Social Media Marketing Strategy for Recruitment | 10 Step Guide

Social media is a game-changer for driving leads and attracting top talent. Unlock the secrets to a successful social media strategy with our 10-step guide to social media marketing for recruitment businesses.

Whether you are a new or established recruitment business, you will likely be using social media or considering using it to connect with target audiences.

It’s no secret that social media has firmly established itself as the tool of choice for many recruitment businesses looking to increase inbound sales leads, attract candidates and ultimately scale their business and brand. The only thing is that many recruitment businesses haven’t really taken the time to develop an effective social media strategy.

What are the advantages of using social media for recruitment?

To put it simply, it’s the easiest and most effective way to pique your target audience’s interest and encourage them to engage with you and your business. Not convinced? Check out our blog on the power of social media marketing for recruitment agencies.

However, developing a social media marketing strategy for recruitment is by no means an easy task – especially if you recruit in a niche specialism or industry. Not only do you have to really to know your target audience, you’ve also got to find out what platforms your audience hang out on and how you are going to reach them.

Sounds like a daunting prospect? Don’t despair, we’ve got you covered and developed 10 simple steps to use to build the best recruitment social media strategy.

1. Identify your target audience (clients & candidates)

The first step in developing an effective recruitment social media strategy is knowing exactly who your target audience is, what’s important to them, what challenges they are facing and what they are influenced by. Many businesses make the mistake of thrashing together a social media plan that just focuses on talking about themselves and promoting their services, without considering audiences pain-points and needs. This can result in a lot of wasted time, resource and budget.

Instead, take the time to get to truly understand who your target audience is and what they care about. If you haven’t already, you’ll want to develop audience personas. In short, these are profiles of your customers with basic information and demographics and overviews of what challenges they face, where they go to get information, and what they look for when choosing services to procure.

Kick off by making a list of key information you need to capture and then make some general assumptions and observation about your target audience based on your previous experience and engagement with them. Key information to list and answer include:

Recruitment audience persona guide:

• Job Title/Position/Industry
• Typical Age
• Education
• Location/Commute
• Personality
• Introvert or Extrovert
• Analytical or Creative
• Conservative or Liberal
• Passive or Active
• Personal Goals & Motivations
• Companies Goals
• Frustrations, Pain-Points, Challenges
• Brands they are inspired by

Conduct market research and subtly sense check these with existing clients and candidates to find out what information they look for, what stops them scrolling and what they care about most when using social media in a professional capacity.

Once you know who your target audience is and what they care about, you’ll be able to reach and engage with them more effectively through social media. Your market research will also help drive the types of content to use in your social strategy.

2. Select the right social media platforms

Now that you know more about your target audiences, it’s time to understand what social media platforms they hang out on.

When selecting what social media platforms are most suitable for your content to reach and be engaged with by your target audiences, consider the following for each social media channel:

• Which social media platforms have the largest populations of visitors who fit within your target audience demographics?
• Which social media platforms offer the best features that will allow you effectively promote your content and call to actions away from their platform to view your own website and collateral (this is called linking away).
• Which social media platforms offer the best features for users to react, interact, share and engage with your content.

Remember, social media marketing beyond LinkedIn for recruiters does exist! We recommend broadening your exposure across two or three platforms, rather than just focusing on LinkedIn. For example, Instagram can showcase your values to potential clients in a more visually appealing way, while X (formally known as Twitter) can be used for networking with industry leaders in your sectors.

3. Develop specific strategy goals and objectives

Before you can get started developing your social media strategy campaign, you need to determine your goals and objectives are. Consider not only what you want to achieve from your strategy but also how these goals align with your wider business strategy.

Here are some common goals that many recruitment businesses use as a starting point for their social media campaigns:

• Drive more traffic to their website
• Generate new inbound sales leads
• Convert leads into sales
• Sell a specific recruitment service
• Attract actively seeking candidates without the need to utilise job boards
• Engage and attract passively seeking candidates
• Build communities of niche, hard-to-find talent
• Communicate with clients
• Establish or build a brand presence

When your measuring the success of a recruitment social media strategy, you have to make sure that your goals are clearly outlined from the start. We recommend using a SMART goal system to help ensure that your social media campaign goals are clear and attainable. Using (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals is one of the best ways to set yourself up for success.

However, setting a goal of “getting more jobs and clients from social media” is not a good enough goal to measure success! You’ll need to consider how many jobs and clients you want, how you will measure success, and in what timeline you will achieve this goal. You’ll also want to make sure that the goal is relevant and realistic given your timeline and resources.

You should also consider that your goals will also play a key role in your wider sales strategy. If you want to drive traffic to your website, your call to action will be different than if you are just trying to spark engagements and conversations with and among your target audience. Keep your goals in mind when choosing the type of content to post.

4. Decide on what content types will go on what platform

Each social media platform has different features that you’ll need to consider when using them as part of your social media strategy. It’s best to research what features they have in advance, that way, you are able to maximise your results by using each platform to its full potential.

After you’ve decided on which platforms to use, you will have a better understanding of how you can promote your content on each of them. Some platforms have features that will allow you to publish different types of content to engage your audience. For example, Facebook, Instagram and more recently LinkedIn have a live video streaming and webinar hosting feature that allows you to connect with your audience virtually and instantly.

5. Recruitment marketing content calendar

Know you know the goals of your social media strategy and how you will post content across your chosen platforms, it’s time to create a content calendar. Content plays an important part in your social media strategy. It’s the first line of communication and it’s what your followers and target audiences will see before deciding whether or not to engage with you/your business.

The types of content that you create will change depending on your goals and objectives. Here are some types of content that you may want to include in your content calendar:

6 types of social media content to consider

• Articles – Blog articles are ideal for content that focuses on your audience’s challenges, but they can also be effective for middle and bottom-funnel content that gets more specific regarding the problems you solve with your services.
• Text Posts – You can use text social media posts that include a call to action in the comments or work to spark engagement and conversations. The use of emojis is a great way to grab attention and highlight key messages and topics in text posts.
• Imagery – You can use all types of branding, images and visual attention grabbers in your social media strategy from infographics to short sentences and statements to promote and share your content.
• Videos – Videos not only get the attention of busy feed-scrollers, but they are a great way to break down complex topics or share your message with audiences.
• Slide Shows – Slide show images are great for taking audiences on a journey or promoting a multi-point solution or case study. Platforms like Instagram support this with simple images, whereas LinkedIn offers a PDF scrolling feature.
• Guides, Brochures and Whitepapers – are great to use as gated content because they provide enough additional value to encourage your audience to hand over their contact information.

Once you have an idea of the types of content you would like to create and post, you can start deciding on the right themes and topics. We highly suggest collaborating with your recruitment consultants and make the topic brainstorming process a group effort. Choose consultants and senior leaders in your business that know your target audience well and ask them for help in coming up with topics for content.

After you know the types of content and themes that you will be creating, you should add this information to a content schedule/calendar. There are a host of free and paid platforms available online to us to build out your calendar, or just create a shared excel or Google spreadsheet.

A content calendar/schedule makes it easy to see what content is coming up and keeps content collaborators and creators on the same page about tasks and deadlines. No two businesses content calendars will look the same! So you should choose a format that works best for you and your recruitment business.

When crafting your content calendar, we recommend you include the following:

• Topic or title
• Description
• Content type
• Content owner/author
• Content approver
• Content creation completion date
• Content posting date
• Desired goals of content (like more candidate leads for a certain role etc.)
• Performance reporting metrics (impressions, interactions, engagements, comments, shares, conversions)

Keep this content calendar where everyone involved can access and update it. Google drive or Sharepoint are both highlight recommend. It’s important that everyone involved can update their progress and make any notes on issues or delays so that it’s clear when the content will be complete so you can update your content posting calendar.

6. Creating your social media content

Now that you know what content you need for your social media strategy, it’s time to create it!

If you’re crafting the social media content yourself, Canva can be a great starting point, offering both free and paid versions. CapCut can also be handy for creating quick and easy video edits. These tools provide user-friendly interfaces and templates to help you design eye-catching graphics and videos for your social media platforms.

If you are outsourcing the content creation to an agency (like Halt ) or freelancer, make sure that they have specific instructions on what you want the content to be about, the content type, when you want to see a first draft and when it needs to be ready by in order for it to be published on time.

No matter what resource options you take to create your content, keep the following in mind as you build a bank of content for both your clients and candidates:

Stay on brand!

Though different people may be writing or creating visual content, all of your content should be in line with your brand’s visual identity, voice and persona. Creating specific brand guidelines can help communicate your brand parameters.

Call to actions

When appropriate, make sure that the content has a clear and effective ‘call to action’ that uses action verbs to encourage your target audience to engage and interact with your content. Whether it points them to your website or encourages them to engage in conversation with you, it should be clear and specific.

Re-purpose content

Once you have built out a content library and themes for your recruitment social media strategy, always look for ways to re-purpose, recycle and link back to this content in future posts and content. This lets yoy maximise the content’s potential but also gives you the opportunity to promote your authority as a thought leader when referencing other relatable content that you have created.

For written content and articles, make sure that the content is engaging and free of grammatical errors. Break up the content using headings, sub-headings, bullet-points and calls to action to make sure that it’s easy for your audience to digest.

When it comes to creating visual content, you will want to ensure that any images or video you use are of professional quality and that you have an appropriate license and rights to use the image if using imagery and video from online sources.

Lacking the skill, time or resource needed to create your content? Check out our On-Demand resource service.

7. What is the best time to post on social media?

Once the content is created and ready, it’s time to schedule it according to your schedule in your content calendar. The pacing of your posts will depend on a number of factors such as your desired goals, types of content, where and when your audience is most active. It’s best to do a little research before you start posting so you know when the best times to post on each social media platform.

Optimal times to post depend on the social media platforms as well as the audience you are trying to reach. While there is no 100% full-proof formula to the best times to post on each platform, research and data from strategies we have delivered suggests:

Best posting times for recruiters on LinkedIn

LinkedIn remains the number 1 social media platform for professionals, so it should come as no surprise that the least amount of engagement happens on the weekends. That’s not to say that content doesn’t perform well on weekends, but the optimum time to post on LinkedIn is:

Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, 11am to 4pm.

Though engagement varies each day, Tuesday through Thursday tends to be the best days with the highest amount of engagement. However, if your target audience may be an evening commuter on the London underground, posting as late as 6pm in the evening has also proved to achieve high engagement rates.

X (Twitter)

X is a unique beast when it comes to social media platforms, reports published last year highlighted that the best day and time to post on X was: Friday, 8:30am to 11am.

However, as long as it’s aligned with your target audience persona, you can still expect decent engagement on any content posted from 11am to 2pm each day of the working week.

Facebook

The best times to post on Facebook are: Wednesday and Thursday, 11:30am to 2pm.

Evenings, early mornings, and weekends have the least amount of engagement.

Instagram

Research shows that the best days and times to post on Instagram are: Tuesday through to Friday, 8am to 9am and 4pm to 7pm.

Keep in mind that Sunday has the lowest engagement.

8. Audience Engagement

So many people fall foul of the trap of posting content and then sitting back and forgetting about their content and most importantly – those that engage with it. It’s critical to the success of your content that you monitor engagement and respond to what others are saying. This can be achieved through setting up alerts to your phone/inbox or using online tools to capture all responses and engagement into a central dashboard.

Set time out each day to through alerts and notifications to see who you may need to respond to and engagement it. If clients/candidates ask questions, answer them to the best of your ability. If they are leaving a comment, sharing their thoughts on the topic or trying to start a conversation, take this opportunity to authentically engage with them.

9. Tactic adjustments

There is no guideline to when you should/shouldn’t make adjustments to your content strategy. For example, if you discover that a particular piece of content is really resonating with target audiences, explore other avenues to promote that content and gain more traction from it.

If tactics aren’t working, discover what works by testing different things along the way. Just be sure to monitor the results each step of the way and compare these with your initial goals to determine if you’re on course.

10. Analyse results and respond

All that hard work you’ve put into developing and implementing your social media strategy will pay off when you start to see more social media followers, increased traffic coming to your website, more inbound sales leads and direct candidate applications happening as a result of your content and online activities. It’s important to track these successes and translate them into what results they have brought to your business in terms of return on investment (ROI).

However, you need to go beyond just tracking the successes of your strategy. If you really want to get the most out of your social media strategy, you’ll need to analyse the data from your social media efforts and use it to respond and make adjustments for future campaigns. Identify which content and tactics worked best, which still need some work and what content needs to be put in the ‘it will never work’ file.

Does managing your social media and creating content get in the way of what you’re really good at?

Whether you need to grow your brand, engage a wider audience, increase inbound sales leads or simply need to attract more direct candidates, take the pain out of finding the time and resources with our outsourced social media solutions designed specifically for recruitment businesses.