Making the Most of Social Media Recruiting Ads: 5 Simple Tips

In the early days of social media, social recruiting was a novelty. Only a few companies have truly established their presence on these platforms, back when they were focused on establishing social connections among users.

Today, with more than 295 million social media users in the United States alone, social recruiting is a must for every industry. This is particularly true for real estate recruiting, as agents often utilize these platforms for their own communications and marketing strategies. 

For social recruiting to be effective, however, you have to do it right. Those millions of users can give you millions of opportunities, yes, but remember that other brokerages are also vying for attention. If you don’t maximize your social media ads budget, you’ll end up wasting golden opportunities and a whole lot of money.

Fortunately, making the most of your social media recruiting ads isn’t too complicated. Here are some simple tips to get you started:

Make It Mobile

Real estate professionals are always on the go. Couple this with the fact that most users engage with social media on mobile devices, and you have every reason to optimize your recruiting ads for mobile.

The good thing here is that each platform has guidelines you can follow to ensure that your content is shown properly. They also have recommended file sizes (although most social media platforms compress files as part of their built-in optimization features). If there’s no way to crop a large image properly, it’s a good idea to direct candidates to another URL, ideally your website.

Short, Simple, Specific

Optimizing your social media job ads isn’t just about images and videos. It’s also about keeping the text or caption short, simple, and specific. Remember that a typical social media user—including real estate agents—won’t spend more than a minute or so reading a wall of text. In addition and as earlier mentioned, you’re also competing with other brokerages and recruiters. Thus, you need to be purposeful about your job ads.

Your primary goal is to grab attention, so don’t include the full job description in the post. Rather, create a short, simple, and specific status update. Then, host the complete details on your website’s career page. Avoid jargon as much as possible and don’t use buzzwords (ever seen a job ad looking for “ninjas” or “gurus” in your feed?) in your attempt to be witty. You might end up sounding pretentious, which is definitely a turn off for candidates.

The bottom line is to keep things straight to the point with your social recruiting ads. Most of the time, taking the generic route but easily understandable route yields more and better results.

Use Quality, Relevant Visuals

Most social media platforms are highly visual mediums. In fact, algorithms reward content with photos and videos because these can push users to engage more and therefore stay longer on the platform (which is what these sites want). Thus, if you want more potential candidates to look at your recruiting ads and if you want social platforms to give your ads an extra boost, make sure to add visual media to your posts.

Of course, make sure that the visuals are relevant to the job. If you’re posting an ad about your company culture, then take photos or create videos about the company culture. For those who don’t have the time to stage photo shoots or produce background music, make sure to have all the necessary permissions for the content. This way, you won’t encounter any copyright issues and get your ad taken down.

Make Things Easy

The ultimate goal of every recruiting ad is to have people apply for the job. For this, you need a straightforward call to action that will lead to the next step. This is all up to your brokerage’s application process. Do you need them to give you a call first? Do you want them to send their resume? Is there an online form they need to fill out? Make sure to give clear instructions to avoid any misunderstandings. 

More importantly, don’t make applicants jump through all the hoops. Coming from a social media job ad, it’s likely that they’re only going to be in the first stage of the recruitment process. Keeping things as easy as possible will save both recruiter and candidate a lot of time and effort. It also helps create a friendlier atmosphere.

Monitor Your Metrics

Last but certainly not least, it’s important to measure and analyze your social recruiting ads’ metrics. This will give you deeper insights on what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to refine your content and strategies.

Remember, though, that there are more valuable metrics than just reach and impressions. You need to take a look at the share of voice, engagement rate, and application rate. There’s also a lot of merit in analyzing the demographics of those who apply. Did you attract more male or female applicants? Were there more engagements from a certain age bracket? Did the respondents come from farther or nearer your specified location? All of these details will help you with better targeting for your next ads.

Keep in mind that the way technology evolves will always affect recruiting trends. Today, it’s social recruiting. Tomorrow, it could be a completely new method that’s shaping the industry. The best thing to do is to stay on top of the latest developments and how these can influence your current real estate recruiting programs. Be ready to make adjustments and learn best practices to make these new trends and technologies work for you.

Cover Photo by Tracy Le Blanc from Pexels