5 Tips for Using Social Media in Your Recruitment Strategy
With an estimated 250 million Americans using social media (for around 2 hours each day!), it’s not surprising that many school districts are turning to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to bolster their recruitment strategy.
Let’s explore five tips to get started on the path to becoming a social media whiz.
Develop a strategy and follow it!
The key to effective social media recruitment is ensuring that you approach posting with a defined strategy. Specific actions designed to target specific candidates by providing relevant information perform the best. You need to both (1) know where to find your ideal candidates, and (2) understand what information you should be sharing with them.
Designate an owner.
Creating social media content and ensuring a consistent online presence can be a considerable lift. To ensure you have capacity, ask yourself the following questions:
Which platform(s) are we interested in (and why)? Who are we trying to recruit? What demographics are we specifically targeting?
Do we have the capacity to manage one or more social media platforms?
Who will be responsible for managing these accounts?
Who will be responsible for creating content?
Who will be responsible for editing and compiling content?
Address the needs of job seekers.
Give the people what they want! According to Gallup, job seekers have five expectations for new positions:
A significant increase in income or benefits
Greater work-life balance and better personal well-being
The ability to do what they do best
Greater stability and job security
The organization is diverse and inclusive of all types of people
With an idea of what job seekers are looking for in their next position, align your content to what those job seekers want to see. There are many ways to do this, such as by sharing posts about your benefits or highlighting the ways your organization promotes work-life balance and well-being.
You can also create content that features employees who have been in your district for a long time or those who have held multiple positions in the district; this shows potential applicants that you value and care about your employees. And it provides you with an avenue to showcase the many different people you work with, from custodial staff to bus drivers, that are also small business owners (e.g., barbers, hairstylists, freelancers or others with more flexible schedules) for benefits.
In a job seekers’ market, often those in search of new roles are choosing between multiple offers from different organizations. Take the time to tell job seekers why you’re the best. This can be accomplished through consistently promoting your employee value proposition (EVP). Your EVP communicates the value or benefits that employees receive when they join your organization. With proper attention, your EVP can evolve into your employer brand. People aren’t just selecting a position—they are selecting an organization. Show them why they should choose you.
Post regularly.
Across social media platforms, the algorithms reward regular posting and engagement. Ensure that you have enough content to provide a steady stream of traffic to your accounts. In our opinion, here are some easy ways to improve the posts on your account:
Take advantage of pre-scheduled online events, such as virtual hiring fairs.
Edit previously recorded content to post. For example, recorded testimonials from current staff describing why they work at your educational organization can go a long way.
Take advantage of holidays to create themed content!
Use a calendar to organize posts in advance for holidays and days of recognition.
Reaffirm your brand in every post.
Track metrics and adjust.
Many platforms host an analytics section to help you understand how your account is performing. Using those analytics can help you determine if you’re meeting your goals If the analytics feel inaccessible, at a minimum, you should be reviewing the number of likes, shares, and followers that you have—and how they fluctuate depending on your posts.
Be ready to update your strategy and content based on the response from followers. Review your content and examine readily available data: What kind of posts get the most engagement? What days and what times do posts seem to gain the most traction?
Social media usage is almost universal—it’s time to start leveraging it for your recruitment and to grow your organization’s brand. The most successful organizations are using social media content to address the needs of job seekers and provide them with the various types of information they are looking for when considering where they want to work. Let them know why you are the employer of choice.
Learn More
This blog post was inspired by a recent training focusing on strategies to support social media use when attracting and hiring candidates. To go deeper, you can:
Explore the PowerPoint slide deck
Use our activity handout to activate your learning
We encourage human capital leaders in education to take an active role in evaluating recruitment and hiring practices and engaging in discussions with peers. Contact us at HCRC@education.ohio.gov with any questions.