Using social media platforms for recruitment and hiring

Finding top talent in today’s recruitment landscape is easier said than done. Luckily, social media makes it easy to connect and engage with potential candidates. Finding the right channels to attract top talent can be a game changer.

This article helps you to pick your battles. We’ll highlight the best social media platforms for recruitment and hiring among different options. 

Modern talent attraction and the hiring process

New generations grow up with social media. Social media platforms are evolving more into dynamic marketplaces where talent meets opportunity, shaping how businesses find and connect with potential employees.

From LinkedIn's professional networking abilities to Instagram's visual attraction, the hiring process has become a multidimensional journey.

Think about it. Outdated hiring processes that are misaligned with today's recruitment expectations keep you from sourcing the talent you need to hit your business goals and instead hurt your employer brand altogether. 

If you want to successfully hire the best talent out there, you need to use the latest tools and methods that bridge the gap between your business and the talented people you wish to hire. 

Let’s have a look at the numbers of social media usage for recruitment. 

Some statistics on social media and recruitment

Recent social recruiting research indicates an incredible 98% of hiring and employer branding teams use social media. The main reason is the large reach at a relatively low cost. This helps recruiters and people involved in hiring to achieve their objectives.

Recruiting passive candidates is tough but can help you to find the best hires. 80% of employers feel that social media assists in finding and nurturing passive job seekers.

When looking at potential candidates, 79% of job seekers use social media when conducting their job search. One survey even showed that over 1,000 professionals find social media sites and professional networking platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter more efficient than career sites and job listings.

In short: if you’re not recruiting on socials now, you’re missing out. But what specific platforms are most suitable for attracting the talent you need? 

The most popular social media platforms for recruiting

Each social media platform has its own benefits and some are more suitable for recruitment purposes than others. Here’s an overview of the most popular platforms for recruiting and how they are used by recruiters.

• LinkedIn - Used by 90% of recruiters
• Facebook - Used by 55% of recruiters
• Twitter - Used by 47% of recruiters
• Instagram - Used by 11% of recruiters 

Next, we'll walk you through a list of the best social media platforms for recruiting talent.

Best social media platforms for recruitment and hiring

Conducting research and exploring multiple solutions can be a daunting task. Here's an overview of each platform and its key features to ensure you're not missing out on anything to up your recruitment game. 

1. LinkedIn
2. Facebook
3. Instagram
4. Twitter
5. YouTube
6. GitHub 

LinkedIn 

LinkedIn is seen as one of the most effective recruitment platforms. Which makes sense. The platform is on a mission to connect professionals.

With that focus LinkedIn is attracting a huge audience to its platform. Which is very convenient, isn’t it? The platform offers easy ways to target people and offers in-depth profile options. Advanced search tools allow for choosing candidates accurately.

InMail can be very convenient to directly get in touch with a potential candidate. Posting jobs additionally helps to reach more potential hires.

For employers, the platform also offers strong support for building their brand with company profiles and data analytics. But even more importantly, the chance to connect with passive candidates. Especially when you’re using LinkedIn Recruiter.

LinkedIn is definitely a valuable tool for attracting new talent. Want to take recruiting on LinkedIn to the next level? Then consider integrating it with other platforms like your ATS and talent CRM for a complete talent acquisition strategy. 

Key recruitment features of LinkedIn

• Extensive professional network for a wide and diverse talent pool
• Advanced search and filtering to filter candidates
• InMail messaging to directly contact candidates
• Job posting and talent recommendations 
• Insights and analytics on job posting and campaigns

Facebook

Facebook is considered to be the second-best social channel that sources the highest quality candidates. It’s a powerful social media tool for recruiting due to its large user base and targeted advertising capabilities.

Some of the features offer great advantages for hiring like reaching a diverse talent pool and engaging directly with potential candidates. Important to highlight is the fact that you can use demographic targeting for job ads. 

Facebook is an effective platform to reach both active and passive candidates. Many people regularly use Facebook for personal reasons, unlike job-specific platforms. Last but not least. Recruiting on Facebook can also be highly cost-effective.

Key recruitment features of Facebook

• Large talent pool with over 3 billion monthly users
• Cost-effective targeted advertising
• Lower recruiter saturation in comparison to LinkedIn
• Reach active and passive candidates
• Enhanced engagement based on the platform’s personal nature 

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Instagram

Instagram is becoming an essential tool for recruiting, especially the younger generations like Millennials and Gen Z. 

Features like direct job links, strategic hashtag use, and cross-posting increases visibility. Meanwhile, using geo-tagging helps to connect with people in specific local areas. Instagram’s stories, reels and hashtags allow recruiters to bring their companies’ culture and vacancies alive.

Thanks to the strong user involvement and the ability to share content across different platforms make Instagram a great platform to find talent. Especially to connect with both candidates who are actively looking for jobs and those who aren’t. 

Key recruitment features of Instagram

• Targeted demographic reach
• Visual brand storytelling through engaging visuals
• High user engagement compared to other platforms
• Strategical hashtag usage
• Geotagging for local recruitment 

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Twitter (X)

With 450 million active monthly users Twitter offers unique advantages for recruiters. It has a big and varied group of users. It’s especially useful for sourcing passive candidates and reducing recruitment costs.

At the end of 2023 Twitter launched ‘X Hiring’ and rolled it out for Premium users in the US. Verified organisations can feature critical roles on their profile and organically reach millions of relevant candidates. Increasing the opportunity of X (formerly Twitter) to be a valuable platform for recruitment. 

In general, Twitter does require a strategic approach and may not be ideal for niche recruitment. It's best suited for general roles and can be an effective tool for brand promotion and candidate engagement. Especially when used in combination with Twitter’s advertising and analytics capabilities.

Want to be successful on Twitter for recruiting? You can, but take into account that you need a bit of patience. When using a social and conversational approach on a consistent basis, we’re sure you can make it work. 

Key recruitment features of Twitter

• Large diverse user base 
• Real-time interactions and communication
• Direct candidate engagement 
• Networking and referral opportunities
• Cost-effective 
• New X Hiring feature rolled out in the US 

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YouTube

Video is a great way to personalise the recruitment process. And, let’s not forget, YouTube is still the second-largest search engine in the world. 

With more than one billion users who watch video every day, YouTube offers a great platform for recruitment. Think about it. It’s ideal for showcasing the company culture. Employee testimonials and creative videos can strengthen your employer branding. 

Recruiters can use YouTube to detail their hiring processes, promote job openings, and explain company values, improving the candidate experience. The platform is especially useful for sourcing creative professionals and inviting video applications. This can be a nice way to discover talent for roles that require strong presentation skills. 

If you want to successfully hire on YouTube high-quality and genuine video content is key.

Key recruitment features of YouTube

• Employer branding opportunities
• Employee testimonials to showcase experiences
• Candidate sourcing based on creative portfolios and tutorials
• Effective job promotion
• Engagement with specific audiences 

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GitHub

You might not have thought about it. But GitHub is a powerful social media platform for recruiting. It’s the biggest place for hosting source code worldwide and has over 40 million users. Those users include students and professionals, who contribute to the platform with the aim of learning, practising, and improving software.

This is making it an ideal space for sourcing technical talent. Recruiters benefit from GitHub's rich portfolio, public profiles, and search filters, allowing them to assess developers' skills, coding style, and contributions to open-source projects. 

GitHub's expansion during the pandemic shows how important it is. Developers have been actively working on projects and showing off their skills. Finding the right people on GitHub can be tough. However, the features and insights do help recruiters to find and connect with technical candidates who are both motivated and skilled. So it might pay off. 

Key recruitment features of GitHub

• Rich portfolio showcase of candidates
• Easy access to public profiles
• Robust search filters on specific criteria
• Display of open-source contributions 
• Global diverse and skilled talent pool expansion 

Best recruitment marketing software for social media

Next to recruiting on social media platforms, you may also want to consider using recruitment marketing software to boost your social media recruitment.

Recruitment marketing software helps companies find and connect with people who might want to work for them, before they even submit a job application. It works well with social media sites, making it easier to run recruitment ads and organise the hiring process.

Here’s an overview of the best recruitment marketing software you can use. We’ll summarise the list for you, so you can think of integrating recruitment marketing software in your social media recruitment strategy. 

Wonderkind

Wonderkind empowers you to connect the ideal job with the perfect candidate, exactly when needed and within your budget. The programmatic job advertising software gives you access to unreachable candidates by making compelling job ads for social media, giving a clear overview of costs and return on investment.

Wonderkind makes it easy to transform text-heavy job ads into visually appealing content for socials. You can publish thousands of eye-catching job ads simultaneously in no-time.  

It’s a powerful tool to incorporate into your social media recruitment strategy, with a great ROI. 

Other recruitment marketing software tools

• Recruit CRM 
• Jobvite
• Zoho Recruit
• TalentReef
• iCMS
• Joveo
• Appcast
• PandaLogic
• Randancy 
• Talroo
• JobTarget
• Adway
• Symphony Talent
• SmartDreamers
• JobAdX
• VONQ
• OnRecruit
• Aimwel
• Jobilla
• TalentBait
• HeyJobs
• Beamery
• Phenom
• SmartRecruiters 

Some disadvantages and risks of using social media for recruitment

Now that you know which social media platforms are effective for recruiting and hiring talent, it's essential to consider some of the drawbacks.

Here's a brief list of disadvantages and risks that can have a serious impact on your talent acquisition and overall talent attraction efforts.

Finding the right candidate takes time

Scanning through profiles on social media is time-consuming. Especially when you need a large number of candidates. When posting a listing on social media yourself, everyone can see and apply to the position. It can take a lot of time to sift through the profiles and separate the wheat from the chaff. 

Bias in the hiring process

Social media platforms show a lot of information about a person. This may inadvertently lead to bias in the decision making process. What a job seeker posts online can affect how they are seen by potential employers, and sometimes this can lead to them not getting a job opportunity.

Inaccurate or incomplete information

If a job applicant hasn't updated their profile lately or it has wrong information, recruiters might have trouble checking if the details they shared are accurate.

When recruiters look at updated social media profiles, they might find profiles of different people with the same name, which can be confusing and lead to mistakes in identifying the actual job candidate.

Get started with automated job ads on social media today

Social media recruitment and job advertising on social media go hand-in-hand when it comes to modern talent acquisition. When done properly, they both enhance the visibility of job opportunities and create a more dynamic and interactive approach to attracting talent.

Social media advertising enables precise targeting, allowing you to reach a diverse pool of potential candidates. This approach opens the door to tapping into a large network of professionals, reaching individuals who may not be actively searching for jobs through traditional channels.

Wonderkind’s Talent Attraction Technology helps you reach 5x more candidates in 5x less time by leveraging social channels. Our platform provides the tools and templates that make it easy to create and manage Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google ads all from one place.

Not only can you master multi-channel advertising quickly, but you’ll also get access to valuable insights from our extensive experience from launching over 10,000 job campaigns. 

Benefit from real-time audience estimates, an extensive library of job title synonyms for precise targeting, and a smart profiling system that enhances ad placement to reach high-quality candidates.

If you’d like to see how Wonderkind can help you to run efficient recruitment marketing campaigns on social media, we’d be happy to give you a free 15 min. demo. 

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