For those job hunting and researching your company online, a candidate’s typical user journey will begin by visiting your website, specifically a careers page of some sort. They’ll probably go and look for company reviews on sites like Glassdoor to try and build a picture of what it’s like to work for your organization. Candidates will also go one step further and not only look at your company on social media but they’ll do some investigation in looking at the social profiles of your employees as well as any specific career-related social profiles you may have. Therefore, it’s vitally important to ensure that you are using social media in the most optimised way to sell your company culture to attract talent.
It is crucial that you have a social media presence on channels where your talent pools are active. Hiring millennials? Look at channels like Snapchat where huge numbers of 25 and under are snapping multiple times a day to their networks. Hiring in China? Then you’re not going to use Facebook as a channel to attract Chinese talent due to government restrictions on service in that country.
Can you showcase your company culture in pictures on channels like Instagram? Does your target audience for talent even exist on that channel? Do your research. Know your target audience. Know what channels they’re active on, and strategize around what they can engage with and where.
Use Your Employees
There’s nothing more powerful than employees telling their own stories about what it’s like to work at your company. Invest in empowering your workforce to be brand ambassadors:
- Train them up
- Create a hashtag and let them join the conversation
- Collaborate with them to create careers content that can be shared on social media
When you have an active employee base of brand ambassadors that can complement your own corporate and career social profiles, you have a winning formula for well-rounded company culture messaging. Candidates will look at the profiles of your employees who they may be potentially working with, or being interviewed by. If they see how great it is to work at your company through these profiles, they’re going to naturally be impressed.
It’s crucial to ensure hiring managers are driving their teams to be brand ambassadors online, as well as setting a good example themselves. If hiring managers at your organization want the best talent to join their teams yet they’re not going out of their way to be advocates for showcasing why your company is a great place to work, then you have an internal issue that needs serious change management. Use your people. They are the lifeblood of your company. Seek the highly enthused advocates in the workplace and give them the tools to shout about your company externally on social media.
Use Your Recruiters
If you are a company in a competitive arena for talent, and your recruitment team is scouring the industry for high achieving, passive potential candidates, then it’s highly likely that your recruiters will be the candidates first point of contact from your organization, and first impressions count. Granted, it’s down to the communication skills of the recruiter in the way they position the opportunity that can influence a candidate’s decision to progress forward in the recruitment process but it’s equally crucial that their social profiles are fully representative of the brand and ready to “wow” candidates.
Aside from representing the company well on social media, think about using your recruiters as content generators. What are the reoccurring themes that come up in candidate screening calls? What are the most common questions they get asked? Are these the type of things that can be turned into blogs and infographic content, ready to be shared on social media? Leverage your recruiters. They live and breathe on a day to day basis the true value of your company’s brand in the marketplace. Empower them to be Brand ambassadors like the rest of your workforce and seek their knowledge, and turn it into ideas for careers generated content to attract candidates.
Use Social Advocacy Tools
Now you have fantastic company social profiles that showcase your incredible company culture and your recruiters, hiring managers and general employees are posting about how great it is to work at your company, what’s next? Budget permitting, investing in a social advocacy tool is always a great way to leverage your employees’ individual networks on social media through pushing brand approved content out autonomously.
Personally, I would recommend as many organic posts as possible when it comes to employees posting on social, but social advocacy tools are extremely complimentary and make for ease of sharing content for employees, which is a great way to get their buy-in. Many tools have gamification functionality, meaning you have the potential to reward the real brand ambassadors at your organization who’ve been the most active. Initiatives like this are great for morale and employee engagement internally, whilst benefiting externally from their social sharing activity in amplifying your employer brand.
In summary of how to best use social media as a tool to showcase your company culture; Select the correct channels that match your target audience for talent, train up and generate content with your employees and recruiters to be Brand ambassadors on social media, and invest in a social advocacy tool to automate the social posting activity across your workforce.
About the author: Stuart Hazell, is an Employer Branding and Social Media expert at CA Technologies. His work helps to increase CA’s employer brand through bespoke recruitment marketing strategies.
