Social Recruiting through Your Customer's Success

To build social followers who may be interested in a career with your company, you’re gonna need content. We know that just sharing jobs on Twitter isn’t a winning strategy to attract and engage candidates. But dang, that social beast needs feeding!

So where can you get valuable content to share through social media? And recruit quality candidates at the same time? Look to your customers and partners!

It’s one thing to tell candidates that you’re a great place to work; it’s even better to show them through the success of your customers. By sharing customer stories, you can show candidates teamwork in action and the impact they’ll be making. And if you have noteworthy customer names, that ain’t bad either.

Plus, by engaging your customers and partners and their social followers, you’re tapping into new ways to reach the talent that’s in your industry. Your next great employee may come from a customer or partner, or someone in their network.

Who’s Practicing It

Pepper Construction has developed an active Twitter feed that provides a great picture (literally) of what it’s like to work for and with the company. As a general contractor, Pepper depends on subcontractors, architects and other trade partners, not just its own employees, to ensure project success. Its Twitter feed features project managers and their teams speaking at town hall meetings, company leadership breaking ground with customers on new projects and employees volunteering in the community.

Pepper Construction knows there are potential candidates among its social followers. So its Twitter profile header photo showcases the company’s recognition as a 2016 Top Place to Work by the Chicago Tribune.

What We Like

How Pepper Construction finds creative ways to include photos and images in nearly every tweet to show the faces behind the construction as well as its customer projects at various stages. Pepper Construction smartly weaves together customer stories with employee stories, as well as photos of office outings and community volunteerism. Rather than promoting jobs, the firm lets its employees, their work and the company culture do the social recruiting.

Photos can boost your retweets by 35% (Twitter).

Recruitment Marketing Strategy Behind It

Uses your customer’s success to tell the value of working for your company
Builds social followers through storytelling, not just promoting jobs
Uses photos and images to amplify reach of social content
Taps into customer’s and partner’s social followers to recruit from your industry

Making it Happen

Developing an active Twitter channel requires making social sharing part of your culture. You’ll need to ask and remind employees to snap photos while they’re on the job site. If they don’t want to share the pics on their social channels, they can send the photos to you, and you can share them through the company’s Twitter account.

You also can check what your customers and partners are tweeting. Encourage them to tag your Twitter handle when relevant. Your Twitter content doesn’t need to be original – curated content can be just as valuable – so long as it’s relevant to your target audience.

On a Dime

No budget required to implement this idea. Just some time to remind employees to send you updates and photos, to monitor your customers and partners on Twitter and then to share the content. For a few hundred dollars a year, you can use a social media management tool like Hootsuite to monitor other Twitter accounts to find content worth retweeting.