Social Recruiting
Find More Qualified Employees
Reaching Out to Candidates Through Social Recruiting
Has anyone ever sent you a connection request on LinkedIn and, after you accepted it, made you a job offer? That’s an example of social recruiting. Essentially, it refers to the process of recruiting employees through social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Social recruiting is a valuable way to target potential employees. We leverage the reach of these channels to reach out to prospective candidates in a targeted manner.
This term refers to a variety of measures in recruitment marketing. We compare the search for candidates to lead generation, since the goal is to attract new prospects with the aim of converting them—in our case, to find a new employee.
Benefits of Social Recruiting
Unlike traditional job postings, where you usually just send your resume to the HR manager, social recruiting aims to establish contact with the potential employee. The prospective candidate can respond directly to a job posting and ask questions. The HR representative responds easily and quickly. This creates an important connection between the two, which is crucial in later stages of the selection process. Are you wondering why?
Let’s assume the potential candidate has several job offers. By consistently and directly addressing her questions, he has already established a connection with her. If the candidate is allowed to choose her preferred job, she has already built an initial relationship with him, which is an important factor in her decision here. The candidate feels flattered to be headhunted when HR managers approach her without her having applied. This attention is perceived as very positive.
The challenge with social recruiting is reaching out to users in a systematic way. Unlike job platforms, users on social media are primarily there out of personal interest. The challenge for HR professionals, therefore, is to direct users’ interest toward job openings even though they’re browsing for a different reason.
1. This allows you to reach not only active applicants—who make up only 20% of the total—but also passive candidates.
These are the female candidates who do not apply on their own, but who are also not opposed to job offers.
2. Social recruiting allows you to shortlist suitable candidates.
3. They also generate a wide reach for your company.
4. You also measure the results of your efforts in detail. This enables targeted marketing.
Types of Social Recruiting
Direct (Active) Social Recruiting with LinkedIn and karriere.at
a) Manually via LinkedIn
An easy way to engage in social recruiting—even without a paid LinkedIn account—is to connect with people in your desired field or reach out to followers who work in the field where you’re looking to hire. When reaching out to new connections you don’t yet know, it’s best to address them formally (“Sie”) at first. According to a Google study, the fear of being perceived as spam is unfounded, provided you don’t send a generic message to everyone but instead address the person by name, for example. Over 50% of respondents even stated that they viewed it positively when approached by companies like yours via social media platforms such as LinkedIn for recruitment purposes.
b) Automated via LinkedIn
Social recruiting takes a lot of effort and time, so automate certain processes. Use marketing automation tools to automate lead generation on LinkedIn so you can expand your candidate sourcing beyond your current networks. Features include a live dashboard, reports and charts on lead generation campaigns, as well as specialized search filters.
A paid LinkedIn account allows you to narrow your search to a specific location and radius. Use filters such as industry, company size, job title, field of work, and years of experience to search for potential candidates.
Conversations and qualified leads are automatically generated for you based on user-defined criteria.
c) Partially automated via LinkedIn
Use partial automation to gain more control over your processes. For example, in Sales Navigator, you can set the system to target HTL graduates who completed their training 3 years ago. You can then reach out to these profiles manually.
d) Active Sourcing with karriere.at
To expand your sales team, you can use karriere.at for active sourcing. The various search filters in talent.cloud help you find suitable sales candidates who meet your requirements. An intelligent keyword database automatically expands your search to include similar keywords, alternative spellings, and gender variants. This ensures you get the best search results.
The “exact phrase” search helps you narrow your search to specific words and thus get precise results.
Just get in touch if you’ve found an interesting profile. Information such as the candidate’s name, current employer, and photo will not be visible to you until the candidate has approved it.
There is also the option of resume matching. This allows you to automatically view suggestions for resumes that match your job postings on karriere.at. It’s simple and happens every day!
Indirect (passive) social recruiting through ads on platforms
Have you tried using Facebook Ads as a social recruiting strategy to reach passive candidates? These days, you can use not only Google Ads but also Facebook Ads. Social recruiting in general—and Facebook recruiting in particular—are effective ways to reach passive candidates with new job opportunities. In the following paragraphs, you’ll learn what to keep in mind when creating Facebook Ads so you can attract the top candidates.
With currently 5.3 million users in Austria, a daily user login rate of approximately 72%, and a diverse range of professions represented, Facebook provides a solid foundation for social recruiting. Thanks to its extensive reach, it’s also quite possible to adapt proven social recruiting approaches to other regions and target groups.
Through targeted ads, Facebook quickly reaches a large number of candidates. In addition, you can precisely control who you want to reach. Here are some things to keep in mind when it comes to social recruiting:
Relevance of Personas
On Facebook, people are browsing in their free time, and irrelevant ads can be a nuisance. That’s why you should show potential customers only relevant ads. The advantage of Facebook ads is that they can be precisely targeted—for example, by location, interests, or “Likes.”
Take advantage of this opportunity, too. If you show a candidate a job ad that’s relevant to them, they’re more likely to click on it than if the job isn’t a good fit.
Clear Added Value
Make it immediately clear to the candidate what to expect. The candidate is browsing Facebook for personal reasons and is most likely not actively looking for a job. So convince them quickly to click on the job posting. Show them the added value of your organization right in the job ad. You need to offer the candidate a unique selling point (USP) that they don’t have at their current company.
Targeted Call to Action
Define a targeted CTA that appeals to the candidate. This call to action is essential to ensure that the candidate clicks on the job ad.
Compelling graphics and content
Tailor your graphics and content to your personas. The structure of Facebook ads is crucial in social recruiting, as they offer detailed filtering options that allow you to identify exactly the right candidates.
Tracking
Use a different tracking ID for each ad. This will help you determine which platform and which ad generated the most qualified candidates and is best suited for social recruiting.
Analysis is therefore just as important in social recruiting. This allows you to determine which platform has incurred which costs. Contact us to schedule a consultation!
Reach the Best Team Players Through Social Recruiting
Here’s what our plan for your success looks like:
For social recruiting, you need personas
To engage in social recruiting, you need to know who you want to target, how you want to reach them, and what kind of candidates you’re looking for to join your company. To do this, create personas if your company doesn’t already use them.
What is particularly important when creating personas for social recruiting? On the one hand, facts such as educational background, work experience, and qualifications play a significant role when creating a persona for your social recruiting efforts. On the other hand, information about hobbies and the generation (for example, Generation Y = Millennials) is also important for better understanding the needs and preferences of your target audience. This means you’re profiling people who are important to your company.
Depending on the area of responsibility and role, you can attract a potential employee with different tasks, or they must possess different qualities to be able to fulfill those tasks. If you’re looking for an assembly line worker, reliability is a very important quality. The same applies to a marketing employee. However, other qualities—such as creativity and the ability to think independently—are also essential for developing strategies.
Personas can therefore help you craft better job postings. Developing a persona is also crucial when using LinkedIn automation. After all, it’s possible to automate the search for candidates based on specific criteria. However, you need to know the characteristics of your personas in order to effectively target the right potential candidates.
Now it's up to you!
Get in touch with one of our specialists to talk about lead generation!
