Having a difficult time recruiting the right applicants for your job openings? Perhaps it's time to take advantage of social media.

Join Krystal Hobbs in this new episode of Beyond the Tools, as she discusses the advantages of using social media in advertising jobs online. She shares her knowledge on social recruiting platforms and some tips and tricks for creating compelling job advertisements on social media that will help increase the number of qualified job applicants.

For the full show notes, head on over to:

https://reflectivemarketing.com/podcast/Get-More-Job-Applicants-with-Social-Media

Krystal Hobbs 0:04

Welcome to Beyond the Tools, the podcast that helps contractors attract more leads, grow their business, and finally get off the tools. In each episode, you'll discover marketing tactics that work. You'll get actionable insights from other successful contractors, and connect with experts to help you grow. I'm your host, Krystal Hobbs, owner of a social media agency that helps contractors attract and convert more leads. Get ready to take your business to the next level so you can finally enjoy the fruits of your hard labor. Ready, let's go!

Krystal Hobbs 0:46

Hey, contractors, welcome back to Beyond the Tools. I'm your host, Krystal Hobbs. And today, I wanted to do something a little bit different.

We've had a lot of guests on the podcast talking about the labor shortage. And let's be real, it's an absolutely real and super difficult challenge that everybody in the trades is going through, especially now that we're in the summer, a lot of you are way busier, especially if you're in the heating and cooling world. So this is an issue that is absolutely top of mind.

Some of our previous guests have talked about some really important long-term strategies for dealing with this issue, whether that's taking on apprentices, whether that's going to local schools, getting your company out there and generating interest in the trade, or whether that's building your own school like a lot of our previous guests like Chad Peterman Aaron Gaynor, some of these guys have done this, those are all amazing. And if you haven't caught those episodes, definitely go back and listen to them. But what I want to talk about today is a little bit more practical in terms of what you can do right now, if you're trying to hire someone, this is something we've been working with a lot of our clients on to be able to help them generate more applicants.

So one of the strategies that have been super effective for our clients at Reflective Marketing, which is my agency, is using Facebook ads using social media to be able to generate applicants for the job that you already have. So once our clients have a great job offer put together, they have a job description, what we want to do is put that in a couple of places. One, we do want to put that on Indeed, because for the most part 90% of job applicants do come through that platform. So we want to make sure that we're on there. With a lot of our clients, we help them craft their job ads as well because we want to make sure that it's compelling. It shows what an awesome company you have, and why someone will want to work with you. And if you've got a website, we put that up there too.

Krystal Hobbs 3:08

Now what we do that is really good for driving a volume of applicants is running your job on social media. One of the biggest reasons that you should run your job as an ad on social media is that you can get people who aren't actively looking for a job. So if I'm in the industry, I'm already working for another company, and I see your ad, you may spark my interest enough that I will go ahead and apply for that. But I'm not necessarily looking on Indeed, I'm not googling for a new labor job, or new tech job, or whatever, I'm already happy where I am. But if you can get in front of me on social media, where I'm hanging out, then that's a really great place for you to get people that you wouldn't normally get in front of. The other major benefit of running a job ad on social media is that people naturally want to share a job. If they see an opportunity, they're going to share out with their friends and family. They may even tag people that could be a great fit. Even your team, they may share that out because they see it in their Facebook feed. So you have a lot more shareability through that. It's way easier to get that message out on social media than just having it on a job site. So those are a couple of the reasons that we find it really effective to advertise for clients to get more job applicants.

So there are a couple of tips and tricks to keep in mind to make sure that you do this really well. For one, as we said, you want to think about your employer's value proposition and you want to make sure that is really clear, not only in the job description but also in the ads and the posts that you're going to put on social media about this particular job. The other thing you want to consider is having a really compelling image. You want something that's going to stop somebody's scroll. So an easy place to start would be to have a photo of your team. If I see some happy, smiling people, then that's going to capture my interest and give me a bit of a feel for your company culture, what you guys are all about and how big your team is. So that's an easy place to start.

And the last thing you want to keep in mind, particularly with social media advertising, is that employment is one of those categories that need to be declared on Facebook ads. So Facebook has a policy, essentially to avoid discrimination, which is a great job. Facebook, we're delighted you have that. So that means that you need to declare a special ad category for employment, which means I'm advertising an employment opportunity. This will restrict some of your targeting options. For example, you can't target by age range, gender, or some other specific details there. But the important thing is that if you don't follow this, and I've seen it happen to so many businesses, if you don't follow this, at best, Facebook won't let you run the ad. At worst, they will shut down your ad account or your page. And that is a whole lot of mess and pain that you don't want to deal with.

So if you are running employment ads on social media, make sure that you declare that special ad category. And the really cool thing is that you don't need a super high budget on Facebook ads to be able to run a job ad, because again, people are naturally going to want to share that. So at a very basic level, this is something that we've done for many of our clients to be able to help them to get the right applicants. And something really cool is that we had a client that was really struggling to get applicants. Now this company had it figured out in a lot of ways. They had this amazing video about their culture. So we said, “Let's use this video because this really gives a feel for who you are as a company.” And it's totally different. And obviously, video content is super effective, and gives a much more personal feel than just a photo or whatever. So we ran this video in their job ad that had a link to the job description and where they could apply. Now this client, this company, they got a ton of applicants, but in particular, there were four that they hired, that came from Facebook. And not only that, these were people that we're genuinely excited to work for their company. They talked about like, “I saw your video, I just had to work for this company.” So if you can create that kind of effect, because you've got a great EVP, you've got some great content about what it's like to work for your company, if you put that behind an amazing engine like Facebook and Instagram advertising to get in front of the right people, you are going to have a much better time recruiting people into your business.

Krystal Hobbs 8:51

So listen, if you found this helpful, I would love to know it. Please DM me on Instagram, on Facebook at Reflective Marketing, you can get me there. And just let me know if you've tried this for your business. Or if you have another challenge with hiring, I'd love to hear that too. This is something that's such a hot topic in the industry. At Beyond the Tools, we want to be able to help you in any way that we can. And all of this feedback helps us find the right guests and the right topics to be able to help you. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll catch you on the next episode.

Krystal Hobbs 9:33

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Beyond the Tools. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcast. I'd love it if you could also share this episode with a fellow contractor who is ready to get off the tools and grow their business. And if you want more leads, sign up for our email list at reflectivemarketing.com where we share weekly marketing insights that you can't get anywhere else. I'm Krystal Hobbs and I hope you'll join me on the next episode of Beyond the Tools. See you next time!