In the last couple of years Snapchat has grown from the party town for teen tragedy and triumph, to a business valued at £20 billion. And with 10 million users in the UK (as of December 2015), and a new adverts centre just released, it’s rapidly becoming a platform for businesses to recruit young people.
Just last month McDonald’s ran a successful campaign on the social media platform in order to reach what it dubbed, ‘Snapplicants’. Users watched a short, 10 second video showing employees at McDonald’s talking about their experiences and then could ‘swipe up’ in order to be redirected to an application page.
This not only allowed the fast-food company to reach the young people who use the platform (whom it tends to employ), but in a way that easily allowed for applications. So how can you use social media for your application drives?
Talking to founder and managing director of OST Marketing, Luke Brynley-Jones, HRD Connect discussed the challenges of social media in recruitment as well as how to use certain platforms…
How to Bring Applicants to your Website
The main take-away was to publish content about the job itself, as opposed to direct recruitment. Telling employee stories, or examples of projects is a far greater driver of traffic because it engages the user on a more personal, relatable level. And relatable is the keyword for social media.
You are going to appear in the applicant’s stream, which is populated by their friends’ stories, and the stories of businesses they like. You need to fit seamlessly in with the overarching narrative of their Facebook walls, their Twitter feeds and their LinkedIn streams.
Targeting the Right Candidates
LinkedIn is the obvious one for drawing applications. It allows you to find people by specific job titles, employment history and many other relevant factors. It’s a digital headhunting ground. But how do you manage to create adverts on other social media platforms where targeting isn’t so career focused?
The simple answer is that you have to get creative. When you’re looking to recruit a candidate for a specific job role (Brynly-Jones uses the example of a finance director for a utility company), you’re only going to have a very narrow audience to whom that job will appeal. Therefore, you need to think about keywords and content that will appeal. Think: guides, opportunities and stories.
Learn to Measure
It’s all well and good coming up with a strategy and putting it out there, but you need to be monitoring its impact. And measuring it effectively.
The first thing to do is to set out desireable outcomes. Importantly, these should be numerical in value as you are going to have to monitor them. If the drive is to bring people to your website and apply, you need to monitor users clicking through your adverts, and the subsequent pages that they visit.
Applying a monetary value to every ‘lead’ you generate from the link will help you calculate your return-on-investment (ROI), which in turn will allow you to further optimise your campaigns.
With a whole host of social media platforms ready to be used to drive recruitment, we just have to get a little more savvy about how we use each one.
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