With today’s tight labor market, recruiting teams must get more creative in sourcing new talent to fill their roles, which is leading to a reevaluation of how to improve their top-of-funnel marketing efforts. However, while companies tend to focus on how they market their jobs, such as updating their employer value proposition or aligning with the company’s brand identity, it is critical to also optimize where you are recruiting from. Traditional job boards, while a foundational piece of any recruiting strategy, are crowded spaces with a broad audience. This is especially true for the service sector companies, who must stand out in an often large pool of competition.

Because of these factors, it’s crucial that you diversify your recruitment marketing channels. In particular, it’s important that you have a social media-based recruitment strategy. In fact, one could argue that social media might be a better channel for service sector recruiting than traditional job boards in reaching the right audience, building a strong brand reputation, and better engaging potential talent.

Here are some reasons why social media is so important in recruitment marketing for service sector jobs:

1. Reach a larger audience – In the service industry, sourcing candidates at a rate that keeps up with turnover is all about volume – you need to be able to keep the top of your funnel packed with prospective talent. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, and Instagram, have billions of active users. Additionally, there is plenty of data showing that Millenials and Gen Z (the ideal persona for entry-level roles) are regular social media users. The fact is that they aren’t picking up their phones to go look at job boards! By augmenting efforts with social media marketing, you can reach a much larger audience than traditional channels. This means that job postings can be seen by a wider range of potential candidates, increasing the chances of finding the right person for your open roles.
2. Stand out from the crowd – Job boards are crowded spaces. Every recruiting team at every organization must set up and maintain a profile on Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and others as a matter of principle. But as a result, potential candidates are left swimming through tens or even hundreds of different job listings and are often left having to compare on one or two variables. Social media provides opportunities for you to stand out by not only promoting your jobs but also effectively building and promoting your brand reputation. By creating a strong and consistent presence on social media, you can showcase your culture, values, and employee experience in a much smaller competitive pool.
3. Stay top of mind – Social media also offers a unique opportunity to continually engage with potential talent. Job boards are static by nature – you create the job posting, publish it, and then wait for applications to come in. Social media is conversational by nature, and allows you opportunities to remain top of mind with your target talent profiles, even if they aren’t looking for a job. For example, by creating social media content that showcases the company’s culture, values, and employee experience, you can not only attract talent today, but you can also effectively nurture passive talent that might convert months later. Social media can also be used to answer questions, address concerns, and create a dialogue with potential candidates. This can help build relationships more effectively, which can lead to a more successful recruitment process.
4. Target talent more effectively – In the service sector, location is everything. When sourcing talent, recruiters are often bound by the geographical radius of physical stores, restaurants, and warehouses. Talent that is physically closer to their place of work is more likely to stay in their role long term. Social media advertising is unique in that it allows for specific geotargeting. This gives recruiters the ability to tailor messaging for specific locations and set up campaigns that will only be displayed to the relevant audience. This increases the chances of not only finding the right talent fit but also that you will decrease turnover chances.
5. Cost-effective recruitment marketing – While job boards are priced based on a singular metric, such as cost per application or cost per click, social media prices their advertising solutions based on a number of factors. Depending on your optimization criteria, whether it’s engagement with brand campaigns or clicks to applications, the pricing flexes to meet those needs. And when combined with the ability to reach a large volume of high-quality, targeted personas, it’s easy to see how you can optimize and even reduce overall recruitment marketing costs by adding social media to your strategy.

Social media is a powerful tool that is currently underutilized in recruitment marketing. Companies that can successfully integrate these channels into their holistic strategy can quickly source higher quality candidates, leverage opportunities to stand out from the competition, create effective nurture paths that can keep their talent funnel full of passive candidates, improve candidate quality through better targeting, and all at a higher return on investment. By starting small and experimenting with different messages and targeting strategies, you can incrementally add social media to your recruitment marketing strategies to attract top talent, which ultimately helps you build strong teams that drive business success.

Alissa Lydon is the head of marketing at Levee. With 10 years of experience in SaaS software, she is passionate about sharing how technology can help improve outcomes for everyone. Outside of work, you can find her reading all kinds of books, traveling to faraway lands with her family, or catching a baseball game.