Nowadays, recruitment and social networks are highly correlated activities. No recruitment strategy that wants to be somewhat effective could do without levers as relevant as social networks.

How to take action operationally

"I love social media because it exists at the intersection of humanity and technology " (Jeremy Waite, IBM Chief Strategy Officer)

The same could be said for digital recruiting. With the tools at their disposal, your community manager could become your best recruiter.

Let's look at the different strategies he can adopt and his relationship with the social recruiter.

Here is a video summarizing the three approaches.

What to understand from this video ?

1 - Job Sharing, the first level of social network recruitment

Different uses of social networks are possible for recruiting

When we think " recruiting through social networks ", we often have in mind those posts on LinkedIn or Facebook where job offers directly appear.

Here is an example :

An example of first-level social network recruitment

We are here in a pure logic of post and pray, which could be translated as " Well, the bottle containing the message is the sea, let's see what happens ".

And what happens in general ? Not much.

While non-targeted, non-enriched job sharing is inexpensive, it offers a very low response rate according to one of the experts in the field, Work4 (unless of course, you use their solution !).

The Work4 tool allows you to send highly targeted job offers.

To increase the effectiveness of Job Sharing (also called Job Posting), it is therefore necessary to use segmentation tools, or to accompany the job offer with an original or even funny message.

This is, for example, what the community manager of Edgar People does very well, and he often makes us laugh with his shares of current offers like this one, posted on LinkedIn, a few weeks ago: 

Humor and quirkiness can increase the visibility of your offers

The value of enriching the message in this way is to generate virality and thus boost the sharing rate.

Job Sharing remains, however, a limited way to use social networks for recruitment.

The social media timeline principle (" one piece of information chases another ") reduces the chances that your job posting will be seen by the right person at the right time, even if it has a decent share rate (which it rarely does).

So you need to go a little further in terms of value proposition (EVP) to improve the candidate experience.

2 - Employer brand content, HR communication goes social

The distribution of employer brand content by community managers allows you to adopt a more indirect approach to the relationship you have with your potential candidates.

This time, the focus will be on showcasing the company as a future employer. This type of content is often produced by the communications department or the employer brand department when it exists.

The essential message carried by this content would be " Hey, check out who we are, find out what we do and how cool we are ! ".

The results are sometimes very good quality. This is especially true of content shared by AXA like this :

 This type of Employer Brand content gives a very good image of the company.

The most impactful content for candidates is often thought to be employee testimonials under Bill Gates' " The best advertising is a satisfied customer."

 A particularly successful example is the "Nobody's perfect" campaign by Mazars with real employees from the company. Full of humor and creativity, this campaign was a big hit, especially on Instagram.

The campaign featuring "mazarians," a true community of collaborators.

This type of campaigning is, however, effective to a point.

It is sometimes forgotten, but candidates (as indeed are consumers), understand the mechanics of communication better than ever and are less and less receptive to it.

The expression " it's only com' " is much more used than it was a couple of decades ago.  The generations born in the 70s and 80s, bottle-fed with " Culture Pub " or " Arrêt sur Image "  have had time to integrate the laws of communication like those of Peckham or Morgensztern.

So, testimonials from overly beautiful, overly perfect employees, speaking with clarity and ease, tend to be perceived as a willingness to hide a less-than-stellar reality, whether or not it's true. 

In addition, one of the limitations of HR communications content is the difficulty of measuring the engagement of its audience.

Once your potential candidates have admired your premises and " liked " your crazy afterworks, what's the next step ?

Will they apply en masse to your job postings after reading the four values that define your DNA ? Not sure (and hard to measure, anyway).

3 - Inbound Recruiting through social networks, the birth of a community

The third level of social network recruiting is through inbound content. 

Too often confused with employer brand content, Inbound content has a very different purpose.

This time, rather than broadcasting a message serving the company's image as an employer, we will instead seek to answer specific questions that candidates are asking.

The goal is to offer expected added value in terms of information.

 Look at this content recently offered on the Robert Half LinkedIn account:

Robert Half offers content that answers real candidate questions

Here, Robert Half isn't proclaiming that it's a good recruiting firm, it's demonstrating it by speaking out on issues that really matter to candidates.

In some ways, if the words of love are those spoken by employer brand communication, Inbound content is the proofs of love that candidates expect.

Another notable difference is that while communication (often) highlights current events, Inbound content is said to be " evergreen ", meaning its relevance persists well beyond the date of publication.

This allows the community manager to repost it throughout the year by scheduling it through tools like Buffer or Hubspot, greatly increasing the share rate in the process.

This is the case, for example, with the publications of the training/recruitment company devenez.fr, which regularly offers content aimed at recent graduates.

This content is interesting for this population regardless of the time of year, and will remain so for the next few years.

The training company devenez.fr offers solutions to access digital jobs

Inbound content on social media can carry your message directly, via video or gif content, but typically refers the viewer to a blog post hosted on your career site.

The engagement process to accompany it to your jobs can then begin.

Note that with this type of content, the community manager can reach (reach) and exchange (communicate) with a much larger candidate base than with Job Sharing and HR Communication type content.

If trained in talent detection, it can undoubtedly become an invaluable aid to your recruiting, especially the most difficult ones.

Would you like to know how?