles as targeted job ads and reach both active and passive talent with precisely matched ads right in their newsfeed. Through audience-specific targeting, job ads are shown to exactly the right candidates. The challenge lies in the complex ad-manager setup. Recruiting software with AI analyzes your job postings automatically and turns them into ads that convert, with no marketing know-how required.

!Recruiting on social networks

Author: Dominik Becker · Published: September 29, 2021

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Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Social media has become a constant companion in daily life for most of us. In our newsfeeds we keep up with what family, friends, and acquaintances are doing. We read the news and follow our favorite brands. And more and more often, talent finds a new dream job on the "socials" too, even when they were not actively looking for one. It simply lands in their timeline. And so perfectly matched to their own interests that it is almost impossible not to click the apply button. That is the secret of Social Media Recruiting. How exactly does it work? We will tell you in this article.

What is Social Media Recruiting?

For anyone hiring, Social Media Recruiting, also called social recruiting, means finding staff through social networks like Facebook or Instagram. To do this, companies regularly publish open roles on the socials. And the trend is rising. Around six in ten employers are now active on social channels to win over new employees. That comes from the Recruiting Trends 2020 study by the University of Bamberg.

The importance of Social Media Recruiting has grown strongly in recent years, and for good reason. Because candidate acceptance is well above average. Most professionals (60 percent) appreciate being able to check out their job options in a low-effort way, for example while scrolling through their Facebook newsfeed. Between posts from friends or influencers, they now and then come across an interesting job posting that sparks their interest. You cannot get in touch with candidates in a simpler or more direct way.

The reach of social media

Another point in favor of Social Media Recruiting is the sheer number of candidates you reach on the networks. You are surely one of those people who keep glancing at their phone to catch up on news from Facebook or Insta, right? Many millions of people do exactly the same thing day after day. Among them are plenty of high-quality candidates who could be interesting for your company.

In recent years, social media usage has practically exploded, and the reach of these platforms is now enormous. Take a look at Facebook's global user numbers from the first quarter (Q1) of 2021:

• 1.8 billion people worldwide use Facebook every day.
• In Europe alone, one million daily users were added in Q1.
• Facebook's monthly user numbers grew by 50 million. Of those, 4 million in Europe.

In Germany alone, Facebook has 32 million users per month, closely followed by Instagram with 21 million monthly users. In a direct comparison, social media clearly leaves classic recruiting channels like job boards in the dust when it comes to reach. According to the statistics portal Statista, market leader StepStone attracts "only" 2.57 million users per month and is far from the numbers that Facebook and Instagram generate.

Social Media Recruiting: reaching active and passive talent

You might be thinking: "That comparison is unfair. After all, not everyone on Facebook and the like is actively looking for a new job, but on job portals they are." And you have hit the nail on the head, though in a different way than you might now think. Because the special thing about Social Media Recruiting is exactly that through social networks you reach not only active seekers but also so-called passive talent. You cannot reach them through classic job boards. Because they are not hanging around on StepStone, Monster, or Jobware.

So what is the deal with passive candidates? Well, studies like the Gallup Engagement Index 2021 keep confirming that most employees do not feel emotionally attached to their employer. According to the latest survey, that currently applies to more than two thirds (68 percent) of the workforce.

Why social job ads also reach passive candidates

Many of them are probably quietly open to new career opportunities, but they will not start a job search on their own for now. If, however, they come across a job posting on Insta or Facebook that fits them perfectly, it quickly triggers the reflex to click the apply button. As you can see, the potential you unlock through Social Media Recruiting is huge.

But what is the secret behind posting jobs on social media? Why do social media job ads reach both active and passive talent in the first place, and why so precisely? It comes down to the algorithm that Facebook or Instagram uses to show your job postings to your audience. For one thing, it does not distinguish whether a person is currently looking for a new job or not. So the job ad is shown to both active and passive seekers who match your audience.

!Audience-specific targeting in Social Media Recruiting

Audience-specific targeting in Social Media Recruiting

For another thing, when you run the job posting in the social media backend, the so-called ad manager, you can set in fine-grained detail who your job ad should reach. Experts call this targeting. You can choose between a wide range of parameters:

• Age
• Gender
• Level of education
• Occupation
• Interests
• Hobbies
• Location

But this by no means exhausts the options for running a job posting on the socials. You can also align your job ad very precisely with your audience's user behavior. For example, based on which company pages they visited before, which purchases they recently made, and much more.

Challenges when running a social job ad

On top of that, you can choose between different ad formats. Would you prefer an image ad that guides a potential applicant with a high-quality picture, a description text, and a link to a specific job posting on your career page? Or would you rather embed a recruiting video in your ad? You can also upload up to ten images, each linking to a different job posting.

Finally, you set the budget for your ads. Here you can define both a total budget and a daily budget. The daily budget states how much you want to spend per day. The total budget, by contrast, sets how high the costs should be for the entire duration of the ad run. You can also choose between the billing models CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions).

Phew! Quite a lot so far, right? If all these options are making your head spin, you are not alone. In fact, many recruiters feel the same way. The ad manager interface is so detailed that your colleagues, too, are often overwhelmed by it at first. Without expert knowledge, it is therefore very hard to set up social media ads successfully.

!Challenges when running a social job ad

A social job ad has to stand out from the crowd

And even when everything is right with the targeting settings, there are further risk factors that can keep a social media job posting from generating the hoped-for number of applications. For example, because it does not stand out from the crowd. And unfortunately that happens very easily.

You surely know from your own behavior how quickly 80, if not 90 percent of the content rushes past you while scrolling through social network newsfeeds. To keep your job posting from meeting the same fate, you need to communicate the most important facts with the right words in the right places and the right images. But that also takes a bit of instinct.

Which paths lead to Social Media Recruiting success?

You are surely wondering now: how do you still get to recruiting success? Here you have several options:

• You can build up social media know-how yourself together with your colleagues and attend various training courses. That is slow, expensive, and time-consuming, however.
• Or you can hire an external agency or a freelancer to run your Social Media Recruiting. Although that usually eats up a fair amount of budget too, and ads are often not steered as precisely as they could be. Because the agency simply does not know your company well enough to set the targeting as exactly as possible. The result: you pay good money, but there is still a lull in incoming applications.

But there is a third option that is both cost-friendly and extremely effective. This is where the software takes over the work. It creates the social media ads automatically and shows them precisely to your audience.

To do this, the software analyzes the content of your job posting:

• Which skills are you looking for?
• What background is desired, and are career changers an option too?
• Which industry is the role in?
• Which soft skills should a candidate bring to succeed in your company?

Based on this analysis, the AI creates a precisely matched ad on the social media channels of your choice. You will see: your time to hire simply melts away, and you get to know plenty of talent that fits your company perfectly.

Conclusion

Let us sum up once more: posting jobs on social media is an ideal addition to sourcing on other recruiting channels for anyone hiring, and an alternative to active sourcing. The benefits are clear:

• Thanks to targeting, an extremely audience-precise approach is possible.
• You reach not only active but also passive job seekers, unlocking new recruiting potential.
• The reach of the networks is second to none. Nowhere else can you reach more candidates at once with a single campaign than on social media.
• Thanks to detailed reporting, recruiters always see how many people the ad was shown to and how many of them clicked the job ad. That provides maximum transparency. And it helps you continuously improve your recruiting.

That said, Social Media Recruiting does require a certain instinct and marketing know-how from those hiring. It is not entirely easy to set the targeting algorithm precisely enough for a social media job posting to convert optimally. Still, there is a way to optimize job postings so that they reach your audience perfectly, and to do it fairly cost-effectively too.

Use the power of artificial intelligence for this and have the key features of your job postings read out automatically and packaged into effective ads. All you have to do is approve the finished ads. It does not get simpler or more effective than that!