The 3 Step Guide to Social Recruiting Like a Pro

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AnnaMarie Houlis4.87k
Journalist & travel blogger

Research continues to show that the recruitment and retainment of female talent is crucial to business success. A 2018 report from McKinsey & Company,  "Delivering Through Diversity," found that a gender-diverse company's likelihood of producing above-average profits has grown from 15 percent in 2015 to 21 percent today.

But how do you attract women, especially at the senior level, in the first place? Enter Fairygodboss, the largest career community for women, that's using social media to connect female job seekers and companies. Fairygodboss provides the more than three million female professionals who visit the site each month with career connections, jobs, community advice and hard-to-find information about the ways companies treat women.

67% of women know if they will accept a job before interviewing at a company due to prior research they do about the employer and its culture for women. AKA: in this competitive job market, women are looking for well-developed stories about your organization's commitment to diversity.

Here's a three-step guide to social recruiting for female talent like a professional, according to Fairygodboss intel. 

1. Establish your brand story.

Before deciding to work for a company, women want an accurate and honest view of the workplace and culture. Specifically, the majority of women are looking to see if a company has positive female role models they view as similar to them, as well as publicly shared information about the company’s diversity progress and initiatives.

While they may look to your official accounts and website for your brand story, they're also looking to other platforms such as news outlets, peers' accounts and other sources they trust for a less-biased look inside your organization.

Fairygodboss doesn’t just provide a platform for you to share the positive experiences of your female employees and tell your story. It also offers an expert content team to help develop creative and tactical content that resonates with female jobseekers. 

Research suggests communicating your employer brand in 3 ways: 

  1. Incorporating photos and videos that showcase your culture into recruiting efforts 

  2. Sharing information about diversity initiatives

  3. Telling the stories of female employees

Fairygodboss uses these tactics — along with tactics devised from their proprietary data — to help partners create a story women want to see. 

2. Use targeted social strategies to attract the talent you want and drive traffic to your organization's opportunities.

Once you've defined your brand story and created content that resonates with women, you need to make sure that your message reaches the qualified talent that you want to hire. 

Many organizations use ad agencies or other paid approaches to reach their preferred demographics via social media. Targeting experienced female talent can be expensive. However, Fairygodboss offers an already developed audience that you can reach effectively and inexpensively. 

Millions of professional women visit Fairygodboss each month, and Fairygodboss sees up to a  14 percent click-through rate on Instagram — 14 times higher than the industry average. Its sponsored content sees almost identical results to its general content. 

3. Track and study your results.Then, refine your campaigns. 

To improve the success of your social campaigns, it’s critical to plan, track and measure your efforts. Some commonly utilized social recruitment goals include engagement metrics, click-through rates and sources-of-hire — which platform your hire came from, and how much it costed. 

Once you’ve tracked and measured your efforts, your campaigns must be iterated and refined based on observations of what goals you’ve achieved and how you stand against industry standard. Sometimes, this means changing an entire creative, but sometimes it means changing something as small as a word in the call to action. 

Fairygodboss is reactive to data on a day-to-day basis, and consistently shares best practices with their corporate partners. 

But you don’t need to just trust me on that. Amber Grewal, chief talent officer of Intel and former vice president of global talent acquisition at IBM said: "Fairygodboss helps us attract women using social and content tactics that have amplified our in-house efforts… The data they are able to provide — and their customer service — are both fantastic."

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AnnaMarie Houlis is a feminist, a freelance journalist and an adventure aficionado with an affinity for impulsive solo travel. She spends her days writing about women’s empowerment from around the world. You can follow her work on her blog, HerReport.org, and follow her journeys on Instagram @her_report, Twitter @herreportand Facebook.