Social recruiting is the process of finding, interviewing or recruiting new candidates for a company through social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Job listings on social networks have a higher chance of being seen by a candidate with a healthy social presence.

Around 86% of job seekers use social media in their job search. Plus, as part of company recruitment strategies, HR professionals can look at candidates’ social profiles to determine the candidate’s eligibility for a particular kind of a job. This can make social recruiting a vital part of any organizations’ corporate culture.

What Is Social Recruiting?

Social recruiting is the practice of finding, recruiting, and engaging with potential employees on a social media platform. Social recruiting happens when employers use social media to market their employer brand, announce their vacancies, interact with potential employees, research employee capabilities, and recruit the best-suited candidate for the available position.

Before thinking about how social recruitment works, it is imperative to know why it works.

Around 97% of Fortune 500 Companies use at least one social media handle to promote their initiatives and 73% of job seekers aged 18-34 use social media in their job search. Going by the above statistics, it is a no-brainer to suggest that social media platforms are an efficient method to recruit the best-performing workers.

However, for social recruiting to be effective, companies will still need to choose the right social media platform. Choosing the channels your existing employees and overall professional network are active on will be the most prosperous approach.

As a quick rule of thumb, the company profile and nature of work can influence the choice of social media platform the company should use. Companies that are into design, marketing, fashion, among others, can use LinkedIn for job recruiting. This may not work well for those companies trying to recruit computer engineers. GitHub, BitBucket, or SourceForge are probably better options.

Every company has a specific social recruiting strategy but, generally, most companies engage in the following procedure:

• The recruiter posts job openings or vacancies on their social media platform. They may use specific hashtags, for example, #RemoteJobs, #Workfromhome, etc. As a brand, you can use a user-generated content (UGC) platform to practice social listening and gather all posts related to your products — from potential employees, ambassadors, and customers.
• Potential employers interact with and interview clients.
• Experienced recruiters usually engage their potential clients on a one-on-one basis 
• Companies can invite potential employees for a physical meeting where possible. They may also use video conferencing platforms, such as Zoom, for the interview.

To attract the right employee, companies should show off their company as a great place to work. Ultimately, social media provides recruiters the platform to perform many steps in the recruitment process. 

Social recruiting provides a priceless opportunity for employers to reach out to potential candidates, and it’s a great way to discover future brand ambassadors and influencer partnerships. Someone who wants to work with you because of the content you share on social media doesn’t have to be a run-of-the-mill full-time employee!

Benefits of Social Recruiting

So, what exactly are the benefits of social recruiting? Let’s look at them one by one in this section: 

1. Showcases Your Company Culture

Any company on social media can proudly showcase their team by encouraging and resharing employee-generated content. This type of content is created by your employees themselves and shared either on your brand accounts, their own individual social media accounts, or both, and it gives both potential customers and job candidates an inside look into your company and what it means to work there.

Delta reshares employee-generated content on social media and across the brand’s website to humanize the company and help job seekers and customers alike connect with the real people behind the brand.

2. Reduces Hiring Costs and Time

The hiring process can be quite lengthy—from sourcing potential employees, putting up job postings, receiving applications, sorting qualified candidates, inviting them for interviews, and so on. 

Social recruiting can enable a company to save time and money that would otherwise be invested in physically scouting potential applicants. With social recruiting, candidates fill out online forms for open vacancies. So, whether you’re hiring virtual assistants or programmers, you can reach out to them and get responses within the shortest possible time.

For promoted job posts, LinkedIn charges on a pay-per-click basis. The employer sets the daily budget and overall budget for the entire duration of the job post campaign. If the number of views on a day costs more than the daily budget, LinkedIn will automatically adjust subsequent daily budgets so what you ultimately spend still falls within the specified overall budget. LinkedIn doesn’t charge more than the overall allocated budget for a job post campaign.

Other social media platforms have their own pricing scheme but they operate in a similar way. On other social media platforms, you can also post job announcements for free. 

3. Helps You Find Passive Candidates

Passive candidates are not actively searching for a job but will not pass up on an opportunity to switch to another company if it offers better perks. According to LinkedIn, this group makes up 15% of the workforce at any given time. 

As a recruiter, passive candidates are the best people to reach out to for several reasons. Since they’re not actively searching for a job, they’re less likely to be in touch with other companies that may want to hire them. That means less competition for you.

Also, passive candidates may be just the ideal employees when hired. The fact that they aren’t looking actively for a job should mean something, right? They may just be the loyal employees all employers are looking for.

That said, social media can help you find these desirable passive candidates. Some social media platforms like LinkedIn have built-in tools that allow employers to identify them. They use artificial intelligence and machine learning to come up with a list of profiles of candidates – including those of passive ones — that may fit the qualifications set by a potential employer. It will then be up to the potential employer to reach out to these passive candidates.

Reaching out to these passive candidates is also easier via social media. Companies can just send a request to connect with them, and then engage with them in private conversations. Some social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, for instance, can also show whether or not a passive candidate has connections with a company employee. This can make it easier for companies to reach out to the passive candidate through the employee.

4. Facilitates Referrals

Social media makes it easy for companies to generate referrals for a job post or ad. After all, once you announce a job opening on social media, a person who wants to refer someone can do so with just a few clicks. They can just comment on the job post and tag the person they think is qualified for the job. Check out the first comment to this job post:

Daniel tagged a friend, Robyn, he believed to be qualified for the position. This shows that as a company, your resulting pool of potential candidates isn’t just confined to your social network. 

When one person who sees your job announcement tags someone else (as in our screenshot above), that person tagged isn’t necessarily directly connected to you on the social media platform. The same is true when someone shares your job announcement. 

What does this all mean? After posting just one job post or ad, you end up with a large pool of direct and indirect referrals, and, therefore, many choices. It would then be up to you to reach out to potential candidates that may be qualified for the job.

Social hiring comes with many benefits. You learned those benefits from this article. Social hiring helps you reduce hiring costs and time. It can also help you find passive candidates and showcase your employer brand. Social hiring facilitates referrals, too.

By and large, social media recruiting adds great value to the recruiting process. Leverage it to find the best talent that can help you reach your business goals.

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Mackenzie Lepretre is currently the Director of Operations at FreeUp Marketplace, a top-rated marketplace for businesses to find and connect with the best remote professionals. She has worked with freelancers and run freelance teams for 5+ years.