Dalena Nguyen

Brands have been using user generated content in their marketing campaigns for a long time. By getting users and customers involved in campaigns and the content that is being shared, brands are able to get their customers more engaged with their brands, establishing a stronger connection with these customers. Companies can also apply this to their workforce and employees. By sharing content that employees make themselves, companies can actively encourage workers to share their own experiences. By doing this, employees can contribute to recruiting efforts and help grow a bigger and better team of employees while making their voices heard. So, what kinds of content can you get your employees to post?

Employer Hashtags

By encouraging employees to use an employer hashtag, you can easily track and view what your team is sharing on social media. You can simply click on the hashtag on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook or track it using a social media dashboard, and this will populate any posts using it. Using an employer hashtag can also be low risk - there is no need to hand over credentials for any of your company’s social media accounts. Instead, you are able to choose which posts you would like the re-post or share on your own profiles. This can also be a great way to track how your employees are feeling about work. If they are sharing fun content and positive experiences, you can be sure that they are enjoying working with you. If, on the other hand, they’re sharing negative experiences, you can catch issues as they happen and resolve them.

Instagram Takeovers

With over 500 million monthly active users, this is a great platform to reach out to tons of potential new employees! Using Instagram, you can showcase what life is like at your company. Instagram has introduced more ways to share content, including a 60 second video limit and a new feature called Stories, which lets you upload content for 24 hours. With a 60 second video, you can share things like employee profiles or quick clips of quirky office traditions. The new Stories features gives you the freedom to upload more casual content, because after 24 hours, this disappears! When you create Stories on Instagram, you can also create quick doodles on images and videos that you share. This means that you can include more fun and casual clips without having to stress too much about whether they fit into.

Employee Blog Posts

While social media posts are quick, fun, and easy to consume, blog posts can be a great way to get a deeper look into the days of your employees. By asking your team to write about their own experiences, you can let them feel like they are making a big contribution. By reading through different perspectives, prospective applicants can get a better sense of the work environment as a whole. Blog posts can also be used to help walk job seekers through what your recruitment process looks like. When these job seekers have this knowledge and have a better idea of what they can expect when applying for a position at your company, this can encourage them to apply! Using employee-generated content saves you time creating content yourself, engages your employees, and helps to reassure potential applicants that what they’re seeing and hearing is genuine. With social media becoming a bigger and bigger part of our world, incorporating marketing practices into your social recruiting can help you connect with potential new employees.

Today, it’s mobile devices (not laptops or desktop computers) that make up the most internet usage. With the number of social networks (like Facebook or Twitter), messaging platforms (like Whatsapp), and mobile apps (services like Netflix or games like Pokemon Go) at our fingertips, this should come as no surprise.

Think about how much time you spend looking at your phone, checking your email or snapping a photo of your lunch. For many people in today’s world, their smartphones are practically an extension of their hands.

There are currently 2.6 billion (with a B!) smartphone users across the globe. If you’re not optimizing for mobile, then you’re leaving behind a lot of users, and most of these users are very engaged – 70% of mobile searches lead to online action within an hour.

You need to take advantage of the sheer number of users, being mindful of how you design your website and making it easy for visitors to take action right away. Users who click on your job posting, careers site, or any other link that you share won’t stick around for long if they have a hard time viewing the content on their phones or tablets. 

With such powerful small devices in our hands, people are becoming more and more accustomed to using their mobile phones. This is made clear by the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, where you can only publish or post content using a mobile device. Mobile usage isn’t just limited to social media – there’s an app for everything from fitness to banking to hailing a ride (hello, Uber!).

With all of these options, why shouldn’t people be able to find and apply for a job on mobile devices too? Mobile has become a big part of our lives, so you can’t ignore it now.

Did you know?

Jobcast already optimizes for mobile. While Facebook doesn’t support installed apps on your Page, Jobcast links will still work. Whenever a potential candidate clicks on a Jobcast posting from a mobile device, they’ll be redirected to the applyto.co Careers Page that Jobcast hosts for you or straight to your own website. You can also collect applications straight from a user’s smartphone! 

Your team is already full of great people and as it turns out, great people know more great people! Candidates hired through employee referrals result in higher quality hires, faster hires, and employees that stay with companies longer. If you don’t have an employee referral system in place, you’re missing out on a potential gold mine of talent. Want to tap into this? Keep reading for some tips to start getting more referrals.

Leverage Social Media

You probably already know that with Jobcast, you can connect your company’s Facebook page, Twitter account, and LinkedIn company profile. This is a great way to get the word out about the opportunities at your company, but you can take this one step further by combining social recruiting with employee referrals - did you know that your employees can connect their personal social media profiles too? With so many users using (and actively engaged on) these networks, you instantly expand your network whenever one of your team members gets involved.

Make it easy to share

Try to eliminate any barriers that could prevent employees from sharing your posts on their own social media accounts. Offer employees sample posts (it’s a lot easier to copy and paste a status update) and give them the flexibility to edit and adapt messages as they see fit (while staying appropriate). Creating and providing your team an Employer Brand or Employee Advocacy Guide can help posts stay on message.

Make sure employees want to share

Let’s face it - some parts of the job will be more fun than others. While you may be excited about finding a great candidate with years and years of technical experience, your employees might be excited by the fun culture at your company or the awesome benefits you offer. Think about what working at your company actually looks like and what makes you stand out from the competition. Ask your employees what aspects of their jobs they want to share - you’ll probably be surprised that it goes beyond the fun perks.

What’s in it for them?

Who doesn’t like a little bit of competition? To encourage your employees to go that extra step in sharing out opportunities with your company, find ways to make sharing fun. This could take the form of something as simple as a small gift card or some branded company swag. You could even turn sharing into a game, where teams with the most (or the best) referrals win a prize.

The rise of employee referral programs is expected to be a lasting trend, so you should get on the bandwagon. Do you have more tips or personal experiences with referrals to share? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

Your employer brand plays a huge role in helping job seekers decide whether or not to apply for a position. After all, 75% of job seekers consider employer brands before even applying for open jobs. With 79% of job seekers likely to use social media during their job search, it's important to think about where social media and your employer brand meet. Living and working in an increasingly digital world, there are more and more opportunities to connect with job seekers and show them why it's so great to work with your company. An important thing to consider is the audience you're trying to reach - this will help you identify which social media channels you should focus more of your effort on. We've done posts on using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram to build up your employer brand. To wrap up our series, we'll be having a closer look at two platforms that could help you connect with niche candidates: Pinterest and Snapchat. Pinterest's audience is predominantly made up of women, and Snapchat's users skew younger - if you're looking to target or connect with either of these groups, getting on these social media networks could give you a big boost in exposure and relatability.

Pinterest

Pinterest has over 110 million active users and is the social media network of choice for women aged 18 to 34. With an engaged user base that spends an average of 98 minutes on Pinterest and views 2.5 billion pages each month, there's (growing!) opportunity for you to connect with potential employees. Thanks to how easily users can share photos and visuals on Pinterest, it's a great way to show off your company and the people who work there. By creating Pinterest boards with different themes, you can share more targeted content. For example, you can create a board that lets visitors "Meet the Team" by pinning photos of your employees with quick bios. You could also create a board showing off your cool office space, what a day in the life of different roles is like (how about one for your IT team and another for Marketing?), or even a board about all of the fun perks your company offers. Did you know that 80% of the activity on Pinterest is made up of users re-pinning existing content? As people more often re-pin content rather than create it, other users help you do the sharing. You can take advantage of this by getting your employees to jump start the sharing by liking and re-pinning your posts. This should be particularly easy if you're showing off the employees themselves or the fun things they get to do at work!

Snapchat

Valued at approximately $18 billion, Snapchat has quickly become a big player in the social media landscape. With over 150 million people using the mobile app on an average day, Snapchat isn't just for teens anymore (though the majority of its users are under 24). Snapchat's introduction of Live Stories (which let people see events unfold around the world from different perspectives) and Discover content (which is produced by a number of media companies partnered with Snapchat, including Buzzfeed, The Food Network, and CNN). With Snapchat, you have the opportunity to show off your company in an informal way - Snapchats are typically quick, casual photos or videos with captions, doodles, and stickers added. Snapchats photos and videos are typically 10 seconds or less, however you can use these to create a Story, which is viewable for up to 24 hours. Using your story allows your friends to engage with you at their leisure. Use your Story to Recently, Snapchat introduced the ability for organizations to create custom Snapchat geofilters (filters that appear based on the user's location). One way to encourage your employees to act as advocates for your employer brand is to build Snapchat geofilters for your office, allowing them to show off a behind-the-scenes look at what it's like to work for your company. Users are more engaged on Snapchat that other platforms, so when your employees send Snapchats about your company, their friends are likely to see it. Before you get started with Snapchat, it's important to note that it can be a lot harder to track metrics or see the immediate impact of what you're doing. Unlike other platforms, everything is self-contained in Snapchat - you aren't able to share links that send the audience directly to your Careers page. This limited functionality also means that you may get less information to work with. While you can see the number of friends (potential viewers) you have, exactly who has viewed your Snapchat Story, and the number of people who have taken a screenshot of one of your Snapchats (meaning that they're saving it for later), Snapchat doesn't offer comprehensive reports like Facebook's page Insights and Twitter Analytics.

Catch up on our posts

This is the third post in a series looking at how your company can use social media for employer branding. Check out our posts looking at Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as Twitter and Instagram.

Want to get started? Click here to get working on your employer brand with Jobcast today!

Did you know that 79% of job seekers use social media in their job search?

The list of social media networks just seems to keep growing, and with a growing emphasis being placed on creating a strong employer brand, it might be tempting to jump on all of them. Before you do this, it’s important to consider that each of these networks will reach a different type of person and will require different types of content. To find success, you’ll need to identify which social media platform aligns with your brand and culture and also lets you connect with your target candidates?

It can be hard to decide which platforms your employer brand should have a presence on, and maybe even harder to figure out what kind of content you should be sharing on each of these social media networks.

In order to help give you a clearer idea of the social media landscape, we’re dishing out some posts and having a look at some of the biggest social media networks, including ways you can build them into your social recruiting strategy and elevate your employer brand.

In our first post, we took a closer look at Facebook and LinkedIn. This post will focus on the two of the easiest platforms to connect with candidates on: Twitter and Instagram. 

Twitter

Twitter users send out an average of 500 millions tweets each day. Due to Twitter’s format of serving out bite-sized pieces of information (140 characters per Tweet), it’s a great channel to constantly be sharing and taking part in conversations, both with your customers and job seekers.

Start talking to others and growing your employer brand by engaging with accounts that mention you, joining regularly-occurring Twitter chats, and even hosting Twitter Q&A sessions! As Twitter runs in realtime, it may seem fast-paced at first, but this quality gives you the flexibility to share content again and again. Since information can flow so quickly on Twitter, be sure to take advantage of its media options – use images that will catch people’s eyes (Tweets with photos can get up to 313% more engagement!) and test out videos.

One of Twitter’s biggest impacts on social media was bringing the #hashtag mainstream. Develop a hashtag for your employer brand (check out Hootsuite’s #HootsuiteLife and Starbucks’ #ToBeAPartner) to use when you share out employer branding content, and encourage your employees to use it as well! This allows job seekers to search through the hashtag to see real examples of how your employees are talking about your company.

Instagram

Instagram recently hit a milestone, reaching 500 million monthly active users. These users are very active, posting an average of 70 million photos every day. If you are looking to hire young millennial talent or are thinking about long-term hiring, Instagram is where you should be. It’s considered the most important social network among young people (the same young people who will be entering the workforce soon).

Did you know that 90% of the information that comes to the brain is visual? It’s really true, a picture is worth a thousand words. Using Instagram, you don’t have to stick to words – you can easily show off what a day behind the scenes of your company is like. Take it one step further and mix in a few videos! Instagram recently extended their maximum video length to 60 seconds, which you can use to do quick office tours or lightning profiles of employees.

Engage your current employees by taking the same branded hashtag that you’ve introduced on Twitter and bringing it to Instagram. Get your employees to share their unique, real, and candid perspectives, and engage them when they do! When you like, comment, and even repost photos using the hashtag, this will encourage them to share more and more (which means all of their followers will keep seeing how great it is to work for you!).

Want to hear more?

Stay tuned for future posts, where we’ll have a closer look at Pinterest and Snapchat. For now, click here to get working on your employer brand with Jobcast today!

Did you know that 76% of companies have indicated that social media is their go-to method for sharing and growing their employer brand?

With so many different social media networks and so many different audiences to reach, it can be a little overwhelming figuring out where to start building your employer brand. In order to prevent yourself from become discouraged by all of the different choices in front of you, it’s important to identify one or two platforms to start off with. By choosing key channels to focus on, you will be able to use your time and resources more effectively. Once you feel that you have a grasp of a platform, you can begin to introduce a new network into your employer branding strategy.

Each network offers you different ways to share content and engage with online communities, so how do you figure out which social media network you should start off with?

To help you out, we’ll be posting an overview on some of the most prominent social media networks right now and share some examples of how you can use them to build up your employer brand. The first post will focus on the two of the most popular platforms: Facebook and LinkedIn. 

Facebook

Facebook is likely the first thing that pops into your head when you think of social media. With over 1.65 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a great channel to connect with tons of people.

With a company page on Facebook, you have the ability to share status updates, photos, and videos that highlight what working at your company is like and what your culture is like. Beyond the basic features, you also have the ability to add Facebook Apps (like Jobcast) to your page. With these applications, you have much more flexibility – you can host contests, create photo walls, or even host your own Careers site right on your Facebook page!

You can also take advantage of individual networks and groups on Facebook to help build your brand. You likely have a Facebook profile, as do your recruitment team and employees – use these networks to spread the word about your company to your Facebook friends! By leveraging these networks, you can greatly expand your reach and make passive candidates more aware of who you are, what you do, and what types of opportunities you’re offering.

• Jobcast tip

  : Images go a long way toward engaging people on social media – make the most out of your Branding options with Jobcast. Through your Jobcast Dashboard, you can add banner images to the top, side, and bottom of your Careers Page on Facebook. You can even go one step further and add a video showing off your company to the sidebar! Click here to watch our video tutorial on Branding.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has solidified its status as the social network for business and professionals, with over 433 million people signed up on the platform. LinkedIn is widely used and one survey showed that it was also the most effective social media network to find new employees.

On LinkedIn, people can follow your Company page, which means that status updates and announcements will appear in their LinkedIn feeds. You can also position your company as a leader in your field by having your employees publish insights and opinions on news and developments in your industry. Just like you can on Facebook, you can also create and join Groups on LinkedIn.

Engage your current employees to boost your employer brand on LinkedIn – they are 70% more likely to engage with the updates on your company page, which means that their own connections are more likely to see these updates too! These employees’ profiles can also act as a source of information for job seekers doing research on your organization and the different opportunities you offer. You can also invite employees to join LinkedIn Groups, where they can start discussions about working at your company and other topics that interest them.

• Jobcast tip: you can add your personal LinkedIn profile to Jobcast and share out new job openings automatically just like you can with your company page. Check out this video tutorial to get set up Autosharing!

Want to hear more?

Stay tuned for future posts, where we’ll have a closer look at Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. For now, click here to connect your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles to Jobcast today!