Social media connects us to millions of people across the world. From following up on your family and friends, to reading updates on your favorite sports teams, or in our case, using social media for hiring and recruiting. There are many social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Each of these platforms provides many exceptional hiring tools for staffing and recruiting companies.
Facebook is currently the largest social media network worldwide with 2.41 billion active users in 2019. While many people use Facebook for updates on family and friends, companies can use Facebook to post jobs as well. With such a massive number of users, posting jobs on this platform can increase the amount of applications, resulting in a higher probability of filling the job while also simultaneously growing your candidate pool.
Twitter is most commonly used to provide short updates on friends, events, news, television shows, athletes, and famous individuals. Most Twitter profiles are public, which can create either a positive or a negative connotation about a person. Employers have used Twitter as a hiring tool by reviewing the candidate’s profile and reading through what they post on a consistent basis in order to find out more about the candidate’s personality or interests. Vulgar or distasteful tweets may turn the employer away from hiring that specific applicant. It is always best to be mindful of what you post online!
Instagram is a picture and video sharing platform that can be used for marketing. Instagram offers various filters, stickers and video options such as boomerang, super-zoom and live-streaming, which can be beneficial for promoting your company. Each of these fun accessories can help highlight and emphasize your company culture as well as give your company or brand more of a personality, which in turn, will make candidates more interested in working with that business if they can get a better feel for the company culture. If the company is larger and has multiple branch locations, Instagram can also be used to help make the different branches feel connected by providing picture updates of the team activities for example.
LinkedIn is known for professional networking, including posting jobs and finding current job seekers. Many hiring specialists use LinkedIn to source for candidates that may not use sites such as Indeed, Monster or CareerBuilder. Hiring managers also use LinkedIn to provide updates for their company or to give advice to other managers across the states. Recent graduates might use LinkedIn to get feedback on their resume. Another excellent tool that LinkedIn offers is LinkedIn Learning. This is a benefit to companies because it provides video trainings on numerous, different topics that could be useful to the employees.
Overall, there are a multitude of ways social media can be utilized by recruiting and staffing firms to not only find talent, but market themselves to it as well. Go ahead and try them out!
