How to Use Social Media to Recruit the Best Talent

The fact is that millions of people use social media platforms daily. According to studies, 7 in 10 adults in the United States routinely use at least one of the many social media platforms, and now around 70% of those seeking employees and talent use social media to screen their potential hires.

Are you using social media as a tool to benefit your business in the area of recruitment? There are many avenues to finding great talent for your company. You can work with recruiters to locate the best and brightest, or perhaps turn to the job posting and hiring sites, and while those are still very effective options, social media is as well.

Using social media as a tool for recruitment not only supplements many of the established methods but has a surprising amount of upside and potential in its own right. Here are some tips to help you to use social media to recruit the best talent.

Make them feel the FOMO

One way to use social media to acquire the best talent is to make them want to work for your company. That can be achieved by using something called talent branding. This just means how your company is represented on social media and what it makes people feel.

Your company’s mission, the culture of your team and your personal vision are something that you should express and promote on social media. The goal is that users who may also be the talent you’re looking for will want to be a part of what you're doing. Talent branding has had very successful results for many high-profile companies.

One way to create a successful talent brand is to use your employees to reach future team members. Encouraging your employees to blog or to post on social media platforms will attract others by showing them the culture of your company. Who better to share how great it is to be a part of your team?

Creating blog content or posting photos from company events is also a great way to allow others to peek behind the curtain, so next time you do a company bowling night or have a particularly lively office party, hashtag it with photos. Show the talented potential team members who happen to be scrolling their feed, why your company is the place to be.

Personality plus

Using social media to find the right potential hires is beneficial in many ways. First of all, using social media allows you to attract and recruit from an immense pool of talented people. It also allows you to hone in on the right fit for your business, something that wouldn’t have been possible in past years.

Social media should never be used to screen potential hires based on race, sexual orientation or identification, religious practices or political leanings, but it can give you insights that you can use to identify if a candidate might be a good fit or not.

Social media posts live on in perpetuity, and using that knowledge is a great way to see what kind of posts have been made by your potential hire. If they’ve ever posted or have a tendency to post things that may be seen as offensive, insensitive or inappropriate, it could adversely affect your company in the future. However, you can also discover some positive things.

Through a potential hire’s social media presence, you can learn a lot about their personality. This can be an important insight to have when assembling a team. Personality can play a large role in balancing your team with people who have strengths where other have weakness or to find people whose unique background or point of view can add value to your team.

Make each platform work for you

Social media consists of a vast and diverse collection of platforms, so selecting one to recruit talent for your dream team can be daunting. However, you don’t need to know every facet of every platform - you just need to understand which platforms can work for you and why. Each one is unique, so how you market within and utilize these platforms will be different as well.

Connect and thrive 

Your company requires the right team for success, so it’s crucial to use all the tools available to you to recruit the right players for your dream team. Using the services of a superstar recruiting firm or job search sites are tried and true methods, but social media is a great tool to incorporate as well.

Using social media to recruit allows you to reach a wide and diverse pool of potential hires.

Just remember to share your company’s culture and let your team share what they love about being a part of the company. This will make others want to know more and hopefully lead the right people to investigate how they can be a part of what you’re doing.

And while there will be many qualified people coming your way, it’s also important that you find the right fit from a personality perspective and that your team players are an asset to your company, not a liability. In this case, using social media to gain an insight into your potential hires is a priceless resource.

But not all platforms are created equal, and you must utilize each social media platform for its particular strength. Doing so will help you to better attract the users that you seek as they engage with social media.

These tips will help you use social media to recruit the best talent for your company and to assemble a cohesive team that can help you take you to reach all your goals.