ALC - CareerArc blog

So you’ve heard us talking all about employee advocacy—how it’s this amazing talent acquisition strategy that greatly expands the reach and efficacy of your social recruiting and how you need to doing it, like, yesterday. But you still might be wondering: how can you know? What proof is there that employee advocacy really works? Are there maybe some employee advocacy statistics we could share with you? (Ok, you might not be thinking that last one.)

Talking about automated social media posting—especially when it comes to recruiting—kind of feels wrong. It’s difficult to deny that social recruiting is a highly effective talent acquisition tactic, or that it’s something that every talent acquisition team should be doing. Unfortunately, it’s also difficult to deny that it requires a skillset that falls outside of talent acquisition leaders’ and professionals’ typical job requirements. After all, your job is to hire and recruit—not to be an expert at social media. And that’s a problem, because candidates are increasingly using social media in their job search and in navigating their career.

There’s a reason so many companies are trying to figure out how to recruit diverse candidates. Studies show that companies with gender diversity in their executive-level positions are 25% more likely to experience above-average profitability, with 30% women in their executive-level positions are more likely to outperform than those with less women, and with ethnic and cultural diversity are 36% more likely to be more profitable.

Employee advocacy is all the rage among talent acquisition circles, and for good reason. With so many companies and industries struggling to fill their recruiting needs, employee advocacy—a strategy that turns your employees into an army of ready advocates for your employer brand—is emerging as a timely strategy to meet those needs. We’ve talked in the past about employee advocacy in general, so today we’re gonna tackle a new topic: should you invest in an employee advocacy tool? How do you know when it’s time to invest?

They say numbers speak for themselves, and in the case of social recruiting and its efficacy—that’s true. But sometimes you want more than just the numbers. Sometimes you want an example—a real-life story of someone who got a job on social media.

If you aren’t yet actively engaged in employee advocacy strategies, you’re snoozing and losing. Employee advocacy is more than just the next hot thing in the world of recruiting: it’s a highly effective tool to improve the reach, reinforce the validity, and strengthen the gains of your talent acquisition strategies (not to mention improve employee retention). There’s just one problem: running a successful employee advocacy program is often easier said than done.

There’s a lot you can—and should—expect from social recruiting, but one thing you never hope to see? Radio silence. No likes. No applies. No changes in anything at all. But what do you do if that’s exactly what happens? You throw your proverbial hook into the social recruiting pool, and nothing bites on. For all intents and purposes, your social recruiting isn’t working. What now?

When people think of using social media for recruiting, they tend to think about LinkedIn and Facebook, and maybe even Twitter. But recruiting on Instagram? That doesn’t sound like something Instagram was even made for.