Jul 2023

The missing link in your talent attraction and reputation strategy

Social media is an opportunity. But are you maximising it within your talent attraction and reputation plan?

Social media has become increasingly prolific as a channel for communicating Employer Brands and attracting talent. But it isn’t just about posting vacancies and expecting a deluge of candidates to knock at your door. Social media is a window into your organisation, a medium for informing, engaging and telling your story. With the right guidance, you can build the narrative surrounding your Employer Brand and your employer reputation, improve reach amongst active and passive job seekers, and reduce reliance on other attraction channels to drive down costs. 

There’s a common misperception that social media is both free and easy. It is neither. However, utilise social media as a tool, and you have a secret weapon in your attraction and brand toolkit. Harvard Business Review found nearly half of the individuals in their survey would entirely rule out taking a job with a company with a negative reputation. So how do you build a truly positive and authentic reputation as an employer? It needs careful planning, but certain activity streams are key – and right at the top of the list will be maximising the potential of social media. Here are our tips.

Social media strategy and setting objectives
Start by setting clear objectives and developing a strategy. It doesn’t need to be overly complex or over-engineered. It’s important that it provides a foundation you can base recommendations on and that it gives true purpose and direction. The best strategy sets out measurements and KPIs to work towards. If you have no strategy in place, you run the risk of pushing content into a void. Followers and engagement will lessen over time. There’s nothing worse than hours wasted crafting content that doesn’t deliver any results. Clear strategy and objectives will support your activity, and to ensure you are seen and heard as a quality employer, you need to grow followers, improve engagement and increase reach.

At a basic level, the key to maximising social media is:

• Regularity of posting. All social media platforms reward accounts that post regularly! But this shouldn’t mean you are posting for the sake of posting.
• High-quality content. Better content helps improve engagement, and better engagement equals improved reach. Create relevant and interesting posts for your followers. Write for them, not yourself.

Content development
What you say, how you say it and what content looks like dictates the quality of your social media output. Consistency across the look and feel of all posts is imperative to help build brand recognition and awareness across social networks and beyond. This doesn’t happen accidentally – you need clarity and purpose, and a content framework gives you both.
Identify what your audience wants to see and how you can bring your messages to life. Imagery, whether that’s photography, a graphic, infographic, animation or video, should be high-quality, eye-catching, consistent, and most importantly, on-brand. Post copy should be informative, relevant, and engaging.

Programmatic campaigns
Targeted programmatic campaigns allow you to utilise budget to speak directly to potential talent in a non-recruitment space. Through effectively targeted social media, you can reach not only active job seekers, but also a very large group of people who don’t (yet) know that they’re looking for a new job. These passive job seekers may just be the talent you’ve been looking for! This type of campaign focuses on building brand awareness and promoting your Employer Brand through carefully crafted messaging that cuts through noise.

Campaign management
As well as developing your social media strategy and content to drive that strategy, you must manage the deployment of posts across your social media channels and provide monthly performance reports. This level of continuous performance optimisation really does ensure success. Careful planning and managing campaigns in real-time is key. Everything we do is a means to an end, not an end in itself, so cut through, optimisation and ROI are vital.

Employee advocacy
Your existing staff are the most authentic, enthusiastic and articulate exponents of your brand and employment experience. For many organisations, too many people aren’t aware of the true offer. Or worse still, their experience has been tarnished anecdotally or via review sites. Building your employer reputation through employee advocacy gives your organisation a real presence ‘upstream’ in the talent market – raising your profile and building awareness so you can earn the right to have a recruitment conversation. Like a good Employer Brand, a good reputation will make you money and save you money. You can learn more about Employee Advocacy: The DNA Way here.

You can leverage social media to attract top talent and establish your business as a thought leader in your industry. But it won’t happen overnight. The sooner you start, the quicker you’ll see results. We’ve covered sharing valuable content, but engaging with your audience is also important. Interaction is essential across social media. It shows that you care about the content you create and allows you to showcase your culture, build relationships, and foster a sense of community that talent will want to be part of. Make sure your business page participates in online discussions, especially on LinkedIn.

Social media is an opportunity to proudly share your Employer Brand and create a compelling narrative that can help you stand out in a crowded talent market. To talk more about social media and your attraction strategy, get in touch with us today by emailing mary@wearedna.co.uk.