No matter what area of marketing that you are in these days, the name of the game is to make your piece of content or media go viral through social media. Yes, even HR finds itself in the position of having to make jobs postings go viral so they can compete effectively in the new social media battle ground for talent. Fortunately there are 7 steps that recruiters can take to increase the chance of their job postings going viral.
7 Steps for a Viral Job Posting
- Create desire by developing an infectious employer brand that people want to share. People want to share content and things that make them feel good and therefore your company should develop a compelling employer brand proposition, a great company culture, challenging roles, great perks and real career-opportunities.
- Reflect your employer brand in your job postings, careers site and social media profiles so people know yours is a brand that should be shared.
- Share your jobs when the market is most receptive. E-quest looked at over 1,000,000 adverts and revealed that the peak times to get a response from your job postings on Twitter are Sunday, Monday and Tuesday from mobile devices. From the big jobs boards, most responses came on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, from PCs, during lunch times. So, share during peak response times to maximize the chance of your posting going viral.
- Share your job postings with powerful influencers who may be inclined to retweet your job postings such as careers services, professional bodies, trade press, employment services etc.
- Include funny and inventive employer branding videos in your job postings, as research from CareerBuilder shows that jobs postings with video receive a 34% greater application – and research from HBR in their paper the Science of Viral Ads reveals that funny, surprising postings are most viral.
- Make it easy to share jobs, by making sure all your job postings have social share buttons so it is easy for readers to share the job.
- Offer incentives for sharing; establish an employee referrals scheme where employees or even external associates are rewarded for referring potential candidates to your job posting. Modern social recruiting software like Zao, Jobvite etc. make this very easy to do.
Try these 7 tips and watch your job postings go viral.
Image:brewbooks/Flickr
Author: Kazim Ladimeji
Kazim Ladimeji is a Chartered Member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, and has been a practicing HR professional for 15 years. Kazim is the Director of TheCareerCafe UK: a resource for start-ups, small business and job seekers.
Great article! Most often job ads still look like they were designed for print, but not for the internet. Recruiters need to realise that we are living in the digital era! We tried to design the perfect job ad for the internet, do you think this has potential to become viral? lab.softgardenhq.com/jobad/
[...] from the gym or restaurant where they meet up with potential candidates, or providing them with a quick job link to beam to their social media and e-mail networks, harnessing the power of their mobile [...]