You’re creating and sharing great Recruitment Marketing content each and every day that provides candidates with authentic insight into your company culture. So you know that if you want your content to stand out, then you need to continually test and optimize your Recruitment Marketing approach on social media.
Today, we’re sharing 4 social media tips that can elevate your strategy, based on insights we learned from the winners of the 2020 Rally Awards:
- Cisco’s #LoveWhereYouWork LinkedIn Live
- A Look Inside 14 West’s Instagram Strategy
- Squarespace’s Product Design Q3 Pipeline Builder
- Booz Allen Hamilton’s Paid LinkedIn Strategy
The Rally Awards exist to celebrate the best employer brand and Recruitment Marketing work in the world. The awards program recognizes work that has achieved exceptional results and that leads the way in creating true best practices in our industry.
The program features two award categories for social media: Best Use of Organic Social Media and Best Use of Paid Social Media.
Before we share social media tips from the winners, let’s explain the difference between the two awards categories, and why you should consider leveraging both types of social media for your Recruitment Marketing strategy.
Organic social media
Organic social media refers to social media content that’s published without any budget behind it. Companies typically use this approach to help nurture talent and build employer brand awareness steadily over time.
Paid social media
In contrast, paid social media uses sponsored content or ads to boost results more quickly. Paid social media is an effective method to reach target audiences and to attract candidates and build pipelines for immediate or urgent hiring needs.
Rally note: If you’d like to get recognized for your Recruitment Marketing efforts too, don’t forget to enter your work in the 2021 Rally Awards!
Rally Award-winning organic social media approaches to add to your recruiting content strategy
1. Leverage livestream features
The winner of the Rally Award for Best Use of Organic Social Media was Cisco for their livestream strategy using LinkedIn’s beta LinkedIn Live functionality.
Cisco decided to try out LinkedIn Live because their talent brand team noticed that many of their top-performing content pieces were their social media takeovers. Their takeovers feature real employees who take over the reins of their social accounts for the day to share about their work lives on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook.
Knowing that this type of authentic and unfiltered content had been well received in the past, they knew that LinkedIn Live was worth trying out as soon as possible.
To prepare for the launch of their new #LoveWhereYouWork campaign on LinkedIn Live, the team started by developing a topic calendar. The areas they wanted to touch on during their LinkedIn Live included internships at Cisco, recruiter ask me anythings, and a session on work-life balance.
Then they identified 3-4 employees from their San Jose and Raleigh offices that wanted to talk about one of those topics to feature in the livestream. As with their takeovers, before the livestream sessions they conducted a “pre-live meeting” with employees to review expectations and share best practices.
Their #LoveWhereYouWork campaign netted some great results, including 3,000 average engagements and 260,000 minutes watched. In addition, a real win was that 60% of the views came from people with job titles in their key talent pools!
The takeaway here is to tailor your content by focusing on topics that resonate with candidates, while also testing out new and innovative channels for reaching candidates. This is a great way to build brand awareness, improve the candidates experience and stand out from your competitors!
2. Use UTM parameters to track effectiveness
If you want to understand if your Recruitment Marketing content is working, then you need to actively encourage candidates to take tangible actions after engaging with your content. Maybe more importantly, however, is that you need to have the right tools in place to be able to track those tangible actions.
The other Rally Award Winner for the Best Use of Organic Social Media, 14 West, borrows techniques from our peers in marketing in order to do just this. 14 West’s Instagram page uses thoughtful call-to-actions (CTAs) to encourage their Instagram visitors to visit their site, their careers blog and to apply. The team uses tracking links on their CTAs so they can track the user journey from the time someone clicks a link, to the time they finish applying for a role; including whether or not they receive an offer!
View this post on Instagram
This is a great approach to measure the effectiveness of your content. While commonly tracked social metrics, like engagement and impressions, can provide a general indication of how your content is landing, these UTM parameters elevate the level of insight you can gain from your social content.
UTM parameters are tags you can add to the end of any URL. It allows you to track information such as where visitors are coming from to access your careers site. You can view this information in your Recruitment Marketing platform or in Google Analytics.
If you’re looking for more insight on how to set this up at your organization, here is a guide from Hootsuite on How to Use UTM Parameters to Track Social Media Success.
When it comes to measuring the success of your Recruitment Marketing campaigns, UTM parameters can provide deeper metrics across the candidate journey to learn how a candidate is truly interacting with your social media content and where you can optimize on an ongoing basis.
Rally Award-winning paid social media strategies to add to your recruiting content strategy
3. Research your audience and A/B test
The winner of the Best Use of Paid Social Media, Squarespace, needed to find and hire more product designers. When the talent brand team sat down with their recruiters, the recruitment team identified that they wanted to post job ads on Dribbble and Behance, 2 social media sites where creatives spend time online.
However, the talent brand team thought that LinkedIn might actually be a more effective channel for reaching this audience while they’re already in a career mindset. In particular, the talent brand team wanted to try running a targeted LinkedIn campaign to drive potential candidates to a LinkedIn Pipeline Builder page with more details on Squarespace’s product design opportunities.
LinkedIn Pipeline Builder is a tool that helps organizations build targeted candidate pipelines by leveraging ads, personalized landing pages within the LinkedIn platform and recruiter license integrations.
To convince the recruiters to give this approach a try, the talent brand team used LinkedIn’s campaign manager tool to research whether the audience was actually reachable on the platform. You can use the LinkedIn campaign manager tool by starting to set up an ad, but not actually putting in the payment details or starting the ad. This is a step earlier in the ad set-up process where you can enter in job titles, locations and many other criteria, and LinkedIn will provide an estimate of how many people you’ll be able to reach who match that criteria for different price ranges.
The team was able to identify that there were a significant number of product managers who were reachable on the platform, which convinced their recruiting team to give this approach a try!
From there, the talent brand team wrote copy for the Pipeline Builder landing page in collaboration with the recruiting team to ensure the messaging would resonate with their target candidates. Since the recruiters were very familiar with the candidate mindset and typical persona for the role, this ensured the Pipeline Builder landing page was personalized to the audience.
They also A/B tested 3 different ads before launching the full campaign to increase the likelihood that the ads would succeed. A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of a landing page, email, or other marketing asset and measuring the difference in performance.
The campaign drove impressive results, including 22,385 impressions, 479 clicks, 151 social actions, 116 landing page conversions and 33 application conversions. Squarespace was also able to make a hire out of this campaign with a total spend of only $1,500!
This approach shows how research and testing will save you time, money and effort in the long run! This type of thorough and informed approach can ensure you ensure your paid social ads budget is used as optimally as possible.
4. Consult all your business stakeholders
At the end of the day, recruitment success is tied to business success. The ultimate goal of recruiting is to bring someone on board who will add value to your business. That’s why when you’re planning your Recruitment Marketing strategies, you should engage all the relevant stakeholders — from your recruiters to your business managers.
Our other Paid Social Media award winner, Booz Allen, used just this approach when developing their paid media strategy. The team worked closely with the organization’s business groups to identify priority roles and develop personalized campaigns around them. Using this consultative and collaborative approach, the team has developed a range of strong content pieces for their social ads.
Working closely with your business stakeholders is a smart approach. Leaders and members of different business functions can help to ensure that your content is authentic since they have a deep understanding of the team culture, candidate persona and employee experience.
In addition, they know which employees to spotlight based on personality types, engagement and job performance insights. This type of detailed information can help you craft more effective and authentic employer brand and Recruitment Marketing materials.
As a result of their collaborative efforts, Booz Allen’s paid LinkedIn performance is an active contributing factor to their hiring growth year-over-year. Last year, 2,090 of their hires were influenced by LinkedIn content, yielding 190 hires generated from Booz Allen sponsored updates!
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Ultimately, if you want to keep your Recruitment Marketing content on social media fresh and engaging, then you need to continue to try out new approaches to elevate your strategy over time so it doesn’t become stagnant.
We hope these organic and paid social media examples from award-winning Recruitment Marketing and employer brand teams provide some inspiration for new social recruiting strategies.
And if your team is doing outstanding work of your own, then you deserve to be recognized for your hard work and creativity too. You can learn more and apply for the 2021 Rally Awards here!
