Organizations across most industries are having challenges recruiting new employees right now. While social media is not the end-all and be-all when addressing this issue, it can certainly help… or hurt. In today's digital era, people often explore the social media profiles of companies they are interested in working for, whether they are applying or being interviewed. In fact, over the past year alone, more than half the candidates we have interviewed have mentioned being drawn to Stamp because of the company culture that they can get a sense of based on what they see on social media. But make no mistake about it, posting this sort of (genuine) content is a deliberate component of our social media sharing efforts. 

Before you dive into paid recruiting efforts on social media, make sure you take advantage of social media to showcase aspects of your organization organically that would increase candidates' interest in working with your team. One is to regularly showcase people from your organization on your social channels.

Make sure you are taking advantage of organic ways to utilize social media to help recruit good talent to your organization.

Are your pages lacking real faces of the people who work for your organization or what it looks like to work there (company culture, continuing education, volunteer efforts, work/life balance, etc.)? If you answered yes, then potential new hires aren’t going to be able to picture themselves working for you.

Across multiple industries, we regularly see that the engagement rate on posts that show real people working at a company/in an industry is much higher than many other types of posts. You’ll often start to see your employees (and sometimes even their moms) become company advocates on their own personal social channels. These comments, likes, and shares will often put your brand onto new feeds and these users become advocates for your company as more and more positive engagement gets shared.

• The benefits of showcasing company employees on social media goes beyond just future recruitment efforts.
• Your social media advertising dollars aren’t going to go as far if you’re spending money to recruit new people and once they visit your channels, they get no idea of what it’s really like to work there.

Once you have a system in place on the organic front, it’s likely time to put a paid efforts to work to meet your recruiting challenges. Over the last few years, as Facebook and Instagram have increasingly become pay-to-play—meaning for many users to actually see your organic posts—an organization has to commit a daily budget to ensure that a particular post is seen by more than just direct social connections and the networks of their extended connections who also share. For instance, if your organization is recurring for an available position, it would likely benefit the effort to have advertising dollars behind your post about the position to ensure that it is seen by the potential audiences that you are interested in recruiting from. Once they click to learn more, they will be exposed to your organizations overall feed and will get a sense of the culture of an organization vs. simply clicking to get more information. Seeing a positive culture where they could see themselves working is often the difference between them reaching out to your organ

One thing I’ve noticed many organizations do when they prepare social media content (organic posts and ads) for recruiting is to use stock photography in their visuals. Stop this inauthentic, lazy method. It doesn’t work in most instances. Again, show your people, show your office—allow a potential employee to picture themselves there.

When gathering this content of your current employees, it’s important to be mindful of diversity, inclusion and safety. For example, in construction, healthcare and many other industries ensuring employee safety is shown through personal protective equipment is vital in attracting future talent who value work safety.

Lastly, take a good look at your company strengths in terms of employment and make those the star benefits to working at your company, whether it’s great retention (happy employees) or paid continuing education that helps your employees grow, tell those stories in your content.