We are starting to reach a point where social media recruiting isn’t just a “nice to have” part of your strategy, but it’s becoming a “must-have” for a successful recruiting strategy.

According to Recruiting Daily, 94% of recruiters have used social media for sourcing or attracting talent. 59% of workers say social media impacted or influenced their last job search.

The question is no longer if you should use social media, but instead how you go about using it.

I wanted to share 3 tips that could help you start to leverage social media in your recruiting efforts more than you already are.

1. Use Twitter Hashtags to Help Candidates Find Your

Hashtags are a great way to help people find and share your content on social media. Not familiar with hashtags? Take a look at this screen shot:

The hashtag is #DisneyJobs. You’ll notice there’s no spacing or punctuations.

How is this helpful?

This broadens your potential audience that allow people to find you that aren’t already following your brand on Twitter. This allows people who are searching Twitter for those terms to find you.

When you post a job, add some broad hashtags to help it reach a wider audience like #job, #jobs, #jobhunt, #careers, and more.

You can also use more specific hashtags that are career specific like #engineers, #designers, or #accountants.

2. Make sure your brand stays on message by creating a Careers Facebook page or a Careers Twitter account.

In many cases the customers for your company are not the same as your potential candidates. This makes it important to separate your messaging when you are creating posts and content to attract candidates.

This content will likely not blend well or be relevant to the brand that is marketing to customers so it will be useful to create separate social media accounts to market your company and jobs to potential employees.

This also allows the recruiting team to have direct access to posting on social instead of going through the Marketing department.

3. Get employees to help share your culture

The people who work at your company are the best people to share company culture authentically on social media.

To help get them comfortable talking about the brand, create a social media policy. Knowing the boundaries for using social media at your company allows employees to creatively promote your brand so they aren’t worried about making mistakes.

Once you have that policy set up, it’s time to encourage them to share honestly on social media about what your workplace culture is like. Have them use company hashtags that you created from tip 1.

You can even bring more exposure to your employee referral program (if you have one) and get people to promote to potentially earn some extra cash if they can refer high quality people who end up getting hired.

These are just a few ideas to get you to start thinking of all the ways you could be leveraging social media to really help you with recruiting.

Did you know that it could be 30-50% more applicants?

In a highly competitive market where there are more jobs than candidates this can be a great way to get your role in front of people who are not actively searching. These are usually your best candidates!

I’d love to hear how you and your company are using social media to recruit. Go ahead let me know in the comments.