Time to hire, and you are short on social media recruitment campaign ideas?
I hear you, and I get you.
When you need the call to act and kick that recruitment campaign on, the most important person, might add, with the hiring need, has no time for you.
I’ll say out loud what you probably have thought once or twice: If you have no time to make this recruitment process successful, watch me copy you and have no time for success either.
However, let’s think positively and talk about social media recruitment campaign ideas that help you empower your recruitment campaigns with an almost copy-paste marketing plan.
In this Building a Modern Employer Brand podcast episode, I’ll share one of the most simple yet effective social media campaign ideas for you that I believe will help you to get rid of the stress about recruitment campaigns.
If you are new to this podcast, welcome here, my friend!
My name is Susanna Rantanen, and I’m seasoned with talent marketing herbs and spices. I’m talking about knowledge like superfood and sassiness like spicey chilli to help you elevate your employer branding and recruitment marketing career to levels way above sea!
This podcast is exactly what you want to integrate into your weekly routine if you work in employer branding or talent acquisition or if persuading talents with communication and marketing interests you in whatever you do!
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As one of the world’s top employer branding experts and influencers, I’m here to guide you in modern employer branding with practical, logical and science-based tips to convince and convert your relevant talents. I talk about strategies, tactics, data, analytics, content creation, copywriting secrets, and my professional pride and joy: The Magnetic Employer Branding Method™️, for which I have a book coming out later this year.
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Social Media Recruitment Campaign Ideas 101 for Success
In my experience, the most cost-effective recruitment campaigns are on social media or email campaigns to your email list of candidate prospects. In this episode, we’ll focus on social media and start by going through what makes a recruitment campaign on social media successful.
The most cost-effective recruitment campaigns are on social media or email campaigns to your email list of candidate prospects.
Susanna Rantanen
A successful social media recruitment campaign has three key goals:
- First, make your organic and paid target audience aware that now is the time to apply if one is looking for a job in your organisation specifically or a new opportunity matching the vacancy you are hiring for.
- Secondly, to get your relevant target audience to consider this opportunity. Consider means that they actually take time to think about it, do some research to get answers to their open questions about the role and your organisation and then make the decision whether they apply or not.
- And thirdly, to reserve time to actually update their CVs and tailor their resume to this opportunity and for your organisation.
A successful social media recruitment campaign has three key goals: Grow awareness, pursue consideration and convert applicants.
Susanna Rantanen
It takes a fair amount of time for a job seeker to prep their application to meet your expectations.
Let’s think about what helps you as the recruiter to recognise relevant and ideal candidates at the beginning of the process – based on application only.
Ideally for you, job seekers:
- React quickly and apply swiftly so as not to stress you out with a lack of applicants.
- When you glance at their application, it hits all the high notes you are looking for in a candidate of interest.
- They have also described enough of their preferences and work personalities for you to feel confident they are great cultural additions to your organisation.
You wish all this to happen so you won’t accidentally ignore or decline a candidate who would have been a real gem and have good news to share with the hiring manager as early on the campaign as possible, right?
If you wish for this, how can you help them deliver it?
How to Set Up a Social Media Recruitment Campaign That Works
Make sure the recruitment campaign is longer than seven days.
Preferably 2-3 weeks. This will give you enough time to grow awareness, create posts that help your target audience consider this opportunity, and give them enough time to prepare a great application by the deadline.
What did you say? Did you say “impossible”?
Impossible because you always know about the hiring need at the last minute, giving you zero time to plan anything.
Impossible because hiring managers in your organisation expect fast results, and your deadlines are always shorter than 2-3 weeks.
I hear you, my friend. I hear you.
This is one of the Best Social Media Recruitment Campaign Ideas
I believe I have designed one of the best social media recruitment marketing campaign ideas.
It starts earlier than the recruitment campaign, doesn’t leave everything at the last minute for you, and you can repeat and recycle it!
I believe I have designed one of the best social media recruitment marketing campaign ideas. It starts earlier than the recruitment campaign, doesn’t leave everything at the last minute for you, and you can repeat and recycle it!
Susanna Rantanen
How does that sound to you?
This is where recruiting meets employer branding so that you have something else to post about before you can start posting about the vacancy.
Okay, okay, now you are asking: How is this different from what we already do?
Let me explain.
Although, maybe you already do this? If yes, then congratulations! You can listen to this episode with a grin, thinking, hey, you all, we already got this going on and are seeing great results!
But for those who want to hear and make sure this is something different to what you already do, let me explain.
I am talking about a campaign purposefully targeted only at the audiences who match your upcoming recruitment profile, but the content in this campaign is not the job post because the job has yet to be opened.
The purpose of this campaign, I call it the pre-marketing phase, is to warm a relevant audience on social media to pay attention to your posts when your recruitment campaign starts. Not only physically but also by igniting the algorithms to support showing them your recruitment content the best we can.
Who is this social media recruitment campaign idea for?
- All those of you who create recruitment campaign content.
- Those who work in talent acquisition and can use social media for recruitment marketing.
- Also, those already working in employer branding support your recruiters with suitable content creation.
- But also hiring managers who should feel a little itch in their conscience for often not having the time for recruiters and content creators to create better recruitment campaigns for your hiring needs.
This is a really great content marketing system for all of you to know about and adopt!
What’s truly great about this social media recruitment campaign idea is that when you’ve got this working, you don’t need to extend your application period beyond seven days that you do need to, if posting a job and doing a bit of social media posts aside.
Okay, are you still with me? Stay with me because I have a bonus treat for you at the end of this episode.
Bird’s view on this social media recruitment campaign idea
I’ll run you through the big picture, okay?
Let’s do some reverse engineering.
Let’s say that you know that your organisation will be hiring for specific roles at the end of this spring, but you don’t know when the hiring kicks in.
For example, you can start planning for the campaign and posting about the teams, their work, hiring managers, and team cultures.
Way before posting the job ad and starting to promote it.
Each set of content is planned to target your target audience in the upcoming recruitment campaign. In each post, you’ll tailor it like you wrote a Dear John letter for the John you aim to hire later.
You pinpoint subtopics and areas of interest to match the likely interest of the people behind your upcoming recruitment profiles.
You post content like this a couple of times a week for 9-12 weeks before posting the job ad. When the recruitment starts, you’ll switch to talking about the role and the recruitment process.
During the preceding weeks, before the actual recruitment campaign starts, you plant the seeds and pave the way for the right audience to be reminded about your organisation multiple times in their feeds via topics that interest them.
Collaborate with the teams and have them reshare those posts, too, so that their connections take notice.
Isn’t this like employer branding?
Yes! That’s right!
But instead of branding the entire organisation, think of branding the hiring team, instead.
An important step in the marketing process
What you want to do is document and save each content you post, from images to captions, hashtags and links, if you use any. When you have everything documented and archived, it will be easy to recycle and repurpose existing content when you hire for the same team again and start the pre-marketing phase.
For those employers with medium to high-volume recruitment, this is the only way to save time and empower the help of employer branding for specific recruitment needs in advance, in a very effective manner, might I add.
What’s so great about this social media recruitment campaign strategy is that you can add to these team employer brand content folders throughout the year to have publication-ready posts or at least images, quotes, stories, and moments on-store to be used when needed.
Because we all know, getting those at the last minute will be impossible.
In what types of situations does this social media recruitment campaign idea work the best?
This social media recruitment campaign idea works best for organisations with medium to high-volume talent acquisition who often need help to get quality applicants.
The medium or high-volume needs could be for all roles or only some, but it is a continuous struggle. As a recruiter, you recognise the constant struggle of getting those candidates even though you feel like you have tried everything.
This social media recruitment campaign idea works best for organisations with medium to high-volume talent acquisition who often need help to get quality applicants.
Susanna Rantanen
Try this one. Before you resort to extending campaigns, spend even more time and resources on something that didn’t work the first time—or investing in external recruitment consultants or head hunters when your struggles could be solved or aided with this strategy.
Just to pinpoint, this strategy does not work for recruitment agencies because it to work, it must be about one organisation, and you must be able to post and engage on the organisation’s social media accounts, drive traffic to their website and use data to drive success.
The structure of this social media recruitment campaign idea
Let’s structure this social media campaign idea for you.
This pre-marketing phase
- Ideal length: 9-12 weeks
- Minimum 6 weeks, maximum 16 weeks
- The longer this phase, the shorter the application period and vice versa.
- The application period should not be less than seven days.
If, for any reason, your recruitment campaign gets prolonged, you simply either pause the pre-marketing phase or slow it down. Then pick up the pace again, ideally about 3-4 weeks before the campaign is planned to start. And then recycle the same content.
For these 9-12 weeks, you need social media content to win attention, grow awareness, engage the audience and convert them towards the recruitment funnel.
The posts should be about the hiring team, their work, their team’s culture and leadership, collaboration and their knowledge and experience. This type of content helps win the attention of the relevant target audience and when they start engaging, the content ignites the social media algorithm to work for you.
Make sure to document every piece of content: captions, links, images, videos, quotes, tags and hashtags on your content plan, and note the date when it was published. This way, you can recycle and repurpose the team-specific content easily in the future.
The better your content matches the interests, needs and current talking points of your recruitment target audience, the better it will work warming your recruitment audience for your campaign.
Measuring impact and using social media data to drive recruitment campaign success
I strongly recommend you track the impact of your pre-marketing campaign with data. This way, you will know where you stand building your audience and channelling them towards your recruitment funnel when the actual recruitment campaign starts.
This pre-marketing phase belongs to our Instant Employer Brand Accelerator Method™️ applying strategies and tactics from the Magnetic Employer Branding Method™️ to create a data-driven recruitment marketing process for organisations that cannot invest in strategic employer branding. Or employer branding does not hit the right notes for local talent acquisition purposes.
This method consists of four phases, from pre-marketing to actual recruitment campaign marketing and from candidate communication to post-marketing.
We provide a 12-week development program, the Instant Employer Brand Accelerator™️ program, to support you in developing this process in your organisation. The 12-week program is about ⅓ of learning the strategy and ⅔ of creating and developing the process, content and marketing collateral with our support and templates available for you.
And, now, I have the bonus treat I promised for you since you made it all the way here!
I created a free content marketing plan for 12 weeks for you on a Trello Board you can copy. This is three months’ worth of basic content ideas for the pre-marketing phase, specifically. You will be surprised how simple they are.
Grab this free 3-month content plan and start creating your pre-marketing posts!
Additional social media recruitment campaign ideas and tips
Here’s a search result list for my recruitment marketing-related content for you.
Below, some specific social media recruitment campaign ideas: