How Staffing Agencies Can Use Social Media to Land Clients and Candidates

Part of a well-rounded and effective marketing plan for any modern staffing agency or recruitment company is the leveraging of social media. And while each social channel can be used for candidate recruitment activities and landing new clients, there are important distinctions in strategy and tactics. 

We’ve been lucky enough to work with numerous staffing companies across Canada, helping them develop and execute a wide range of social media strategies. Through our work with them, we’ve learned some critical insights about what a truly effective social media strategy for recruitment and staffing agencies looks like.

The Importance of Excellent & Uniform Branding

Often overlooked by staffing agencies is the importance of representing your brand in a way that visually represents the excellence of the services that you offer to both companies and candidates. If your staffing firm has yet to invest in a proper branding exercise, now may be the time. 

But why is branding important for a staffing agency? First, it helps to establish trust. If your brand looks professionally put together, that sends a positive trust signal to both clients and candidates that your company is trustworthy and won’t disappear overnight. 

Secondly, developing a visually appealing brand along with a clear guideline for how the brand is to be used, often known as a brand guideline document, will help employees, partners, and outside contractors know how to use your brand’s visual elements that are consistent with how your company wants to be represented across different channels. 

Here’s an example of what consistent and high-quality social media branding for a staffing agency can look like. Parker Huggett is a staffing client we helped with both their branding and social strategy:

And speaking of consistency, investing in brand assets that become immediately recognizable as belonging to your staffing agency is essential. This will help establish your company’s authority and credibility in the eyes of candidates and clients. 

The Importance of an Authentic Social Voice for Staffing Agencies

One of the exercises we often go through with our clients is establishing a brand voice. For a staffing company, this is an excellent starting point, as it will help you deliver the type of content you think will most resonate with your audience of clients and candidates. 

But the importance of authenticity is beyond establishing a unique voice, be it serious, professional, authoritative, quirky, playful, self-deprecating, or some combination. Being authentic on social media is tougher for brands than individual people, which is why it’s important to remember that as a staffing agency, you can establish that authenticity by:

• Being open about your values as a company
• Being honest about your core mission as a company
• Be transparent about how you do business
• Share inside looks at your company’s inner workings
• Highlight your company’s involvement in community events
• Highlight important milestones
• Handle negative comments or reviews in a professional way
• Have a genuine desire to help

The benefits of establishing an authentic brand voice throughout all of your social media channels have a great variety of positive impacts:

• Your social posts will enjoy a greater level of engagement.
• You’ll establish a better relationship with your company’s social media followers.
• Your authenticity and company values will attract the type of clients and candidates you want your staffing firm to deal with.

Consistency is the Key to Establishing Authority and Domain Expertise

One of the significant affordances of today’s modern social media channels is that consistently posting content your followers find helpful will build your authority and domain expertise around your brand. In nearly all its forms, social media will allow you to slowly but surely provide your bona fides if you produce valuable content around your area of expertise. 

Even in small and medium-sized local markets, establishing authority takes time, never mind more broadly on a regional or national level. This is why developing a consistent social posting schedule, which you execute for months and years, is vital to creating a reputation for expertise and knowledge in the industries for which you provide staffing services. It’s a lot of effort but worth every penny if done right. 

Social Media Strategies for Staffing Agency Recruiting

Most staffing agencies face a similar dilemma in today’s tight labour market. They have a hard time finding high-quality candidates. One potential solution is to turn to social media and leverage your reach to find and reach more qualified candidates. 

Post on a Regular Schedule

Consistently producing high-quality and relevant content is critical to successfully attracting high-quality candidates. If candidates are often exposed to your authoritative content across various social media channels, they may think of your company first if they embark on a new job hunt or career change. 

Don’t be Afraid of Reposting Your Greatest Hits

Any good social media manager knows this cardinal rule. Don’t be afraid to repost your content that found success with your audience at one time. Don’t worry; you won’t annoy your followers because most don’t see your post the first time anyway. Today’s erratic social media algorithms mean that even if you have thousands or millions of followers, only a tiny percentage of them will ever see your posts in their timelines. The social media behemoths have designed this to encourage brands to spend money to boost their posts to increase their reach. 

Engage, But Don’t be Pushy

Treating social media as a broadcast-only medium misses its whole “social” aspect. Suppose you want to find quality candidates through social channels like LinkedIn or other less apparent channels like Twitter or Instagram. In that case, you must be willing to engage with potential candidates. 

But engagement shouldn’t feel creepy or pushy, or downright annoying—quality candidates often field messages with multiple recruiters from competing companies. The last thing they need is another recruiter giving them the same old tired song and dance. If you’re going to engage, be subtle and be unique. Think of how you can start and maintain a good long-term relationship because people change jobs more often than ever. If you’ve built a solid relationship through social media, there’s no reason you can’t build on that solid foundation in the future. 

Motivate Employees and Recruiters to Champion your Staffing Company on Social Media

This one seems obvious, but it’s incredible how many staffing companies don’t engage in this strategy. Encouraging your recruiters and employees more broadly to be active on their social media channels and amplifying your company’s social posts through likes and re-shares can be an excellent way to boost your staffing agency’s social media standing. 

But be careful about being too aggressive with employees about this. Most people treat their social media presence as personal and will only want to mix their personal and professional online lives sparingly. In other words, encourage it, but don’t require it. 

Of course, having a simple set of guidelines for what employees should and shouldn’t do when speaking about your company’s services through their social channels is also a great idea. 

Understand the Platforms

Every social media channel is different, and the stratification of social channels continues unabated. I predict that social channels will continue to unbundle, and we’ll see that the social media landscape will continue to splinter into many more and differently focused social media channels. 

Consider that the audience on LinkedIn will be somewhat different from the audience on Instagram or TikTok. Different audiences and different predominant generations mean you should tailor your approach to each platform differently. What may work on LinkedIn may not work on Twitter, etc.

Paid Social Media Boosting

As mentioned, social media has become a pay-to-play proposition for most companies. Suppose you’ve already dedicated time and effort to building an audience across your social media channels. In that case, you should commit a decent budget to ensure that your posts are seen by an audience that has indicated they want to hear from your staffing firm. 

An added benefit of paying for social media boosts is that your boosts can reach beyond your existing audience and help build your social following. 

Tips for Posting Jobs on Social Media

There’s an entire art form to posting jobs on social media channels that stand out. Too many staffing agencies phone it in and feel like posting a bland “we’re hiring” or “we’re hiring for the following job” post along with a link to the job or summary is enough. I’m here to tell you that you can get much better results if you’re not afraid of applying a bit of creativity. 

Here are a few key points you should consider when crafting your social media job posting strategy:

• Use plain speaking language – focus on the message you’re trying to get across in as few words as possible. 
• Consider who your ideal candidate is – what do they care about? What will make them notice your posting? What interests might they have?
• Consider your client’s brand – as a staffing agency, almost all the jobs you post will be on behalf of a client company. That means you should consider their brand and how you can mimic their brand voice. 
• Include a high-quality image or video – Across almost all social networks, including an image or video will increase the reach of your post. Extra points if the photo or video looks interesting enough for someone to stop scrolling or swiping with their thumb.
• Show the benefits of working at X – if you’re working on behalf of your client to find the best possible candidates, you need to make each job post as appealing as possible. One of the ways is to highlight the top benefits of working at the company.  
• Encourage employees to repost job posts – you’ve got recruiters and other staff that are most likely willing to repost your staffing agency’s job posts – encourage them to do it. 
• Demonstrate the impact of the role – Today’s Millennials and Gen-Z often speak of making a difference or having an impactful job within any given organization. If the position is truly one where a candidate can effectuate change or progress, highlight this in the social job post. 
• Tell an engaging recruitment story – Invite candidates to join the company by showing off your client’s culture and even behind-the-scenes photos or video footage. You can also accomplish this by interviewing existing employees and getting them to give you testimonials or soundbites. This way, candidates can better understand what it’s like to work for the company.  

Here are a few examples from our staffing agency clients who we’ve helped craft their social media job posting strategy:

Social Media Strategies for Getting More Staffing Agency Clients

Many of the abovementioned strategies will help establish your staffing company as a leader in your space. Some of this will translate to honing a direct reputation for serving your clients by providing them with high-quality candidates that will be valuable assets to your clients. 

Highlight Your Successes

Social media allows you to show off your previous successes with candidate placements through candidate and client testimonials. To make this a regular occurrence, you’ll have to work to build up a backlog of social proof by encouraging both candidates and clients to leave reviews for you and your recruiters. Here are a few good examples of social posts from our staffing agency clients using this technique:

Highlight Your Services

Another strategy is highlighting your services and what makes you stand out from your competitors. Is your candidate pool better? Perhaps your pricing is more competitive, or your retention rate is much higher than your competitors. Whatever differentiating factors you can attest to will help to attract new clients; just make sure you have proof of your claims.

Provide Valuable Resources

Another strategy is to build out valuable resources for your potential clients and share those across your social media channels. In most cases, you want to provide as little friction as possible for potential clients to get their hands on these resources. You can also use these resources to keep your staffing agency top-of-mind by directly sending the resources to client contacts. 

In some cases, however, where you provide a massive amount of value, such as an original piece of research or something like a salary guide, you might want to create a lead capture form in front of the contact to catch potential client’s information before they are granted access to the resource. We talked about lead magnets for staffing agencies in this blog post.