How to Use Social Media for Recruiting Millennials

Earlier, the talent search or the recruitment landscape was like this—

Post job ads in newspapers or trawl through recruiting sites, wait for candidates to apply, and navigate dozens of applications.

However, this recruitment style won’t work for millennials. This generation is the resurgence of emotional intelligence. Millennials think and feel together — if they don’t feel connected with a brand, they won’t think about it.

And social media is the best way to establish one on one connection with millennials. That’s why 92 percent of recruiters (Adweek) have already included social media in their recruitment efforts.

Now, advertising a job post isn’t the only way to use social media in the recruitment process. In this post, you will learn all the right ways to use social media for recruiting millennials. Let’s recruit millennials now!

The Case Social Media for Recruitment – Why is Social Media a Perfect Way to Recruit Millennials?

Millennial professionals behave differently from baby boomers and Gen X. They are confident, and ambitious achievers with high expectations from their employers. They are very keen to know more about their employer before working for them.

With social media platforms, recruiters get an opportunity to identify and attract millennial talent. If that’s not convincing enough to use social media for recruiting millennials, look at some facts:

• In 2019, 3.5 billion global social media users will be present, equal to 45% of the world population. (Emarsys)
• The most significant percentage of social media users are millennials (36%). (Marketing Charts)
• 79% of millennials use social media multiple times per day. (Marketingprofs)
• 73% of millennials have found their last position through a social media platform. (Aberdeen Group)
• Social media is used for recruitment and hiring by 84 percent of organizations. (Post Beyond)
• 82 percent of businesses use social media to recruit passive job applicants. (Marketing Sherpa)

Tips to Use Social Media for Recruiting Millennials

Using social media recruitment strategies, you can target both active and passive candidates. You can use social networks in numerous ways to reach millennials, such as:

Build your online presence

Do you know why people are keen to work for Google, Facebook, or Microsoft? Because they have built a brand that everyone knows and wants to work for.

Social media helps you promote your company among the people you need in order to grow and thrive. With online branding, you can connect with passionate millennials who may believe and thus align with your company’s ideology. You simply need to show your company’s work culture on social media, and the right candidate will automatically walk your way.

Videos help to engage passive candidates

Once you have made your presence known on your chosen social media channels, you must work on engagement. And right now, video content is the most effective engagement tool.

52 percent of marketing professionals (FastWeb) admit that video provides the greatest ROI. With videos, you can use body language, visual clues, and verbal tone to convey your message. Through videos, you can stimulate millennials emotions using vivid methods, like:

• Spontaneous Q&A sessions.
• Give people a behind-the-scenes look.
• Share employee experience clips, etc.

Encourage employees to share posts on social media

The whole purpose of social media is to expand your reach. When your employees share/reshare or post something about your company, it widens your reach. You can circulate your posts around different professional circles.

Make your employees your brand ambassadors and lure new talent your way. Just make sure to have a corporate social media policy in order before you let your employees take the lead on social networks.

For example, Starbucks builds its employee-friendly brand on Instagram by including its employees in the social media recruitment campaigns.

Share high-quality content

Millennials have a short attention span and you need to reach out to them in this very span. To keep millennials engaged on your social media pages, you have to constantly share good and relevant quality content with them. Your content needs to be well-drafted and shouldn’t look spam in any way.

Millennials are super smart people; they don’t like over promotional or fabricated stories. So, be real and innovative in your social media posts. Some of the common content style preferred by social media includes:

• “How to” guides
• Blog posts
• Infographics
• Podcasts
• Photographs, etc.

Use relevant hashtags

Take time to understand hashtag science. Putting ‘#’ in front of any word won’t help you reach your targeted audience. You have to understand hashtags reach based on—

• How many people use it?
• Geographic dynamics
• Demographics
• Target audience, etc.

If your hashtags won’t attract your targeted audience, it is redundant, and you shouldn’t use it. Also, try to be inventive with your hashtags and personalize your hashtags.

For instance, MasterCard Canada used the #internswanted hashtag to recruit millennial interns at their company. This hashtag connected them with 532 qualified candidates for the internship program.

Launch campaigns to attract talent

Introducing a campaign is the best way to keep your audience engaged and get in touch with the right talent. Using campaigns, you can even promote a social cause or your company’s core values.

In 2019, The Heineken Company launched a ‘Go Place 2.0′ campaign that inspired future talent. They showcased real-life employee experience on the campaign. By featuring 33 Heineken employees’ stories, they share their brand entrepreneurial culture worldwide.

Build a community

As already mentioned, don’t spam your audience with subpar content; share some value with them and build a community of like-minded people.

Don’t just share information; create two-way communication with your audience. Share content that starts a conversation and keeps it flowing. Directly approach people in your network who could be potential candidates for your company.

Also, don’t straightaway ask a person to join your organization. First, you should vet potential candidates by talking about your company, benefits, and other opportunities of working there. Like, Marriot’s career page has over 1.2 million Facebook likes. They post twice a day, put their employees’ achievements in the spotlight and share how it feels to work with them.

Parting Thoughts

Social media recruiting is a slow and steady process with long-term benefits. Initially, you have to focus on building your network using high-value and engaging content. Once you have a strong social career presence, millennial professionals will automatically knock at your door.

So, let’s start building your company’s career page on social media now and take leverage from your personal talent pool.

About The Author – GARIMA SHARMA 

Garima Sharma is a subject matter expert for Personality Assessments, Talent Management, 360 Degree Appraisals, Employee Engagement, Feedback Surveys, etc. She is also a blogger who loves to write articles, posts, whitepapers, etc., in the HR space.