Leveraging Social Media To Find And Recruit Talent

With the rise of social media, it has become easier than ever for businesses to connect with talented professionals from across the UK and beyond. Instead of relying exclusively on traditional recruitment boards and agencies, companies of all sizes can now leverage social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to reach a wider pool of potential candidates. Let’s look at how you can tap into social media to effectively find and recruit talent for your business.

1. Recruiting Through LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the world’s most powerful and popular professional networking site, with over 1 billion global users and around 42 million in the UK. Of these, up to 60% of LinkedIn users fall into the ‘sweet spot’ job seeking age range of 25 to 34 years. LinkedIn is one of the go to places for people looking for work and is also frequented by recruiters looking to fill positions. As a company, you can tap into this vast pool of talent by creating a strong presence on LinkedIn.

A Great Place To Work

The LinkedIn recruitment landscape is highly competitive, so it’s important to establish your company as an attractive and credible employer on LinkedIn before you start recruiting. Doing so involves a lot of the best practices you may already be using for digital marketing, such as regularly updating your company page, sharing key updates about your business culture and values, updating your followers on current projects, and engaging with connections through posts and comments.

Share stories about members of staff who have received promotions and qualifications, or achieved strong results, providing a real-world example of what prospective recruits could achieve with your company. Building a strong brand image makes you more attractive to top talent who resonate with your company’s service philosophy and vision.

LinkedIn Recruiter

LinkedIn has a specific recruitment tool, called LinkedIn Recruiter, that allows businesses to search for qualified candidates based on specified criteria. This can make your recruitment process more streamlined by giving you a targeted list of potential candidates, saving you and your HR team time and resources. Once potential candidates have been identified, you can engage with them through personal messages, or by inviting them to connect for further discussion. The tool comes with various candidate tracking features and collaboration tools to manage your discussions with candidates. LinkedIn Recruiter can also be integrated with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) – if you use one or if you work with an agency – for a more integrated and streamlined recruitment process.

2. Recruiting Through Facebook

With a worldwide user base topping 3 billion in 2024 and 56.6 million users in the UK, Facebook has become an essential platform not just for personal connections but also for recruitment-focused networking. For context, the approximate UK adult population is around 55 million. In other words, almost everyone had a Facebook account. Here’s how your business can leverage Facebook as a social recruitment tool.

Set Up And Maintain A Company Page

In a similar way to LinkedIn, having a strong and active presence on Facebook stands you in good stead for attracting top talent. By creating and maintaining a company page, you can showcase your value proposition, available job roles, and career prospects to potential recruits, and engage with them through direct messages and comments. Facebook content is also highly searchable on Google, giving you greater visibility for your job positions.

Facebook Jobs

Wise to the recruitment potential of the Facebook platform, Meta launched Facebook Jobs in 2017 to make it easier for businesses to connect with jobseekers. Facebook Jobs integrates with Messenger for easy communication with applicants, and has a local focus that makes it particularly useful for businesses looking to hire within a local catchment area. Candidates can also use the platform to apply for jobs directly through Facebook, drawing on their profile information to auto fill application details – making it easier for both you and your applicants.

Recruiting To Instagram

While primarily known as a visual media platform, Instagram has also taken steps to becoming a professional recruitment application. With over 2 billion monthly active users worldwide, Instagram is one the most popular social media platforms in the world, giving your business a golden opportunity to attract talented applicants through engaging visual content.

Visual Storytelling

Showcasing your company culture on Instagram is different from Facebook and LinkedIn. While Facebook and LinkedIn are primarily text-based platforms, Instagram is all about visual storytelling. Through your Instagram account, you can introduce future employees to their colleagues, office, customers, and workspace. Post pictures and videos that give potential job applicants a glimpse into your workplace environment, location, typical employee activities, events, and projects.

Using #Hashtags

Hashtags are extremely important for maximising search visibility for content on Instagram. Make use of industry-relevant, location-based, and job specific hashtags to attract candidates who are interested in these topics. Posts can use more than one hashtag, e.g. #marketingexecutive, #JDRGroup, #Derby, #Eastmidlands, #marketingjobs.

Find out more

Social recruitment uses many of the same tools and principles as digital marketing. For more information about how best to use Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to build your team, please contact JDR today by clicking here.

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