The data is in, Rally community! After nearly a year and over 1,000 pieces of content, we’re premiering hot-off-the-press data from Rally® Inside™, our new Recruitment Marketing analytics and benchmarking platform, to learn what a successful, high-engagement social recruiting strategy looks like.
You’ll learn what content topics recruitment marketers should be posting to attract today’s talent, what that content should look and sound like, when and where to post that content on social media and other digital channels and so much more!
But before we get to the juicy details, it’s important to answer why recruitment marketers need to be measuring social engagement in the first place.
The data below is from January to October 2021 and was taken from Rally Inside, which tracks and analyzes candidate engagement with content, discovers and reports on what matters most to job seekers and benchmarks strategies across employers globally. The data is based on 1,000, organic (i.e. not paid) social posts from 28 employers from around the world across such industries as tech, healthcare, biotech, banking and hospitality.
Why should recruitment marketers measure engagement?
Most company’s social media real estate is taken up by marketing and communications teams, not recruitment marketers. Many companies don’t have designated channels for their recruiting content, meaning their messages are squeezed in between all other corporate content. When they do get to post, it’s often only a few times a week, or, in some cases, a month!
With so few opportunities to post, gaining access to engagement data is essential. Being able to prove that your posts are doing well will help you build a case for why Recruitment Marketing deserves more social media real estate and a higher posting frequency. More importantly, it’s an essential first step if you want to reap the maximum benefit from the data below! Even if your posts aren’t performing well, having access to engagement data can help you understand what needs to be changed.
Now, onto the data!
What type of content attracts candidates to employers?
Speaking of what needs to be changed, data from Rally Inside suggests a discrepancy in the type of content that recruitment marketers are posting and the type of content that candidates are engaging with most.
Across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, the most popular content topics posted by recruitment marketers were:
- Jobs (e.g. individual job posts or posts promoting a job family)
- People (e.g. employee stories and company culture)
- Company (e.g. perks, benefits and DEI programs).
The most popular content topics posted by recruitment marketers.
This ranking makes sense when you think about the course of events throughout the year, especially when it relates to the economic resurgence and companies beginning to hire again. However, it omits one content topic that recruiters need to be paying more attention to, which is candidate-focused content.
This is defined as content providing candidate advice or showcasing career progression within a company. Candidate-focused content was found to receive the most engagement from candidates, followed by company and job-related content.
The content topics that candidates engage with most.
With time to think over the course of the pandemic, some candidates are returning to work as usual, but many are considering changing companies or even changing careers entirely. The data suggest that company and job-related content is still important, but it’s not at the top of the list. Candidates are more interested in seeing and hearing from employees at your company who have successfully navigated and benefitted from a major change in their role or career.
When and where should you post content on social media?
Of course, nailing your content strategy is only half the battle; the better you can promote that content across your various channels — at the right time — the more engagement you’ll receive.
Let’s start with how to approach your posting cadence for different social media platforms. On average, social recruiting posts get 30% of all their clicks on day 1 on Facebook and LinkedIn, and 40% on day 1 for Twitter. However, the lifespan of social recruiting content on Facebook and LinkedIn is 2 days, it’s merely hours on Twitter.
The lifespan of recruitment marketing content on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
This means that, to avoid your content getting lost in the noise, aim to post your Recruitment Marketing content at least once every 2 days on Facebook and LinkedIn and even more frequently on Twitter.
If this seems intimidating, do what I’ve done on Twitter for years: repurpose content! Keep in mind, though, that Twitter can recognize when you’re reposting the exact same content; they’ll even penalize you with less engagement each time you repost. To avoid this happening, change up the copy every time you repost.
As you start posting more to these platforms, use these Average Click Per Link rates from Rally Inside to gauge your performance.
- Twitter: 6
- Facebook: 44
- LinkedIn: 28
If your rates are equal to or higher, great! But if they’re lower, it might be time to start digging into your content or promotion strategy for possible areas of improvement. One change might be to start having employees share content across their networks, which we found to produce 2-4 times the number of clicks compared to posts from corporate pages.
Rally note: To learn more about how Recruitment Marketing strategies are shifting as the economy opens up, and what strategies you can use right now to attract and engage talent in this competitive labor market, check out the Rally® Inside Recruitment Marketing Analytics Report here!
To help justify a higher posting frequency or reposting strategy to leadership, you can explain that success on social media starts with working with each platform’s algorithm, which expects a specific balance of engaging content and frequent posting. By not achieving and maintaining this balance, you’ll always be placing a cap on your potential reach and engagement.
Don’t forget about your other digital channels!
Other than social media, how many other channels do you have for reaching candidates? If several, do you have a way to tell which ones are worth pursuing, and which ones aren’t?
With the help of Rally Inside, we lined up all of the different digital channels being used by our employers to answer this question. In the end, email, employee advocacy and talent newsletters came out on top.
The different digital channels and their respective engagement levels from candidates.
If you’re sitting on an established talent network, whether that’s a network of people who have applied for a job, signed up for your talent newsletter or indicated they want to receive communication from you, reaching out to them by email is a swift road to more engagement. If you can combine these emails with mass texts, even better!
Consistency is key here, as people within your network will be at different stages in their career journey at different times. An email promoting open roles within your company might not appeal to someone at one point in time, but eventually, you might catch them when they’re looking to make a change.
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After only a year in operation, we couldn’t be more thrilled with the results from Rally Inside and the helpful insights it’s already producing for our community. For now, we hope you’ll incorporate the findings above to boost engagement and give yourself a competitive hiring edge entering into the new year.
If you’d like a more personalized look into what Recruitment Marketing content and messaging is driving success at your organization, be sure to sign up for Rally Inside today!
