What is a social media recruitment campaign?
Recruiting employees on social media means using social platforms to find and attract the best team players.
According to an Adweek report, 92 percent of recruiters use social media to find the right candidates. They leverage all the benefits of digital technology to find the best fit for the job.
Social media recruitment allows you to:
- Target candidates with specific skills in specific locations, locally or internationally;
- Perform A/B tests to see which type of posts perform best;
- Increase traffic to the careers of your website;
- Support job listings for specific positions in each market;
- Attract unsolicited applications;
- Adjust and optimize campaigns in real time;
- Measure performance to improve future recruitment campaigns.
Why make things complicated when you can keep it simple? Recruiting talent on social media allows you to fill positions quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively.
Why do you need it?
You’ve no doubt heard about the labour shortage happening right now. Close to 40 percent of SMEs in Canada are struggling to find new talent, and the situation isn’t expected to improve for at least a decade..
Fewer employees = stunted growth
The growth of many SMEs is in jeopardy right now. According to Pierre Cléroux, the vice president of research and chief economist of the BDC:
“Labour shortages are hampering the growth of many Canadian businesses. As a result, companies are being forced to refuse orders or delay deliveries.”
When labour is scarce, recruiting talent becomes just as important as acquiring new customers in a company’s survival.
Pas de talent – > diminution de la productivité et du rendement – > diminution de la capacité concurrentielle
Where does social media come into play?
In a stunted labour market, you need to treat recruiting new talent like a marketing campaign. You have to use every tool available to reach competent candidates, and competition between companies is fierce.
Qui dit marketing dit réseaux sociaux. Inclure ceux-ci dans sa stratégie de recrutement, c’est mettre toutes les chances de son côté pour se démarquer et attirer les candidats recherchés.
How does it work?
Like any good campaign, a social media recruitment campaign starts with strategic planning. Depending on the positions you need to fill, we evaluate the skills you’re looking for and determine the best platforms to attract qualified candidates.
The 5 steps to recruiting talent on social networks
- Identify your recruitment needs:
- Positions to be filled;
- Geographical scope;
- Demographic data.
- Develop a portrait of the target audiences that includes their interests, behaviours, needs and desires.
- Define a clear communication angle and the key messages to reach them.
- Directly target the desired candidates.
- Measure performance and optimize campaigns.
The right platforms and content
Contrary to popular belief, LinkedIn isn’t the only platform you can use to recruit fresh talent. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and SEM are also useful tools at your disposal. For example, if you’re looking to fill an executive or professional position, you can target directly on LinkedIn. Facebook is great for attracting applications for day labourer positions that are often hard to fill in certain regions. And Instagram is the platform of choice when it comes to reaching millennials.
Each platform has its own strengths and considerations. We use the specific functionalities of each to optimize posts and obtain the best results.
You can leverage different advertising formats to recruit with a targeted job offer, such as organic posts with a specific click word or social media ads.
For each campaign, we create and test a range of different posts. Then we focus on the top performing ones to maximize the return on investment of the ad buy.
Attract the best candidates for less
Whether you’re posting a classified ad in a newspaper or a job offer on specialized sites like Jobboom, Monster or Indeed, the principle remains the same. We post the offer and cross our fingers, hoping to find that rare pearl among all the candidates who apply.
But what if you could save time and money by attracting candidates with the right skills?
One of the biggest benefits of recruiting talent on social media is that you can precisely target your candidates based on both location and interest. That way, you receive more relevant applications from candidates with the right skills. Even if the job offer doesn’t match exactly what the candidate is looking for, you still generate traffic to the careers section of your site, helping build your company’s reputation as an employer.
The importance of establishing yourself as an employer brand
Beyond targeted recruitment campaigns, every company benefits by putting themselves in the candidates’ shoes and keeping the brand’s long-term image and reputation in mind.
Candidates are looking for a job that suits them. In fact, 83 percent of Canadian adults between the ages of 18 and 54 believe that the values of the organization they work for should reflect their own.
More and more companies are leveraging creativity and authenticity to build a strong employer brand that appeals to candidates before they even start looking for a job. Is your employer brand making an impact on social media? Is your employer brand making an impact on social media?
Social media + job sites = a successful recruitment campaign
Making the most of both social networks and job sites is a smart and effective strategy. Social media is a great place to post job listings that can also be found on other job sites or on your own platforms. Recruiting on social media is a useful addition to ad placements to boost the visibility of your offer and to set yourself apart from the competition.
On est aussi très réactifs. Social media also allows you to be responsive and puts you in the fast lane. If you’re looking to fill a position quickly, it’s a useful and powerful tool in your arsenal.
We leverage our social media savvy to achieve concrete results, helping our clients attract and recruit the very best candidates for every job.