Social Media Tips For Recruitment Agencies

Social media is one of the most powerful tools for instant communication, but so many recruitment agencies still don’t know how to use social media for recruitment.

When you’re on the lookout for new talent, if the first place you look isn’t LinkedIn, you could be missing out on a world of hidden gems waiting to be discovered.

It’s not all about LinkedIn though. Social media for recruitment agencies is about using a combination of every platform available to you, plus a little bit of savvy tech-tool-know-how to lasso those ideal candidates.

Tired of trying to shoehorn applicants into your vacancies? Sick of having your inbox packed with unsuitable candidates? Using social media to search for viable matches helps to cut out the confusion of a job searcher’s first contact with you.

This way, you end up with more control and loads more opportunity to take conversations further - if they’re right for your role.

Which Social Media Platforms Should You Use for Recruitment?

The realistic answer is: how much time have you got?

Your company might take its sweet time making sure its Instagram stories are carefully curated, for example, to the cost of its Facebook page. If you’ve made that editorial decision based on how your customers and clients use your channels, you know that’s the right choice for you.

However, if you’re only using certain platforms because they seem easier, or because you’ve always done it that way, you might not be showing your best side to your company’s talent of tomorrow.

Take a look at the platforms your competitors are using. How are their customers and clients engaging with their posts? Are they using channels you’ve never considered before?

Then take a look at your channels. The easiest way to do this is to use each platform’s own analytics dashboards. By looking at the statistics, you’ll be able to build up an accurate picture of the way your followers behave.

What if you don't have any followers? Well, you have to start somewhere, and now is the time!

Questions to ask while you’re scouring your analytics should include:

• Do you have to work hard to get anything back from your followers?
• Does it seem like they prefer photos and images to text?
• Are they more likely to click through to your website than stick around on your Facebook page?
• Are they more active at certain times of the day?

Use Discretion to Your Advantage

When using social media for recruitment agencies, it’s important to remember that your target audience might be more engaged at unusual times of the day. Unlike most of the brands they’ll be interacting with during the day, they might avoid following you so tell-tale job-hunting alerts don’t come up in their newsfeeds.

They might also limit their engagement with you during the day, so their colleagues don’t catch a glimpse of what they’re up to.

This might make it a little harder to improve engagement on all of your social media channels, but this could be a bonus: making discrete marketing or direct messaging a priority can improve your chances of connecting with a potential candidate, and ultimately boost your conversions.

Involve Your Colleagues

Recruiting the right people takes time and a lot of patience. It also relies on the connections you make with people who might be right for a different job somewhere in the future.

Your team is packed with people who’ve met great candidates and have links to some extremely valuable networking opportunities. Why not use them?

Posting jobs on social media is something everyone can do. By setting up team leader accounts, or even individual consultant accounts, everyone can work together to pass on leads and help each other to fill tough vacancies.

Putting together some basic training on how to use social media for recruitment agencies can open up new, exciting avenues to find fresh leads. It will also help the whole team understand how important this line of lead-generation and connection with candidates is to recruitment in the age of social media.

Individual accounts don’t have to be Twitter profiles, either. Think about how everybody in your team could run successful accounts on:

• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Snapchat
• Facebook
• WhatsApp groups

Save Time With Scheduling

In the past, you might have found social media outreach quite thirsty on the old staff resources. It’s true that each platform demands time and effort to work efficiently and bring in solid results.

There are certain things you can do to significantly reduce the amount of time spent each week on social media, however.

Create A Plan

All great things begin with a watertight plan.

Think about your social media recruitment strategy first in terms of yearly peaks and troughs, then gather info on all the times during each month you’ll need to push recruitment in certain areas.

For example - choosing to push a recruitment drive for a travel agency using ads on Instagram in the late summer months could grab the attention of anyone looking to change careers after the holiday season.

Drill Down

Now you have a yearly and monthly plan; it’s time to take it down to the weeks and days.

Map out the best times to post updates and job ads, and when to add new content to your website. Every day might be the same, or you might find that people are more likely to browse on Thursday afternoons and Tuesday evenings. Whatever you find out using analytics, put it to use here.

Decide On Your Content Approach

Now you know what you want to say and when you want to say it, how are you going to put your message across?

Think about the language you use, who your clients and customers are and the type of content they’ve responded well to in the past.

Sign Up for Some Time-Saving Tools

There are a number of fantastic time-saving tools you can use to help streamline your social media usage. Some can even help you with your reporting, automate your RTs and generally take the legwork out of social media. All you need to do is feed relevant content into the machine and respond to your followers.

Here are some of the most useful tools for social media out there right now:

HubSpot

If you’re considering overhauling your marketing processes, HubSpot is the social media platform for you.

It integrates with your inbound marketing strategy, allowing you to automatically share your content on social media when you publish it through the platform.

It’s also a CRM, so you can track how many contacts you gained from your social media posts.

Buffer

Buffer is a scheduling tool you can use to auto-post tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram posts, LinkedIn updates and more. You can load it up with content as often as you like, although most users prefer to get it all done in a couple of hours once a week.

Using Buffer also means you can create set times each day to post on, based on your traffic and analytics research. Then, all you need to do is click on the relevant edit box for the date and time slot you want et voilá: a foolproof scheduling system for outgoing posts.

IFTTT

If This Then That is a tool with millions of different ways to be useful.

You can run multiple mini codes related to your website, social media accounts and smart devices to auto-post, schedule and share across channels.

For example:

IF you update your Instagram, THEN also post it to your Twitter account as a native image post.IF you get an email attachment, THEN automatically save it to Google Drive.

IF you get tagged in a Facebook photo, THEN automatically save it to Google Photos.

There are thousands of ways to make IFTTT work for you, and it can even connect devices like Alexa to the software you use.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a time-saving - some would say life-saving - piece of software that allows you or several members of your team to be logged into multiple social media accounts at the same time, depending on the plan you subscribe to.

Having all your social media accounts lined up makes it simple to witness the conversations people are having about your brand, and it also helps to make sure you never miss a message or tag.

Round Team

Round Team is an app that uses multiple settings input by you to automatically share Twitter posts from trusted sources.

So what, right? Well, if you set up lists of trusted Twitter accounts from your account, it makes sharing their posts incredibly simple. For example, in recruitment, these accounts could be your recruitment team members’ work profiles, relevant job-seeking accounts or even local businesses.

Set it up based on the frequency of shares, word omissions, hashtags you want to share, the randomness of posts and even location-based indicators, and let it go. Now your Twitter account is full of useful tweets all the time - and you hardly had to do anything.

Get Ready to Learn From Your Mistakes

No social media strategy runs smoothly straight from the get-go. One of the most important things you’ll learn by using social media for recruitment agencies is how your candidates and applicants prefer to be contacted, and how they prefer to connect with you.

In the first few weeks or even months, you’ll be finding your way, figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

This is fine. It’s all part of the process.

Once you’ve settled into a strategy that works for you and your team, and you’ve set up all the apps that’ll help your accounts run smoothly and effectively, it’s easy to get complacent. That’s when the next stage of accidents and mistakes can occur.

Common mistakes in recruitment social media posts:

• Grammatical and spelling errors undermining the message
• Incorrect information due to copy and pasting from earlier posts
• Wrong dates or contact details added because of rushing or last-minute posts
• Posting job adverts on social media as a last-ditch option
• Losing steam and giving up

Social media communication should never be used as a final option to be used once all other avenues have been exhausted. You will only ever see instant results from a social media campaign if your platforms are well-established and have a vast audience of relevant, engaged followers.

In almost every case, social media for recruitment agencies requires a long-term commitment. Posting vacancies online should be treated as seriously as calling a warm lead directly. Only by using social media as one useful tool in your arsenal will you start to notice its value, so planning each post in conjunction with other methods is a great way to avoid having it flop on you.

For example:

1. Plan a job vacancy for Twitter and LinkedIn
2. Link it back to the website
3. Schedule in at least three more times with different wording
4. Create a blog post of eshot with details of this and similar roles to relevant candidates
5. A week before the closing date, contact all engaged parties directly

Be Persistent

If your social media strategy is going to plan, it’s natural that you’ll want to spend your valuable time doing something, anything, else. Don’t. Whether you’re reaching the #numbers you want or not, having your name out there sharing relevant, useful and gripping info on recruitment is priceless.

Just think. If you aren’t there, your competitor will be.

Social media is a rapidly changing world of constant chatter, but you can break through with consistent posts that grab your readers’ attention. It just takes a little time.

One last piece of advice: stop comparing your social media accounts to your competitors. So what if they got 256 likes for a photo of a new recruit? How many of those likes are staff accounts or dead leads?

Start looking at your platforms in terms of actual value - how many people connect directly with you, how many people you’ve found employment for and how they positively compliment your website and broader inbound marketing strategy.

Not everything is about metrics. Sometimes the connections you maintain are even more vital.