Originally Published on Forbes
As a small team, any employee’s resignation can feel like a huge blow. Each person’s work and presence is crucial to the overall culture and functioning of the company. A small-business owner’s goal is to make sure that whatever internal turmoil occurs, the product and clients remain unaffected. Slipping into panic mode can be extremely easy, as time is of the essence when finding a stellar replacement.
Once you begin thinking straight again, the strategy sets in:
• Post job descriptions on the regular channels: Monster.com, Indeed.com, etc.
• Reach out to schools and use their alumni networks to find interested parties. If you can afford to hire someone part-time at first, reach out to the current student body.
• Use your personal network to find someone a trusted party can vouch for.
In recent experience, these channels, alarmingly, did not bear fruit. So, we created a group of highly stylized “flyers” on Instagram with three lines of text, including the fact that we are hiring, what position we were hiring for and where. My inbox was immediately flooded with applications.
I felt like I had tapped into the most effective channel out there for finding the right candidates. I found that many job seekers are looking to social media for employment opportunity leads. So, what are the true benefits of recruiting via social media?
• Social media is a high speed, low priced (in many cases, free) outlet. You can reach this new workforce in a place they already spend most of their time.
• The people you are attracting have access to your body of work. Already following and appreciating it in their spare time, they tend to be excited by the prospect of joining your team. This existing interconnectedness helps you find people that would be a good fit for the company.
• Unlike the regular job boards, social media allows you to easily do background checks on your potential hires. You can gain more insight into their lives, personalities and their aesthetic — an organic and true resume. Not only can you begin to understand their personality, but you can also see how they interact socially through commentary and the types of accounts they follow. While it’s easy to spot red flags, it’s equally as important to look for what they are passionate about by exploring their feeds.
• Current employees play a role as well. They can add credibility to your company and reinforce its culture. Most importantly, they can act as inside resources for others helping attract and retain employees. For example, our current employees use social media to share the work they have created for our clients. Whether it’s a copywriter sharing a blog post to her personal Facebook feed or a designer posting an animated GIF on his personal Instagram, their sharing helps our brand but, more importantly, showcases a corporate culture that values their work and believes in giving credit where credit is due. It also opens the door for prospective employees to comment or send direct messages to current employees about their experience.
A new hire (who we found via Instagram) recently told me that schools are even focusing on social media as a place to connect with potential employers. Professional development classes taught in universities for juniors and seniors help students design their web portfolios/presence on different social media channels, combing through them in preparation for employers to review them.
Given this information and cultural change, it seems that the usual channels for finding employees are not as effective as they once were. We are shifting now toward social media as a platform not only for social interaction, creative expression and a photographic anthology, but also as a space for the job hunt.
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What Has Changed Since This Was Written
The piece above was written from a small studio’s own hiring scramble. The tactic it describes, treating recruitment as a design problem and putting the work where the talent already is, has since become standard practice, and the numbers have caught up with it.
Roughly 91% of US employers now use social platforms for hiring, and about 92% of recruiters worldwide source or engage candidates there. The behavior on the other side moved just as far: around 79% of job seekers use social media to explore opportunities, and 73% research a company’s social presence before applying, with 59% using it specifically to read the culture.
Two findings matter most for a small team. First, 75% of job seekers say they are more likely to apply when an employer actively manages its brand on social, presence alone is not the point, upkeep is. Second, candidates approached directly through social are reported to be several times more likely to be hired than those arriving via a job board, which is the same asymmetry the original post ran into when the conventional channels produced nothing.
What we would add now
The flyers worked because they looked like the studio. That is still the whole mechanism. A careers post that looks like every other careers post gets read as noise; one that carries the brand’s actual visual language gets read as evidence. If your recruitment creative is the one place your brand system is not applied, you are advertising the gap.
