3 tips for recruiting young staff via social media

SMEs want to recruit staff and invite an online marketing agency to set up a recruitment campaign, for example for young staff in retail, but at first they often want nothing to do with social media. It happens to Noud Baijens (32), director of Pro Contact, all the time.

Those managers would much rather look for staff the traditional way: they hire a temp agency or put a vacancy on their website. But that either doesn't work or is needlessly expensive, says Baijens.

“I understand if a director wants nothing to do with recruitment via social media or job marketing,” he tells Business Insider. “But if he wants to hire young people, that's exactly where he should focus. That's where his target group is. 95 percent of young people between 15 and 25 spend an average of two hours a day on Instagram or Snapchat.”

It's the most important lesson Baijens has learned since he founded his company seven years ago: know where and how to communicate with your target group.

When Baijens had only just started online marketing agency Pro Contact, companies mainly hired him to help on the sales side. He went looking for potential customers for businesses and brought them in. With the economic boom and the tight labour market, that has changed. Companies have plenty of work, so Baijens turned his business model around: he now mainly recruits staff instead of customers.

“We are not a temp agency,” he stresses. “We are an online marketing agency specialised in recruitment. We have a team of copywriters, designers and advertising specialists who run a good hundred recruitment campaigns a week and make sure companies reach the right target group for a vacancy.”

The team then makes sure the application process is as easy as possible for candidates, so the chances that the right candidate responds are high. The actual hiring is done by his clients themselves.

Because he fully understands that not every company has an unlimited recruitment budget, he's happy to share his best tips for recruiting younger employees with Business Insider. Here they are:

1. Go where your target group is

According to Baijens, the first step in recruiting staff is to work out exactly who you're looking for and where your target group spends its time. “How old is the ideal candidate? What is his or her background? Ask yourself those questions and then try to find out which social media those people mainly use.”

Young people use Facebook far less than they used to, so you'll probably get more out of Instagram, Snapchat and maybe even TikTok. If you have younger employees, be sure to ask them for advice.

If you want to recruit young staff, at the very least know that putting your vacancy on your website isn't enough. “A lot of young people aren't actively looking for a job at all. If you only post your vacancy on your website and on a job site, it won't reach the people you'd love to hire.” You need to manoeuvre your way into their feed, and a recruitment campaign lets you do exactly that.

1. Create the right content

And ideally you don't just appear in your target group's timeline thanks to ads you've bought, but you also have some fun content on your own profile.

“You usually put a vacancy on social media as sponsored content,” says Baijens, “but fill your own profile with fun posts too.” That gives young people a feel for the atmosphere at your company and may make them more inclined to apply.

But randomly posting a few photos on Instagram isn't enough. “Young people respond to very different things than older people. For example, they're used to moving images, like videos and gifs, and their choice of words is different.”

“So make sure you already employ some young people you can bounce ideas off, because things move fast. What do they like? Which challenges can you join to grow your reach? They know.”

1. Make the application process as easy as possible

Finally: it's a waste to work so hard to get young people to click on your vacancy if the application process is still designed for older people. “Young people aren't actively looking for a job, so it's important to make the application process as easy as possible,” says Baijens.

So don't create a long form where they have to list their previous work experience, leave all their address details and then write a 300-word motivation on top of that. “You'll get that information later in the process anyway; at the start it only scares people off.”

Baijens' strategy is to make responding to the vacancy really easy, so that as many people as possible do it, and then to filter within that large group. “The vacancies we create show up in young people's timelines,” he explains. “When they click ‘apply’, the system automatically fills in their email address and mobile number based on the information in their social media profile. One more click and they've applied, so the threshold is very low.” Within an hour of that click, someone from Pro Contact calls the young person to see whether they're a good fit. Only after that might a traditional job interview follow.

Baijens thinks it makes perfect sense to approach the application process this way; in his view, recruitment via social media is simply part of the times. “In this target group, 80 percent of applications are made on a mobile phone,” he says. “So if your process isn't set up for that, your chances of finding the ideal candidate are much smaller.”

“Making applicants fill in boxes simply doesn't belong in this day and age. What does it matter what someone's postcode is? In this tight labour market, it's more important that someone applies. After that, it's up to you to do your very best to bring that young talent on board.”

This interview was published on Business Insider.

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