The primary reason recruiter use social media as a recruitment tool is to connect with potential employees at a more personal level. Using an unconventional platform is the perfect way to show top talent that you’re NOT a conventional employers.
We’ve written a series of posts about best practices for social recruiting on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. In this article, we’re going to talk about the fringe platforms, the spaces not yet infiltrated by recruiters, primed to recruit your next employee.
While Snapchat may not be an emerging platform, it’s certainly unconventional. Along with its face swaps, puppy dog filters, and hot dog DJs, it’s still the go to platform for users under the age of 25.
Similar to Instagram, Snapchat is a great space for employer’s to build their brand. Businesses can use it to tell great stories about the work going on inside and around their company. But, unlike Instagram, Snapchat is a great platform to target candidates directly.
Nobody’s done this better than Snapchat themselves. The ghostly app used their geofilters to recruit engineers at the Airbnb and Uber headquarters in Silicon Valley. Geofilters, if you haven’t heard of them, are Snapchat filters that will only show up within the app in specific areas. When Snapchat released their filter, Uber and Airbnb employees would scroll through Snapchat’s filters and see one that read “Is this place driving you mad?” While there’s no word on the ROI of this stunt, it undoubtedly got a few workers thinking.
And it’s not just for an eccentric and creative company like Snapchat. JP Morgan and McDonald's have used filters to attract millennials employees.
If you’re not already on Snapchat, it may be a good idea to try it out. But, don’t feel the need to poach talent from your main competitor just yet. Start small and try implementing a geofilter at your next high school or university hiring fair. It’s a sure way to engage students.
Medium is a platform for bloggers from all walks of life to share their thoughts and interact with likeminded individuals. They’re like LinkedIn blogs but easier to navigate and—let’s admit it—cooler. Therefore, they’re the perfect place for your business to start sharing their stories in word and picture form.
One of the perks about using Medium as a business is that it’s a common places for professionals to hang out. Everyone from Hillary Clinton to Tim O’Reilly use their medium accounts to post personal thoughts that go beyond 140 characters.
Just like any other social media platforms, you can use Medium to post content, follow others, and comment and like posts that interest you. Unlike other social media platforms you can try and get your content posted to publications (another name for accounts) that gain more traction.
A great strategy for businesses looking to increase their employer brand is to have your CEO or an executive post a blog in a popular publication. Put a call to action at the end of your post asking people to contact your company if they’re interested in working with you. After the post has gone out, follow up with users that seem particularly interested.
If your company hasn’t already started using Slack, you might in the next couple years. It’s the messaging platform that helps reduce the endless internal emails that plague many companies.
What many people don’t know about Slack is that they host public forums and channels not connected to any particular business called Communities. If you’re a developer, for example, you can join a channel with other developers from other companies and talk code (or whatever developers talk about) helping each other with problems, sharing resources, growing closer via Slack.
If you’re looking to connect with top candidates in a space where they feel comfortable, Slack Communities could be the perfect place to do it. But be wary of shamelessly recruiting. While it may be tempting to tell the entire channel about a job opening, respect that this is a channel for people wanting to grow in their craft. It may not be a bad idea to throw in a job posting now and then, just make sure they’re very few and far between.
Get started on a Slack Community by checking out one of these 12 Slack Communities.
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What’s that? You’ve read all of our blogs on social recruiting? And the applications are flooding in? Now that you have a few candidates you’re excited about, you need a hiring process that won’t scare them away. Take a look through our free guide How to Run a Winning Interview Process and renovate your interview operations.