Labor shortage is one of the biggest challenges in Finnish business today. The media environment has changed radically over the past few decades, and many HR professionals are now considering new ways to build employer branding and implement recruitment campaigns in the face of growing competition, rather than relying on traditional job postings.
How can recruiters leverage the opportunities of social media as part of building employer branding and recruitment campaigns?
The traditional way to approach employer branding is to create career stories on websites in text or video format, which are then shared as links on various social media channels. This content works well when the applicant is already interested in the employer, but requires disproportionate effort from others.
To make recruitment marketing as effective as possible, the brand should be present in the channels where the target audience spends their time. Appropriate content should be created for that channel, rather than trying to drive the audience away from the channel directly to, for example, websites. This makes the content more interesting and also serves social media algorithms.
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According to research, especially members of generation Z expect authenticity and transparency from brands. If a brand tries to mislead the target audience with, for example, working conditions that deviate from reality, this can in the worst case create a negative topic of conversation that extends even to traditional media. The brand should therefore strive for authenticity and even boldly highlight areas for development and changes that have been actively made in HR. Social media offers brands an opportunity for authentic, transparent and interactive communication, bringing the employer closer to potential applicants.
An effective way to increase transparency is to bring your own employees and experts to the center of content production. Real people and easily approachable stories often work better than overly scripted or polished content. People trust an authentic person rather than a message told by the brand itself. The work tasks offered by the organization and real people are a natural way to create stories, so it's worth boldly including your own employees and experts as part of social media content production so that potential applicants continuously receive an impression of what working life in the organization is like.
Recruitment campaigns have their role when the employer brand is well-known and you want to quickly get applicants, for example for summer job recruitment. However, it's important to note that brand building is long-term work from an employer branding perspective as well.
Employer branding should be approached as a continuous process rather than an individual campaign, strategically utilizing content marketing tools. Particularly TikTok and Instagram (Stories/Reels) offer a good platform for storytelling. For example, by creating continuous and easily adoptable formats for employees, it's easier to involve your own experts in content production when the given framework is clear.
Content production requires surprisingly many resources and bringing people together, depending on the production method. It's worth making the most of a single production session. From the same story, you can produce, for example, a blog post, a short video and images for different purposes.
Good content that speaks to your target audience should be distributed through advertising. For example, on TikTok, content can be cost-effectively sponsored using the TikTok Spark ad format – meaning content can be promoted as-is in advertising. On the other hand, it's also worth creating more tactical recruitment ads on social media channels that take into account the channel's characteristics, which direct the target audience to take action and explore, for example, open job positions on websites or on external service provider websites (e.g. Duunitori).
