In 2020, it was estimated that over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide and this number is expected to rise to 4.41 billion by 2025. Businesses have taken advantage of the popularity of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more to promote their business and build their brands. 

Social media can also be a really useful tool for recruiting. Glassdoor shares that 79 percent of job seekers use social media when conducting their job search, and 83 percent of organizations are recruiting via social media.

If you’re not using social media as a hiring tool, you could be missing out on a lot of talent, but with so many different platforms, each with different features, it can be hard to know where to start. Let’s go over some of our biggest tips for recruiting on social media so that you can make the most of your business’s social media accounts and start attracting and hiring more talent. 

Inside this guide: 

Use social media to build your employer brand

When you think about recruiting on social media, the first thing to come to mind is probably using social platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to share your job postings. 

Social media is also the perfect place to show off your company’s values and culture and build a positive employer brand. This can make a huge impact on your recruitment, since many candidates take into consideration a business’s reputation when deciding whether or not to work for a company. 

There’s usually some overlap between your customers and your potential employees. Make sure to post consistently to various platforms and try to create content that’s so engaging that future job seekers will want to interact with it. On-brand content that connects with people and stands out can make active and passive job seekers excited when you do post your open jobs. 

Here are some ideas for content that can build your employer brand: 

• Share photos of your employees working together in the office (or over Zoom if you’re fully remote like we are!)
• Share employee testimonial videos.
• Share your industry expertise. 
• Share your company story; help your audience get to know your business and its mission. 

Know where your audience is

It’s good to make use of all the popular social media sites if you can, but depending on your company and the type of position you are hiring for, you might have better luck recruiting on some sites over others. The key thing here is to know what type of social media your target job seekers are using. 

Creating an Ideal Candidate Profile can help you figure out exactly what kind of job seekers you are looking for and give you a better idea of where those job seekers might be hanging out online. 

Chipotle, the popular restaurant chain, is a great example of this in action. In order to reach more Gen Z applicants, they began recruiting on the popular video sharing app TikTok. And other businesses, like the large hotel chain, Marriott, have separate recruiting accounts on Instagram to reach their target job seekers. 

Just because you might be unfamiliar with a social platform doesn’t mean your ideal candidates aren’t actively using it everyday. Be open to branching out and meeting those candidates where they are online. 

Encourage employees to share to their networks 

Social sharing is powerful and employee referrals can often lead to great hires. Get the best of both worlds by asking current employees to share any job openings with their network. This greatly expands your reach and continues building your brand as a great place to work. 

It’s important to make it easy for current employees to share your open jobs online. At CareerPlug, we’ve recently started creating eye-catching graphics for open jobs that look good on our feed and encourage employees to share them on their own. 

Use search features to find potential candidates 

For active recruiting you can use LinkedIn to post and share your jobs, but you can also take advantage of their advanced search features to find candidates that match the qualifications you’re looking for. You can search for candidates by skills, endorsements, job title, and other keywords. Some of LinkedIn’s features require an upgrade to a premium account, but many of the search features are free and can help you find profiles that meet your criteria. 

Using search features on social media can help you target individuals and engage with them one-to-one. You can also view the profiles of any applicants to get a better understanding of their past work experience and professional presence online. 

Use Facebook groups

In early 2022 Facebook announced that it was ending its jobs integrations affecting all applicant tracking systems, including CareerPlug. This means that you can no longer automatically share your open jobs from CareerPlug to the Facebook organic feed and your business profile. However, we still encourage clients to use Facebook to manually post jobs and to utilize Facebook groups to reach more applicants. 

In the “Groups” section of Facebook, just search “[Your City] jobs.” For example, here are the first few search results for the term “Portland jobs.”

Note that each group has several thousand members, making it a viable option for sourcing candidates who are active in their communities. These groups are also a great way to network with other local business owners and keep up with the local jobs landscape.

Measure results 

Like other key performance indicators (or KPIs) in your business, it’s important to keep track and analyze how your social media recruiting strategy is performing so that you can make adjustments as you go. Some things you will want to think about: 

• Traffic: How many of your applicants came from each social channel? 
• Conversions: How many views turned to applicants? How many applicants turned to interviews? 
• Engagement: Which posts are performing well? Which aren’t?  

Use an ATS to make social media recruiting easier  

Using an applicant tracking system (or ATS) like CareerPlug can help with some aspects of recruiting on social media. One way is by making it easier to share your job listings with your followers. Through CareerPlug’s software, you can automatically post open jobs to LinkedIn and share to Facebook and Twitter in just a few clicks. 

Within CareerPlug’s applicant tracking software, you can also analyze the performance of your different sources to learn whether the social media site to which you shared your job is producing any clicks and/or applicants. You can keep track of which applicants came from where and which of those turned into hires. 

Ready to get online? 

When it comes to recruiting, it’s important to have high quality applicants coming from many sources. Using social media as a recruiting tool can help you reach more applicants, while also building your employer brand and online presence. Encourage employees to share your job openings to expand your reach even further, and take advantage of search features on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to measure the results of your efforts and adjust your strategy accordingly. 

These steps can help social media recruiting work for your business and make a huge impact on your hiring process.