{"id":82583,"date":"2014-01-20T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-19T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/how-to-use-social-media-for-recruitment\/"},"modified":"2014-01-20T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-01-19T22:00:00","slug":"how-to-use-social-media-for-recruitment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/en\/how-to-use-social-media-for-recruitment\/","title":{"rendered":"How to use social media for recruitment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article was originally published in Dutch in 2014 and has been translated and updated in October 2026.<\/em><\/p>\n\nThe best-known way HR departments use social media is to recruit new candidates. Social media offer HR plenty of starting points and opportunities in the battle for the best talent in the market. After all, what you are after is the ‘best fit’: the right person in the right place.\n\nNote: the platforms, features and examples below describe the situation in 2014. Several of these services and features have changed or disappeared since then, but the underlying ideas are still relevant.<\/em>\n

Spreading vacancies through social networks<\/h2>\nYou can share vacancies within your own communities and industry-related communities on social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, or on HR and sector-specific blogs and forums. Social networks make it easy for people to pass your vacancies on to each other. That increases your reach, and with it the chance of finding the right match.\n

Facebook<\/h2>\nYour biggest fans already feel positive about your company. There is a good chance they would also be interested in working for you and representing your business with passion. And if not, they are at least likely to be willing to share a vacancy for you. On Facebook you can share vacancies by posting a link in a status update, but if you regularly have new openings you could, like Dutch online retailer Bol.com did at the time, install a dedicated Facebook application on your page. Through this app, interested people could apply directly.\n\n
\"Screenshot<\/picture>
In 2014, Bol.com had installed a Facebook application so that tens of thousands of fans could easily browse vacancies and apply directly through an online form on Facebook.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Posting vacancies on LinkedIn<\/h2>\nOn LinkedIn you can post paid job ads in LinkedIn Jobs, with the advantage that people can apply easily and you get direct access to their online CV and recommendations. At the time of writing, it was also possible to post vacancies within relevant discussion groups.\n

Showcasing your organisation on LinkedIn<\/h2>\nPeople who are interested in your company can follow you on LinkedIn. That way they stay up to date on new jobs, new products and services, and new employees. In 2014, a paid version of the company page also let you include testimonials from employees. This gives applicants a good picture of the organisation. And of course a company page also helps potential business partners get a feel for your organisation.\n

Networking through LinkedIn<\/h2>\nIf you want to approach people at a particular company, LinkedIn has another handy tool. When this article was written, the right-hand side of the ‘Overview’ tab on a company page showed how many people you were connected to there, both first and second-degree connections. That lets you use your network to reach the right people.\n

LinkedIn plugins<\/h2>\nIf you want to benefit from LinkedIn’s tools, you need to encourage people to follow your company on LinkedIn. One way to attract enthusiastic, high-quality candidates through LinkedIn was to use the free plugins that LinkedIn offered at the time. You could easily place these on your own website.\n

Reppify<\/h2>\nReppify was a service that, in 2014, automatically screened candidates based on their LinkedIn profile. You specified the qualities of your ideal candidate and Reppify did the rest. Recommendations, work experience, reviews and participation in discussions all counted towards the applicant’s score.\n

Sharing vacancies via Twitter<\/h2>\nA good content strategy matters for every communication channel, Twitter included. By sharing relevant messages with the outside world, you attract followers. With a sizeable number of followers, there is a good chance that a vacancy you share on Twitter will reach a large audience. Your followers can ‘retweet’ your vacancy, sharing it with their own followers, who can in turn do the same with theirs. That is how you can achieve a viral effect.\n

Making your vacancies easy to find on Twitter<\/h2>\nUse the right hashtags (#) so you can be found. Many Twitter users search for vacancies using relevant keywords. Marketing and communications professionals, for example, might search for #vacancy #marketing, or #vacancy #communications #Amsterdam.\n

The alumni network<\/h2>\nAlumni, or former employees, are another valuable resource: as ambassadors for your organisation they recommend you to others, or you may be able to tempt them back to work for you. Bring them together in a dedicated online community, as Sodexo did, or set up a group on LinkedIn or Facebook.\n\n
\"Screenshot<\/picture>
In 2014, Sodexoalumni.com showed which former employees had returned to the company.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Recruitment campaigns on social networks<\/h2>\nYou can also run recruitment campaigns on social networks. Take the ongoing campaign ‘Kom bij de politie’ (‘Join the police’) that the Dutch police were running at the time. It let you ‘screen’ yourself as a future police officer. In this case it was a kind of gamification of the recruitment process. Applicants got a clear picture of the situations they could find themselves in as an officer, and an impression of how they would deal with them. This helps with selection before anyone even applies: people who get the sense that the work is not for them are less likely to respond, while suitable candidates may get exactly the confirmation that encourages them to apply.\n\n\"Screenshot<\/picture>\n

Referral recruitment programmes<\/h2>\nEmployees know what the atmosphere is like within a company and what is expected of you in terms of the work. That means they are likely to be very good at judging which people in their network would fit in at their company. This is the basis of referral recruitment programmes, in which an employer asks its staff to put forward suitable candidates for open vacancies.\n

Accenture’s referral programme<\/h2>\nIn 2009, Accenture developed an online platform for employees containing all kinds of tools for using their own network to recruit candidates. Both individual and collective results were easy to track within the programme. An extra incentive was that employees in this programme received a bonus not only when a candidate was hired, but also at earlier stages of the application process (on a rising scale). Part of the bonus was already paid out when a candidate was invited for an interview. Accenture reportedly saved 30% on recruitment and selection costs in 2011 thanks to this programme.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article was originally published in Dutch in 2014 and has been translated and updated in October 2026. The best-known way HR departments use social media is to recruit new candidates. Social media offer HR plenty of starting points and opportunities in the battle for the best talent in the market. After all, what you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":44373,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2876],"tags":[],"article-type":[],"trends":[],"class_list":["post-82583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-management-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82583"},{"taxonomy":"article-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-type?post=82583"},{"taxonomy":"trends","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/trends?post=82583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}