Social media has become a leading place to attract passive candidates on a massive scale, but how can your SME stand out from a sea of rival employers?
According to Workable’s Great Discontent survey of workers in the United Kingdom, as many as 45.1% of the nation’s eligible workforce are passive candidates. This makes social media optimisation an essential consideration when it comes to bolstering your recruitment efforts.
With an estimated 54.8 million people in the UK active on social media, it’s essential that your small-to-medium-sized enterprise has a strong presence online, but how can you ensure that more passive candidates are attracted by the prospect of applying for your roles?
Let’s take a deeper look at the role of social media as a tool for improving your talent acquisition prospects and how to build your presence online:
Promote Yourself as an Employer
For employers, your social media profiles are a canvas on which you can promote yourself as a desirable place to work.
Focus on underlining what makes your SME stand out from the crowd, and adopt an employee-centric approach when showcasing your positive workplace culture.
To do this, share employee testimonials and success stories on both your website pages and social media channels. You should also take to LinkedIn to engage with potential candidates.
When advertising your vacancies on social media, be sure to emphasise your company values and initiatives in your posts, focusing on why your SME is about more than just a place to pick up a paycheck each month.
Engage with Candidates
The proliferation of automation tools is one of the biggest developments of AI in recruitment in recent years, and it’s helped more SMEs to enhance their candidate outreach on social media.
Using AI recruitment tools, it’s possible for your recruitment team to proactively find candidates by scanning online profiles, databases, and professional networks to source talent.
With the help of machine learning (ML), the technology has the ability to identify patterns in user behaviour and match them with their skill sets, as well as their location, to identify ideal candidates who could be receptive to new opportunities with your company, even if they haven’t applied directly.
Broaden Your Reach with Shareable Content
Particularly when it comes to recruiting early-career candidates, positioning your SME as a forward-thinking and modern company online can pay dividends in attracting talent. But this approach can be made more challenging if you don’t have a strong enough following to boost your brand recognition.
To remedy this, you should seek to create easy-to-share content that can be distributed across social media channels. Here, using industry-specific hashtags and visual content such as infographics can be an excellent way to broaden your reach. These considerations can not only boost attention among prospective new recruits but also amplify your brand to a larger audience.
You can also encourage your employees to share your content across their social media channels. This approach can work as an indirect referral scheme that may win appeal among applicants who would be pre-vetted by your current workforce, helping to shorten your hiring cycle while improving its outcomes.
Always Engage with Your Audience
Another essential factor in attracting more candidates via social media is to actively engage with your audience as a means of building meaningful connections and fostering relationships with potential recruits.
To action this, be sure to respond to comments on your posts, private messages, and inquiries on social media quickly as a way of demonstrating that you value the input of your followers.
You should also engage with user-generated content, particularly posts by employees that support your values and showcase your company culture.
If you have a large enough follower base, be sure to encourage discussions by asking questions and creating polls that can help to build a vibrant community at the heart of your SME.
Measure Your Success
If you’re planning to optimise your social channels for success, you should always be sure to measure your results to ensure that your strategies are working.
Firstly, determine what success looks like when utilising your social media presence. Are you attempting to connect with more passive candidates? Are you planning to improve the volume of applications you receive for your roles? Or are you simply aiming to create a strong employer brand on social media? Decide on your goals as a team and use the relevant metrics, whether it’s click-through rates, applications, or a mixture of many different data sources, to measure your success.
Social Media as a Recruitment Tool
Social media has become a major tool for recruiters across virtually every industry, and platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X have paved the way for more SMEs to break down the barriers to passive candidates and to improve brand recognition across the board.
Thanks to social media, you can now shape your image for candidates and interact with masses of prospective recruits to support your scaling process and create a cost-effective strategy for attracting key talent to deliver your growth ambitions.
Monitoring your performance is essential to refining your strategy, and with the right goals in place, you can supercharge your talent acquisition in a budget-friendly way.
