How to master social recruiting to attract top talent.

Finding top talent for your open positions gets harder. In today’s competitive job market, you need a powerful strategy that goes beyond traditional recruitment methods. To connect with the right audience, social media channels have become indispensable. With content on social media, you can cover several stages of the recruiting process – from creating awareness for your employer brand to converting potential candidates to new employees. Make sure to have a thorough social media and employer brand strategy to leverage your social recruiting effectively.

With Adobe Express, you can create top-notch content for your social media channels to make your employer brand stand out. By building a brand kit for your employer branding and recruiting team, you can work together to design brilliant content and raise awareness for your company. Want to get started? Then dive into our guide to master social recruitment with Adobe Express.

What is social recruiting?

Everyone is on social media these days. It’s where brands meet people, not just as consumers but as potential candidates for their recruiting process as well. So, it makes sense to use social media as one part of your recruiting strategy. An active profile on social media helps you engage interested people and attract potential candidates for your job openings.

It’s important to understand that social recruitment is more than just posting open positions on your Instagram feed or your LinkedIn company page. To set your company and your employer brand apart from other companies, you need more engaging content to build a loyal community around your brand and attract the right candidates at the right time.

Deciding which social media platform is the best for your hiring strategy depends on where the people you want to attract spend their time. While TikTok is a platform that is popular among younger people, LinkedIn is more suitable for professionals. It can definitely be helpful to create content for more than just one platform to attract young talent, such as students or graduates. However, each target group spends their time on a different platform.

The benefits of social recruiting.

Setting up a strategy for social recruitment is important to attract the right talents at the right time and on the right platform. Don’t worry, it will be worthwhile, as content on social media has several benefits:

• Broad talent pool: Every social media network offers access to a broad audience worldwide. The number of users that you can reach by making use of the algorithm is unparalleled compared to the visitors you might reach with your website or on job portals. On social media platforms, you can reach candidates with various skill sets and from multiple industries.
• KPI measurement: Ever wondered how successful your recruiting strategy actually is? With social media content, you can measure different aspects of your employer branding. Read the comments below your posts to get insights on how your brand is perceived. Analyse if people are interested in your open job positions and see if they click on your links. Do people engage with your content and ask questions about your company and company culture? Social media is a perfect way to start a conversation with your audience – either directly by messaging and through comments or indirectly when they engage with your content by liking it.
• Employer branding: Speaking of company culture – on social media, you can showcase your employer brand by posting about the latest employee events, benefits, and other activities in your company. You can present jobs by interviewing employees. They can share their experience with the recruiting process or their projects on the job, making your employer brand that much more authentic.
• Connect to candidates: Through comments and messages, candidates can get in contact with your recruiters. They immediately will feel more connected to your company if they get fast answers to their questions and comments on social media. They won’t have to write a formal email or get in contact with you via phone. It’s less complicated and way more personalised.

How to master social recruiting.

As with every strategy, you’ll have to set goals for your social recruiting strategy, too. What do you want to achieve with social recruiting? Do you want to fill job roles in a specific department? Do you want to improve your employer branding and how potential candidates see your company as an employer? Do you want to increase the number of applications overall? Define these aspects of your strategy to measure how successful your measurements are. Here are some key factors you should include when setting up a social recruiting strategy:

1. Goals and metrics: What are your specific goals and how will you measure them along the way? Possible KPIs are engagement rate, including comments, likes, and shares, number of applications, time to hire, and quality of hires.
2. Platforms: Choose the right platform for your goals. LinkedIn is a suiting platform for hiring professionals and sharing company updates. Instagram is the go-to platform if you want to share your company culture and daily office life. Facebook is great for targeting local talents. On TikTok, you can post creative job content to appeal to younger talents.
3. Employer brand content: This is content that showcases your company culture and values. You can interview employees and showcase success stories. Show how you support diversity in your company. Accompany employees in their daily work, tell their stories, and explain their jobs.
4. Job posts: Promote open job positions with informative posts and include details such as job responsibilities, qualifications, and benefits. Be concise and answer questions in the comment section. Use a clear call-to-action, so potential candidates are encouraged to apply.
5. Content for passive candidates: Not all users are actively looking for a job. However, with thought leadership content and posts about industry trends, you’ll create brand awareness that generates interest. People will keep you in mind or will have a closer look at your company, your values, or even open job positions – and will turn from passive candidates into active candidates.
6. Targeted ads: If you want to reach specific audiences, use targeted ads. Platforms offer options to target users at a specific location, with specific job titles, or interests. With these options, you can boost your content and promote job offerings more effectively.
7. KPIs: Measure your activities with KPIs such as engagement rate or job applications to see if your posts are successful. Optimise your content or your strategy, if you see potential to reach more potential candidates.

If you want to learn more about social media marketing and how it can help you reach the right audiences, take a look at our blog article on social media marketing.

Optimise your social recruiting.

Check your KPIs regularly to see if your strategy reaches the right talents and if people engage with your content. If your content doesn’t work because the community doesn’t engage with it or you see that people don’t click on your job postings, you’ll need to optimise your social recruiting strategy. Here are some common challenges that you might face during your activities:

1. Low engagement rate: Your postings reach users, however, they don’t engage with your content following a low engagement rate? One reason might be that your content doesn’t have a clear call to action to engage with it. Try polls, live Q&A sessions, or simply ask your community which content they want to see.
2. Reaching candidates with the wrong skill set: You’re receiving applications, but the candidates don’t have the right skill set for your open job positions? Adjust your targeting when running ads. It might be helpful to try different targeting approaches and test which one works best for you. Combine these adjustments with improving your content and tailoring it to the audience you want to reach.
3. Time investment: Handling social recruitment can be a very challenging task, especially if you’re new to the game. Identify repetitive tasks, such as content scheduling for your social media challenges and use tools for it. With the Content Scheduler from Adobe Express, you can easily schedule your created content and structure your content ahead of time.
4. Keeping up with trends: Social media trends are here for a second and then gone forever. It’s important to keep up with them nevertheless because with them, you can leverage your social recruitment strategy and reach new audiences. Follow the social media profiles of different brands, creators, and industry leaders to stay on top of the game.

Create content for social recruiting with Adobe Express.

As we’ve learned, social media plays a crucial part in reaching the right audiences and nurturing audiences that might be passive candidates for now. No matter if active or passive candidates: your content should look professional and stand out from the numerous posts that users have in their feeds. With Adobe Express, you don’t have to be a graphic designer to achieve just that. With our professionally designed templates, you can start right now and adjust them to your needs in just a few steps:

1. Open Adobe Express.
2. Click on “social media” and choose the posting format that you want to use, for example, an Instagram carousel.
3. Browse through a wide variety of professionally designed templates. Choose the template which you like best and start making it your own.
4. Adjust the posting by adding photos to tell your employer branding story. You could show your offices, so candidates see what to expect when working at your company, or introduce a specific team with team photos.
5. Add texts for context to every carousel slide. Use the colours of your brand guidelines to be consistent in your social media profile.
6. You can add more elements, such as icons, shapes, and different backgrounds. Make sure to adjust them to your brand guidelines as well.
7. Once you’re happy with your design, you can download the posting or schedule it to your social media profile by using the Content Scheduler from Adobe Express.

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Good to know.

How do I use social media for recruiting?

Use social media for recruiting to reach the right audiences and increase applications for your open job positions. In comparison to career pages and job platforms, social media offers you the opportunity to showcase your company culture on a more personal and authentic basis. You can get in contact with potential candidates via comments or direct messages and thus engage active and passive candidates with your content.

What are the best practices for recruiting on social media?

Imagine what you want to see if you look for a company on Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn. Candidates like to get to know your company culture, so post pictures of employee events and their workday. Introduce teams of specific departments and what they’re working on. Schedule live Q&A sessions with a recruiter, so users can ask their questions on the recruiting journey. For more ideas, read our article above.

What’s a social media recruiting strategy?

Social recruiting is a complex part of your overall recruiting strategy. It should seamlessly integrate into it. Set up a social recruiting strategy by defining goals, what KPIs are important to measure success, and how you want to achieve your goals with content and community management. A concise strategy helps you measure how successful your activities are and to plan new posts. Find a detailed structure of a social recruiting strategy in our article above.

Can I use Adobe Express for free?

Yes, the basic plan of Adobe Express is free to use. It provides access to a variety of professionally designed templates for your designs and projects. You have access to basic photo editing tools, video editing, and text editing. Choose from a wide selection of free stock photos, icons, and design elements. If you want to use premium templates and more features such as the brand kit, you can always update to a paid plan.