Transforming social media into a recruitment engine
By Dianne Henderson, Communications Manager, Social Media, Maximus
Social media used to be a footnote to a larger marketing picture. Today, it’s evolved from a secondary marketing tool to a central driver of company culture and talent recruitment. A company's biggest mistake is underestimating the power of a strong social media strategy.
Social media strategy varies widely depending on your company’s focus and objectives. Some organizations prioritize showcasing products, while others lean into recruitment or brand awareness. Regardless of the goal, it's important to understand and work within the parameters unique to each platform and audience. Social media’s power lies in its adaptability, but it also requires tailoring content to match the nuances of local, global or industry-specific guidelines.
For instance, direct interaction with clients through social media might be limited in certain industries because the audience isn’t always on those platforms. This doesn’t mean disengagement is an option. A strategic focus on social media can still yield results by shifting priorities. For example, recruitment efforts can benefit significantly from a targeted approach, ensuring messaging resonates with the right talent pools across platforms.
Success comes from recognizing each channel's unique opportunities and constraints and adapting the focus to have meaningful engagement.
Tip #1: The biggest mistake companies can make is underestimating the power of a strong social media strategy to build company culture and recruit the best talent.
We prioritize engaging current and prospective employees to complement our organic and paid recruiting efforts. Engagement involves answering questions about positions and job applications from people interested in employment opportunities. We also react and reply to the many mentions from our current employees. Doing so lets them know we're listening, we're here to support them, and we want to celebrate their achievements alongside them. This approach empowers our existing employees and gives prospective employees a glimpse of our company culture.
In our industry, the words "government contractor" often don’t inspire, but we've built our social media strategy to show potential employees that this government contractor values, celebrates and listens to its workforce. It's a big achievement and only possible because we consolidated our data onto a unified platform.
You know you have too many tools when . . .
I've worked in digital communications for more than 15 years, in roles ranging from launching social channels for a small nonprofit to leading social media strategies for a large health insurer. My current role encompasses social media strategy and governance, employee advocacy and executive social management.
When I joined Maximus in 2022, the company was scaling rapidly. We used an external agency to manage all social efforts. In addition, we relied heavily on email — not where you want your workflow to live! Working this way creates too many opportunities for error and makes it challenging to maintain a proper audit trail. We needed to rework our social media management process to be more efficient and effective and keep pace with the company's growth.
Looking back, it was a classic case of too many tools. Someone submitted a request through one tool, they scheduled and published content through another, and there were three more tools in the stack for analytics, social listening and advocacy. Any engagement and brand interactions happened in their native platforms.
Does this sound familiar? Having too many tools can negatively impact the bigger picture in several ways:
- Ineffective reporting. Posting and reporting on content from different tools makes it almost impossible to identify themes and trends. What should be a simple task, like identifying posts by a specific stakeholder, becomes a laborious, manual process. It's also hard to track the use of creatives, links or hashtags across tools.
- Slow response times. Hopping in and out of native social accounts means managers can't reply fast enough to users trying to interact with your brand.
- Poor quality assurance. When requests and publication happen in separate tools, everything ends up living in email. Designers send creatives by email. Managers receive stakeholder approval by email. Working this way creates too many opportunities for error and makes it difficult to maintain a proper audit trail.
Now for the good news: these issues can be solved by consolidating everything into a single tool and gaining better visibility across all social efforts.
Tip #2: Consolidating everything into a single tool helps teams gain better visibility across all social efforts.
Giving everyone what they want most: more time
Streamlining all our work into one or two tools would solve most of our pain points. I led the Sprinklr implementation at a previous company and became proficient in the platform's Social, Insights, Marketing, and employee advocacy solutions. I started using Sprinklr at Maximus with the goal of consolidating our tools and bringing our social efforts in-house. Consolidating tools means less switching costs for your team, especially when it comes to social media. The efficiency created by having workflow, publishing, monitoring and reporting in one place means that teams can do more with less. A two-person team could now easily run day-to-day operations.
Tip #3: The fewer tools you have, the less switching costs for your team. A small number of people can have a big impact without the productivity drain of toggling between platforms.
Stakeholders also gained access to their performance metrics through self-serve reporting dashboards. It's a win-win: Stakeholders don't have to wait for data, and eliminating the need to compile reports frees up more time — time better spent on fine-tuning strategy and evolving a stronger brand presence via social.
In our case, we had more bandwidth to nurture our digital communities by engaging with them often and in a timely manner. We can react to content faster and have real-time conversations through comments. As a result, our footprint on social media, especially LinkedIn, has grown significantly.
Creating a culture that makes employees proud
Another area where companies can see great success is by giving employees a platform to share their individual journeys. Most employees like where they work and want to brag about their company on social media, especially on LinkedIn. You're doing your marketing efforts a disservice if you don't take advantage of that. Consolidating our tech stack has allowed us to develop a thriving employee advocacy program that provides a space for employees to share their experiences.
Success takes more than simply creating this kind of environment, though. In the two programs I've launched and maintained, I've learned that you also have to support them with training and a structured method of sharing that requires little effort on their part.
Tip #4: Success takes more than creating an environment for employees to share. You have to support them with training and a structured method that requires little effort on their part.
Our investment in advocacy has helped Maximus employees feel more confident in talking about the company on social media. Prior to 2022, many people here didn't discuss work much on their personal social media accounts because they didn't know what they were allowed to say. Establishing the program gave our employees the clarity they needed to advocate more effectively. We've gotten direct feedback, such as:
- "The program has increased my presence on LinkedIn and grown my network and helped me get to know extraordinary people with amazing backgrounds."
- "Being a part of this program gives you a very inclusive feeling, and I love being involved in sharing all the exciting things going on with Maximus."
When it comes to advocacy, quality is far superior to quantity. That said, our active rate within the program is 70%, signaling high employee commitment among those who join. The activity rate is the definitive success metric, and our number demonstrates that we're on the right path.
Our advocates also generated around $15 million in social reach in FY2024 — over 500% more than the Maximus brand could generate organically.
The results are worth the investment
Many companies view employee advocacy as something that should grow quickly, but the biggest challenge of any transition to a new solution is helping social media stakeholders adapt to the latest tools and processes.
Getting everyone aligned can take time, and a slow-and-steady approach — one that prioritizes employee training and support — is best in the long term.
Using social media to improve company culture and attract the best talent takes patience, but the results are worth it.
Read author Dianne Henderson's post on LinkedIn Pulse.