Best Social Media for Hiring - Recruiter's Tips

As a recruiter, you certainly know that finding top talent can be challenging. Luckily, the digital era we are living in has brought about vast opportunities for facilitating the candidate-seeking process. 

With 91 percent of employers using social media for hiring, we have all the reasons to say that social networking is now officially part of a recruiter’s job. In this article, we explore how HR officers can use social media platforms for finding potential employees.

Is Your Company's Culture
Working Against You?

Find out how to improve your company
culture with our short quiz.

Take the Quiz

Which Social Media Are the Best for Hiring? 

First and foremost, it’s necessary to identify social media platforms where your target talent is active and ensure your company is present there.

LinkedIn

With 930 million members in more than 200 countries and a focus on business users, LinkedIn can be viewed as a huge hiring platform. With a broad network of professionals, it offers various recruiting tools and advertising options. It lets recruiters post job ads and source passive employment seekers, to name a few.

Facebook

Facebook is another great social media with vast talent-seeking opportunities. Companies can post free job listings and recruit talent through the platform’s business page. Although it’s not a dedicated professional site, its huge user count with enormous numbers of passive job seekers makes it a good place for talent hunting.

Twitter

With more than 360 million active users, Twitter is another useful tool for recruitment. It allows businesses to connect with a broader range of potential candidates and advertise job openings to a highly engaged audience. As an HR officer, you definitely should try out this platform to fast-track your hiring process.

Instagram 

Using Instagram as a hiring tool might seem unobvious at first sight. However, don’t dismiss this option. The platform is visually engaging and gives you a multitude of ways to present your company culture and values. Besides, there are swaths of tools like Instagram account search that can be successfully used for recruitment purposes.

Post Jobs, Evaluete Candidates,
and Hire the Best with Our
Applicant Tracking System

Learn More about Recruit

How Can a Recruiter Use Social Media in the Hiring Process?

Social media, when used effectively, can help recruiters during the pre-employment stage in many ways. 

Sourcing candidates

Recruiters can use social media to find potential job candidates through targeted searches, hashtags, and groups. 

For instance, platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook allow recruiters to search by job titles, locations, and industry-specific keywords, making the process of finding qualified candidates faster and more efficient.

Instagram provides the possibility to directly contact potential candidates through comments, direct messages, or posts. To find a specific candidate, you can search Instagram users by name. One of the platform’s undeniable advantages is that it’s widely used by younger people, which makes it ideal for recruiting candidates from millennial and Gen Z audiences. People from this aged group value authenticity, are interested in mission-driven companies and often show little trust to traditional job advertising.

Twitter has its own specific features and fortes. It’s good for engaging with candidates, increasing brand exposure, and sharing job opportunities. You can add hashtags like #jobsearch, #hiring, or #NowHiring in your job postings to reach a broader audience. Also, similarly to Instagram username search, you can make use of Twitter search for tracking job seekers — you can do it by using suitable keywords.

Take Advantage of E-Forms, Time-Off Tracking, and Other Powerful Features to Help Drive Your Bussines

Learn More about HRMS

Screening Candidates

Now that social media rules many aspects of our lives, it’s easy for recruiters to screen candidates by reviewing their online presence. HR officers can scan candidates’ public social media profiles for evidence of proven experience and accomplishments that are relevant to the job they are applying for.

Verifying Credentials

Recruiters can use social media to check credentials such as education, scientific degrees, employment history, or training by checking the candidate’s profiles for accuracy. LinkedIn is especially useful in this sense. 

Candidate Experience

Your company’s solid social media presence communicates a clear message to possible employees — it signals that their potential employer is reputable and professional. You can answer potential candidates’ queries and provide them with the necessary information about the company and the job via social media chats and messengers. Thus, you will show your interest to specific candidates and give them a positive experience of interacting with your company.

Download Our Free New Employee Orientation Checklist!

Download Now

Best Practices for Finding Top Talent through Social Media

As a recruiter, you need to know how to harness the power of social media for making the hiring process on your end smooth and seamless. Here are a couple of recommendations for you:

1. Make sure you’ve properly examined your preferred social media from the recruitment perspective. This includes exploring the platform’s focus, user demographics, available hiring tools, etc.

2. Optimize social media profiles, especially on LinkedIn, for recruitment purposes. This includes providing a clear job description, posting company behind-the-scenes stories, and promoting your culture through relevant videos and images.

3. Utilize social media recruiting tools such as LinkedIn Recruiter, Facebook Jobs, and Twitter Cards. They will help you target specific candidates who may be not following your company pages or job posting boards.

4. Draw the attention of potential candidates by including relevant information in the bio. You can simply write ‘We’re hiring’ and provide a link to the page with the job description.

5. Engage with potential candidates by commenting on their posts or sending personal messages. This kind of interaction can help bring your company name on the radar of possible hires.

6. Use social media for a stronger employer presence. It’s not uncommon for potential employees to check the socials of companies they are interested in working for. Social media gives great opportunities for expressing your company's mission, values, and culture.

7. Analyze your recruitment campaigns on social media. Tracking your job ad posts’ engagement rate and click-through rate as well as assessing whether the candidates appeared a good match will help you evaluate the overall efficiency of your campaigns and make adjustments, if needed. To track all these insights, consider using social media management software, which will simplify the process and provide comprehensive analytics.

Final Thoughts

In today’s world, the competition for top talent is fierce, to put it mildly. No wonder recruiters are constantly looking for new ways to facilitate the search for candidates and streamline hiring processes. 

Social media has long transformed into a huge labor market that holds vast opportunities for recruiters. They can examine candidates, build relationships, promote company culture, and reach out to top talent. 

The key to success is to identify which social media is the best in your particular case and to wisely utilize all the features presented by this platform to attract and engage skilled candidates.

Try Workmates Interactive Demo

Click trough it yourself with
interactive demo.

Try It Now

Author Bio:

This article is written by a marketing team member at HR Cloud. HR Cloud is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications & engagement, and rewards & recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.