Social Influence and How It Can Affect Your Recruiting
Social media is, for the most part, entwined with our day to day life. We are living our lives online and are influenced so much by what we see from our friends, family and our favourite, and not so favourite celebrities, personalities and brands.
How many times have you wanted to eat in the most Instagram friendly restaurants, be seen at the ‘go to’ event and share your carefully tweaked and filtered pictures across all your channels. This may be more apparent with the younger generation, but there’s also a huge increase in social media use in the 40+ bracket too and this is something that companies can really capitalise on when it comes to recruitment marketing.
So why does social influence matter then it comes to recruiting, engaging and retaining your team?
We’ve mentioned before that people are now checking around 14 pieces of information on your company before deciding if you are someone they want to work with. They need to see that your culture and values reflect theirs and social influence is the best way to showcase this.
Wikipedia defines social influence as something that occurs when a persons emotions, opinions, or behaviours are affected by others. When we make decisions, we do so (albeit initially) on emotion. Decision making isn’t logical! Emotions play a big factor when it comes to a decision about taking a new role, staying with your current employer, or going it alone.
But how do you tap into the emotions of the people you want to attract?
This is where you need to do your ground work. If you already work in marketing, then customer personas will be nothing new, but the same applies to your potential employees. Who are they, what do they do, what do they think, where do they hang-out online. There’s lots of different things you need to find out about your target market and whilst this may seem unnecessary, if you spend the time to put it together, you will really reap the rewards.
There are a lot of tools in the market that can give you in-depth insight on the posts that your target market respond best to, what their interests are and what they read and comment on. Although – get in quickly as the next Apple update may prevent us from having access to so much of this data in the near future. Read the latest news from Apple to find out more.
However, the advantage with creating a candidate persona for your recruitment marketing is that you are surrounded by your target audience and can tap into their knowledge and remove a lot of the guess work. Find out about their social media preferences, where they spend most of their time, what time of the day, what do they do on which platform. This will give you invaluable information about where to advertise your roles and when.
Then you can look at the content creation. Tap into the emotions of your employees and see what they react to online. What would they share with their friends and peer group. Also, find out why they joined you – what attracted them to apply and what keeps them with you. This is all fantastic insight to make sure that you are creating the right message when it comes to your recruitment marketing.
Use all of the data you now have to create a strong candidate persona. It may be that you need 2 or 3 different candidate personas for the different departments – don’t assume that it’s a 1 size fits all. Whilst there will be similarities across the different personas, they will be things that are unique to each group and these are important to identify to really help your message stand out and be seen.
You can now create content that you know will appeal to each personas emotions and is more likely to solicit a response, whether that be a share, a like or a direct application.
Using your social influence
So, you have all the data for the personas and have created a campaign that takes these people on a journey from awareness of your employer brand to an increased level of interest in your company as a potential employer. Now it’s time to add in some insights into your culture and most companies now have social events as part of their perks.
You only need to glance at Facebook and Instagram to see all the pictures of people out having a good time, partying with friends, going Go Karting or at the races. These are the posts that people like and share – and the same applies to your employees when it comes to company activities.
Arranging an activity, whether it be monthly, or quarterly can have a positive impact on engaging and retaining your teams, but it can also have a positive impact on your recruiting too.
By linking your event to something you believe in, whether that be a local or national charity that reflect the values of the company will have a very positive impact! People like to work for companies that share their values and communicating this through a fun and engaging way always solicits the best response.
Fun events will naturally create posts from your employees as they will be proud to share with their friends – everyone loves a fun place to work! Remember to set some ground rules on what should and shouldn’t be posted though if you have a rather wild bunch of people.
You can also nominate someone to take photographs for your company social media pages. Whilst you can post some the next day to celebrate, you can also weave this content into the larger 6 or 12 content plan to help reinforce your culture.
Social influence can make a big difference to your recruitment marketing – it just takes a little bit of planning to get it right.
If you’re looking for support on how to maximise social media features, feel free to contact us today on [email protected]!
