The Fall season is a busy time of year for Recruitment Marketing and talent acquisition professionals. There’s the pressure of seasonal hiring surges, the rush to meet end-of-year recruiting plans and the organization of your employee generated content for National Coffee Day. What?! Yes, it’s celebrated at the beginning of October each year, and if you missed it, don’t worry, there are many more upcoming holidays this Fall (arguably more important) that your company can celebrate to show your culture and values.
To help you plan your Fall social media content calendar, we’ve provided a list of holidays coming up over the next couple of months that your company may want to celebrate, as well as best practices in how to create social recruiting content that will attract and engage candidates to your employer brand and open jobs.
With a little advanced planning and coordination, you can encourage employee engagement in the upcoming holidays and showcase your company’s celebrations through social media to help boost your talent attraction efforts. Let’s go!
Rally Note:
Get more strategies and tips by watching our webinar: Build Your Fall Social Recruiting Calendar. Whether you’re responsible for managing your company’s social media channels or you create content for your personal pages, you’ll walk away from this webinar learning Rally’s best-practice framework for creating a content calendar, backed by the latest Recruitment Marketing benchmark data from our Rally® Inside™ tool.
Fall Holidays for Employers to Celebrate on Social Media
First, let’s look at the upcoming holidays this Fall. These holidays are a great opportunity to bring more awareness to your employer brand over social media, showcase the company’s culture and values through your Recruitment Marketing content and encourage employee engagement on social media as well, to help you reach even more potential candidates.
A pro tip is to get your Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) involved in organizing your company’s participation and helping to gather stories that you can use to create engaging social content.
Here’s a list of the top social media holidays that many employers celebrate:
October Social Media Holidays
- Global Diversity Awareness Month
- Hispanic Heritage Month (through Oct. 15)
- Black History Month (UK)
- October 1: National Coffee Day
- October 10: World Mental Health Day
- October 10: Indigenous Peoples’ Day
- October 10: Thanksgiving (Canada)
- October 11: National Coming Out Day
- October 16: National Boss’s Day
- October 29: National Cat Day
- October 31: Halloween
November Social Media Holidays
- Men’s Health Awareness Month
- November 1: Job Action Day
- November 8: STEM Day
- November 9: Social Media Kindness Day
- November 11: Veteran’s Day
- November 13: World Kindness Day
- November 16: National Entrepreneurs Day
- November 24: Thanksgiving (US)
- November 29: Giving Tuesday
December Social Media Holidays
- December 1: World AIDS Day
- December 3: International Day of Persons with Disabilities
- December 4: National Cookie Day
- December 10: National Salesperson Day
- December 18: Hannukah begins
- December 24: Christmas Eve
- December 25: Christmas Day
- December 26: Kwanza begins
- December 26: Boxing Day (Canada)
- December 31: New Year’s Eve
The Fall holidays provide a great opportunity for employers to share their celebrations on social media, to showcase their company culture and values.
Rally Note:
For a complete social media holiday calendar that you can incorporate into your Recruitment Marketing strategy all year long, check out our blog post: Social Media Holidays: The Ultimate List for Recruiting. We keep this article updated, so bookmark it as a resource to check often.
Best Practices in Creating Social Recruiting Content
Now that you’ve got a list of the upcoming Fall holidays, let’s plan for the content you’ll share. Holidays provide so many great opportunities to get your employer brand in front of talent on social media, but if your social posts aren’t effective at grabbing people’s attention and driving engagement, then your efforts might be wasted.
Rally Inside benchmark data shows that there are several elements of high-performing social recruiting posts that perform better in getting candidates to click through to your careers site and view your jobs. Let’s look at what the Rally Inside data shows works best.
1. Social recruiting posts about Team Jobs get more candidate engagement than content about Individual Jobs.
- Incorporate messaging that is specific to candidates who would be interested in these careers (for example, talk about projects they’ll work on, technologies they’ll be developing, research they’ll be impacting, etc.)
- Include relevant hashtags that a candidate might be following
- Use keywords that your target candidates might search for
- Feature a group photo of employees on the team, ideally smiling, and ideally in their work environment (if possible, tag your employees as well) (more about photos below)
- Add your company’s logo to the photo, to raise awareness for your employer brand
2. Social recruiting posts that feature employee photos get more candidate engagement compared to posts with no image.
- Use real photos of one or more employees (no stock photos!)
- Select photos where employees are smiling and look happy to be working for your company
- Ensure that you’re featuring people that candidates can relate to, representing the diversity of your company
- Show employees in their work environment or at a group event
- A good alternative to photos is a bold colored graphic overlaid by a large-font headline (that’s of course on-brand!)
3. Certain content topics and messaging are proven to be more effective at attracting talent on social media, so try to incorporate these into your Fall social recruiting content calendar.
- Showcase your people more than promote your jobs (which is why the Fall holidays are perfect for social recruiting!)
- When you do promote jobs, create posts about Team Jobs versus Individual Jobs (and include a team photo, explained above)
- Include information about the corporate benefits available to your employees
- Remember that people are checking out social media not just to stay informed but also to be entertained, so be sure to bring your company’s culture and brand personality to the forefront!
Plus, use relevant hashtags (nearly all holidays have a social hashtag), include your #LifeAt employer brand hashtag, tag employees where possible, use emojis where appropriate and encourage your employees to share your corporate content as well as create their own content to participate.
Rally Inside data shows that high-performing social recruiting posts promote Team Jobs versus Individual Jobs, and typically combine relevant messaging that candidates would be searching for.
Social Recruiting Calendar Tool
Finally, we all know that social media is dynamic, and it can be really hard to know what to write. So our Rally Inside Recruitment Marketing tool includes a recommended social recruiting content calendar that’s built in and free to use. It will help you plan out your Fall social recruiting calendar in advance so that you don’t have to scramble to create social media content.
You can:
- View the calendar by month, week and day
- See recommended content topics, based on Rally Inside’s Benchmark data about what content works best to attract talent through social media, and
- Get prompts on how to write your social posts
- Plus, the calendar includes a built-in holiday schedule with social hashtags, so you can ensure that your posts are topical
Sign up to request your free Rally Inside account and get access to the calendar! Plus you’ll be able to track and measure all your Recruitment Marketing strategies in one place to know what works best to attract talent across your social and digital channels.
—–
The candidates you want are on social media. We hope that this blog post helps you plan your Fall social recruiting calendar and gives you best practices to write engaging social media posts. One of the most effective ways to use social media in talent acquisition is to keep the content drumbeat going. So with some advanced planning, you’ll be able to create a regular stream of content that’s relevant to your talent audience while showcasing your company culture and values. You got this!
