Social Media Recruitment Challenges

“With the many benefits that social media can bring, particularly in recruitment, presents many challenges”

There is no denying that Social Media is a great asset when it comes to social recruitment. It’s a platform where people are connected together in one place and it provides an opportunity for brands and businesses to capitalise on the use of clear and direct campaign strategies and techniques to gain competitive advantages in the marketplace. However, with the many benefits that social media can bring, particularly in recruitment, presents many challenges. Recruitment through social media is a great way to showcase job roles and boost brand awareness but it is often that this medium is overlooked however as there is several challenges facing recruiters when trying to ensure they increase or maintain their traction levels on social media platforms.

Some of these challenges include:

Low-engagement rates and low-reach on social media

As a start-up organisation, it is tough finding your feet when it comes to marketing and social media. How can we become effective? What can we offer that other recruiters don’t? These are just some of the questions asked when trying to boost our engagement rates meanwhile trying to establish ourselves in the recruitment industry. One way to capitalize on these issues is to include social sharing. Engagement breeds engagement. Leveraging your social networks of current employees and encouraging them to share job availabilities, articles, pictures etc. will help to boost engagement rates and reach on media platforms and ultimately help your company to grow their presence and increase their traction on various social media platforms. 

Limited Instant Gratification

When establishing yourself within the recruitment industry, it’s important to acknowledge that it takes long-term commitment to truly succeed. In fact, this applies for all business and brands in any industry. You can’t just expect instant rewards, particularly with social media! You are unlikely to have a great deal of instant success and therefore you must be able to maintain a great deal of persistence and creativity and soon you will suddenly find yourself slowly paving the way and instilling building blocks of what is becoming a solid and successful organization. Additionally, the same perspective can be applied to social media. If you can grab the reigns of social media, then it too will grab the reigns of your business in return.

Confined Talent Pools

Social media is increasingly becoming the tool of choice for sourcing during the recruitment process. Social media sites such as LinkedIn are the go-to area for recruiters to source potential candidates. However, this can inadvertently miss a candidate pool as many applicants may not have live social media accounts, such as LinkedIn. In return, this can lead to recruiters potentially missing out on some high calibre talent.

As a recruiter, it’s important to establish many different ways to reach a wider talent pool for the open positions. Although social media provides a direct and accessible approach to candidates, it’s important for recruiters to open multiple channels and not solely rely on this as a sourcing tool. Other options may include the use of job boards, employee referrals, career fairs and even the influence/power of your own website to enhance branding and messaging to access this broader pool of candidates.

Overall social media and its multiple platforms provide many benefits and challenges. In order to find the most suitable candidate or establish some of the best talent pools, it is important that a recruiter maximizes the benefits and minimizes the challenges during the recruitment process. By doing so, recruiters provide themselves with dynamic pathways to access or reach some of the best talent in the market and ultimately provide themselves with a great opportunity to make that hire.