SMM Recruiting: 4 Social Media In Detail

2022-06-13 13:07 Research: IT and HR analytics

Social media is a useful tool when searching for talents. We’ve already covered this topic in general here (advantages and key tips on how to start). This article goes a bit deeper: it explores particular networks from a practical standpoint.

We took employment-oriented LinkedIn and Xing and general platforms Facebook and Twitter

that are usually used for entertainment. We studied them under a microscope to have a clear understanding of what opportunities each of them offers. Scroll down to better see which of them will be more beneficial for your recruiting efforts.

Types of Social Media

There are lots of networking platforms that can be used for SMM recruiting. They can be roughly divided into 2 big groups: employment-oriented and general. Using each of them has its own unique features.

Employment-Oriented: LinkedIn and Xing

Such channels are perfect when you’re looking for crew members. All fields are standardized showing the most relevant information about a talent (e.g., stack, experience, portfolio). And most importantly, people never hide behind nicknames and enter real names. It’s very convenient for a recruiter.

It has over 250 million active job seekers per month. Employers post about 95 applications every second, with 6 talents getting hired every minute. There are lots of interesting tools that are useful when searching for specialists:

LinkedIn Recruiter. It’s a premium package that gives unlimited search features and full access to other people’s profiles. A free version comes with some limitations.
Work With Us Ads. It’s a special paid-for feature to advertise jobs on your crew member’s profiles, attract talent traffic to your career webpage, etc.
LinkedIn Job Slots. This tool promotes your ad to the most relevant users, allows you to review and filter candidates, as well as does other time-saving tasks.

Click here to read more about the opportunities they offer.

"The key advantage of this social media is that it’s designed for professionals and companies. People describe their experience, education, and skills in detail. It makes their account look almost like a ready-made CV: very convenient for recruiters to get all the information they need."

Head of Recruitment
Alex Staff Agency
Diana Bolat

LinkedIn has a huge pool of passive specialists. So, if you target wisely, you can reach out to people with great skills and lure them to join your team. How exactly? Analyze their profile and try to figure out what can interest them in your job offer. If they don’t live in your country, maybe they would like to relocate? Maybe the project is very promising or the stack is what they’ve been dreaming to switch to?

If you do everything correctly, you won’t even have to do the searching at all. Professionals often sign up for the companies they like. So, with enough audience, you’ll just need to post a job ad and wait for responses.

Xing

This social media is smaller than LinkedIn, with only 20 million members. However, it is region-tied to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (German-speaking countries). So, if you need candidates from this area, the chances that you’ll find relevant professionals there are high. Xing offers the following advantages:

A variety of tools to use: Xing Jobs, TalentManager, TalentService, etc.
Conveniently structured profiles: it enables quicker evaluation of candidates
Opportunity to reach out to non-job-seekers: they’ll get your ad if they fit your searching requirements

"Xing is very convenient thanks to its filters. You can specify the language, location, stack, etc. to get a whole database of relevant candidates to choose from."

Senior IT Recruiter
Alex Staff Agency
Alena Sultanova

Xing is rarely used by specialists of Junior and Middle levels. It’s more popular among Senior+ talents. So, it’s a good platform if you need experienced team members in Europe.

General: Facebook and Twitter

Such networks are designed for communication and entertainment. They’re used by lots of people: the audience is enormous. Of course, many of them won’t fit your requirements, so it’s vital to know what strings to pull to get relevant specialists.

Facebook

There are almost 3 billion monthly active users on Facebook. And it’s growing rapidly: +2 million users from October 2021 to January 2022. About 36.8% of all people visit it every day or week.

Facebook used to have a special in-built service aimed at job-searching only. However, it failed to achieve significant efficiency levels, so the company shut it down in February 2022. Still, other recruiting methods are fully available.

You can create a recruiting ad and then target it for your audience: by location, demographics, education, qualifications, etc. Additionally, there are lots of social groups to join. Find the one that focuses on job seekers and select specialists you need. You can also use the feature called Relevance Score. It’s a special report that shows ad efficiency metrics.

"Facebook has convenient filters. I have experience of searching based on a current occupation (almost everyone marks where they work). I check how many years candidates have worked there and contact them to ask if they are interested in changing their position."

Senior IT Recruiter
Alex Staff Agency
Alena Sultanova

Facebook has a lot of people: it’s both an advantage and a challenge. You’ll need a large recruitment campaign to make it truly effective. First of all, it’s necessary to work out a solid plan on what demographics you’ll aim at, what skills are a priority, etc. Secondly, these users generate a lot of content. You should be creative enough to attract specialists and make them notice your posts and ads.

Twitter

This platform claims to have 436 million monthly users. It’s a very humming network: every day, over 500 million tweets are posted there. To make the chances of finding new talents higher, use the following opportunities:

Make your bio clear. Add the name of your company and state that you’re hiring
Add posts regularly. Tell everyone about your team, goals, and achievements
Try hashtags and keywords. They help you find specialists faster

"Twitter is useful thanks to the system of hashtags and retweets. Hashtags help recruiters find people by their occupation or the technology they work with (e.g., #projectmanager, #blockchain). As for retweets, they’re efficient when you know where to find them. Once we used them to locate Animation Artists: one user launched #portfolioday and retweeted posts of different artists with their works and contacts. It was very convenient for us."

Head of Recruitment
Alex Staff Agency
Diana Bolat

Twitter is also known for causing a strong word-of-mouth effect. Users share content with friends if they like it, so you can increase your audience pretty fast. It’s definitely worth using this channel if you’re looking for young specialists (25-34 years old). According to Statista, 38.5% of users fall in this group, dominating others.

And most importantly, all SMM trends come from Twitter. If you want to know what your audience is interested in, monitor popular topics through this social media: they will be picked up and then actively discussed on other platforms.

What Social Network Will Work Out The Best?

There is no universal answer to fit every company. However, some tips will help you choose better:

Draw up a portrait of an ideal candidate (age, location, skills, etc.)
Analyze the audience of different networks
Check how many of "your" specialists hang out there
Study the tools they offer

Launching and managing too many channels simultaneously will be counterproductive. You’ll post fewer materials of lower quality. If you can’t get specialists interested in your company, the whole thing won’t be of any use.

We’ve covered only a few modern social platforms. There are many more opportunities to consider. Instagram, Telegram, or even something like TikTok or YouTube is very beneficial for some businesses. For example, Disney actively uses YouTube and gets a stable inflow of candidates through its account Disney Careers. It seems logical that they make the best of the video-driven platform. After all, video content is what they do! Of course, it’s not the only source of talents they use.

Don’t forget to read our article that explains why companies should try SMM recruiting to find new specialists. It also offers some useful tips on how to make your account efficient. Trust us, this is a reliable way to attract the professionals you need to power up your team.

Email us if you have any questions: we’ll get in touch right away!