Even as recently as a few years ago, spending your days on social media in the workplace was frowned upon. But for a growing number of people, especially marketers, social media platforms have become the top place to engage with an audience. After all, there are millions of users actively interacting with social media content every day. The prevalence of social media use makes it a powerful tool, not just for people who work in Portland’s bustling marketing industry, but for HR managers and recruiters in the area as well.
If you’re looking to recruit marketers for your organization, it’s crucial to have a thorough understanding of the best way to use social media for recruitment. Many marketers are young, creative, and tech-savvy, so to attract top talent, you’ll need to make sure your social media recruitment game is, well, at the top of its game. Here are a few tips on how to use social media to market your organization to marketers:
Nobody enjoys feeling like they’re speaking to a corporate mask. More than many applicants, marketers can be especially sensitive to tone and phrasing. When posting job opportunities on your organization’s social media platforms, it’s a good idea to humanize the wording. Use more colloquial phrases, and stay away from corporate buzzwords.
You may also want to encourage current employees to post about (and tag) your company on social media. Positive testimonials from happy employees help by providing relatable bits of content, and by allowing association of specific people with your organization. Remember, social media is one of the first places potential applicants will go to get a sense of your company culture, so it’s important to put a human face on things!
When a potential employee checks out your organization’s social media accounts, make sure they don’t see tumbleweeds. It’s important to show that your company is actively engaging with the online audience, and offering valuable or interesting content on a regular basis, in addition to letting people know about job opportunities. Share things like important company updates, photos from team building events, and industry-relevant articles. You can also highlight good moments from your company’s history with things like “Throwback Thursday” posts. All of these things help cultivate relationships and grow your organization’s network, which is essential when it’s time to start recruiting marketers.
Make it easy for potential recruits to find you by utilizing a range of different social media platforms. Limiting your career-related posts to just LinkedIn, for example, might mean that your job opportunities are not reaching a significant portion of the potential employee pool, since marketers tend to live, work, and play on a variety of social media platforms.
It’s also important to optimize the messaging for each platform. Be strategic about using hashtags on Twitter and Instagram in order to reach the correct audience. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn have a little more room in terms of post character count, so you can include a few additional details there. However, make sure you’re not posting paragraphs – in order to get readers to come to a scrolling stop, it’s much more effective to stick to short and snappy verbiage. And if anyone knows (and appreciates) the importance of attention-grabbing messaging, it’s marketers.
More than almost anything, potential recruits want to know that your organization is going to be a fun and rewarding place to work. And your company’s social media channels are a great place to showcase this. It’s a good idea to post things such as photos from team building events and company functions, in addition to any company visits to local landmarks (and there are lots in Portland). If your organization participates in volunteer work or social responsibility initiatives, be sure to share pictures and stories from these as well. This will help attract candidates whose values align well with the organization’s values.
When it comes to using social media to recruit marketers, it’s likely that a creative approach will be more effective. Marketers are generally pretty inventive, and tend to seek out the innovative and unexpected. Consider having a little bit of fun with your recruiting messaging, or focusing on the opportunities your company offers for marketers to flex their creative muscles.
For recruiting, especially in a creative field such as marketing, effective social media use can be an HR manager’s best friend. If you’re looking for more advice or assistance with recruiting marketers, the TPD team is happy to help. Feel free to get in touch with us here, give us a call at 1-888-685-3530, or check us out on social media!