Finding and keeping employees is a challenge, and it’s especially tough for startups that don’t have big budgets for high salaries and expensive employer branding campaigns.
Social media can help. Here are some methods we perfected with our startup customers to help them attract and retain top talent.
Before we start, it’s important to understand that in today’s job market you should view your employees as customers. This requires a real change, but it will make your hiring work more effective.
Start with creating a strong employer brand identity
Distill what makes you unique as an employer. Ask your current workers: is it the flexible hours and work-life balance? Is it your work culture? The interesting technology? Promotion Prospects? Your values? The salary?
Write this in bullets – this is your unique selling proposition (USPs), and together with your company’s vision and mission statement, you now have your brand identity. Every personnel in HR and all managers should know it and speak it.
Create a narrative on Social Media as a great workplace
Use your brand identity to post regularly on social media, creating posts that convey who you are as an employer according to the brand identity you created. Social media is essential because that’s where potential recruits check your out – even before your website.
What kind of posts should you create? “Employee of the week”, a welcome post for a new employee, a banner of your vision, a new project or customer, a product/project milestone, and a photo of the employees who took part.
Pictures of office parties are good, but showcasing your company’s offerings, business achievements, and employees at work is much better: a software engineer will want to see your company’s value beyond balloons and cupcakes.
Which social media platform do your employees use? The rule of thumb:
- Israeli employees aged 30 and up are on Facebook
- Israeli employees aged 30 and below are on Instagram
- Everyone is on LinkedIn – if they’re looking for a job – so you should be there too.
- Regardless of their age, Israelis aren’t big on Twitter
- TikTok is growing fast, but not quite in the realm of Israeli employer branding. You can skip it for now
How often should you upload posts? 1-2 a week is good. Don’t aim too high. Remember, traction is key. Once you start, it’s vital to continue uploading posts in order to create awareness on social media and to get the platform algorithms to notice you.
When you’re creating good content on an ongoing basis, and you get engagement, the algorithms of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook will take note, and show your content to similar eyeballs, so you’ll get more engagements.
Create Engagement
You want your posts to receive likes, shares, and reads. How do you do that?
Start by getting your employees to like and share your posts. Create a WhatsApp group and update them with new posts.
Then add company managers as LinkedIn page Administrators, and get them to invite connections to follow. YOu can do the same with Facebook, only here it’s Likes. This is a great hack. Use it.
Building an employer brand presence on social media is a start. Now you need to optimize your job posts so they reach the right audience, catch their attention and convince them to apply. Read about this in our next blog post.