If posting job adverts across your college accounts is your entire social recruitment strategy, no wonder you think recruiting educators on social media is a waste of time.
The way recruiters use social media as a hiring tool has changed a lot over the years, and unfortunately, posting job ads organically just doesn’t cut it anymore.
So, what can you do to recruit educators effectively? Here are a few tried-and-tested social media tactics that we see colleges get excellent results from.
Link to your Career Site across all your bios
This one might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this quick win is completely overlooked by colleges. Have a look at the bio sections of your Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn pages: do you have a clickable link to your Career Site, where all your live jobs are easy to find?
If you’re only linking to your college’s website homepage in your social bios, this is a missed opportunity. And if you don’t have a Career Site yet, that’s an even bigger wasted opportunity!
If you need help creating a Career Site for your college, FEjobs can support you with this. Just reach out and a member of the team will show you how you can use a Career Site to capture more applications with minimum effort.
Use social media adverts to increase job ad reach
Social media is very much a pay-to-play marketing channel nowadays. Data from 2023 shows that anything you post organically (in other words, for free) from a company Facebook page will reach a measly 1.52% to 2.58% of your own followers. That’s less than 3% of the people who have actively chosen to follow your page!
If you’ve been posting job ads and getting little engagement, don’t get disheartened. It’s not because your followers don’t care, it’s because they’re not seeing your posts.
To reach relevant candidates on social media, you’ll need to put a small budget behind your posts – either through targeted ads or boosted posts. This will get your job ads in the feeds of educators, whether they follow your page or not.
The great thing about using social media ads to recruit educators is that you can target your ads based on relevant data, like location, demographics and professional interests. This means you’re reaching the most relevant teacher candidates and spending less money because the narrower your target audience, the less you pay to reach them.
For example, if you were hiring science educators for your college in Sussex, you could target a Meta ad (Facebook and Instagram) to reach users, who live within 30 miles of Sussex and have an interest in education and science.
Thanks to this kind of laser-focused targeting, FEjobs users report that Facebook ads are the most successful candidate attraction tool they use when recruiting educators on social media. In previous campaigns run for colleges, they’ve seen an increase in engagement of up to 35% from one sponsored social post!
Speak to an FEjobs expert about enhancing your advertising.
Create college employee advocates
While it’s true that posting from company pages without a budget gets you little engagement nowadays, personal accounts are a different matter.
Personal social media accounts get much better organic reach because they’re not built to be monetised. So how do you leverage this for your college?
By turning your current educators into college employee ambassadors.
To do this, you need to find ways to involve educators in your social media strategy, so they want to post about your vacancies, and about your college more generally, on their social media channels. There are loads of ways you can get them involved. For example, creating visual employee testimonials, or ‘day in the life’ videos that give insight into what teaching at your college is like.
There are plenty of benefits that come with turning your educators into college ambassadors, including:
- Improve staff morale by making educators feel that their opinion is valued
- Boost your employer brand - research has shown candidates trust other employees 3x more than the company itself to provide credible information about what a company is like to work for
- Reach an entirely new audience (your educators’ own followers) without spending any money on social media adverts.
Learn from your social media data
No matter how great your social media messages are, if they’re not reaching the right people, what’s the point? The most ineffective social media recruitment strategies are those that waste time and money shouting into an empty virtual room.
Knowing where and how to reach your ideal candidates on social media is always a matter of trial and error (or, what’s known in the marketing world as ‘optimisation’). And to know what’s working and what’s not, you need to see the data.
If you’re posting to social media (both paid and organic) through your recruitment software, you’ll get access to recruitment marketing analytics that will give you invaluable insights about which channels are worth spending your time on and which aren’t.
It’s not just about likes and clicks - how many of those clicks actually turned into applications? These are the kinds of recruitment marketing metrics you need to pay close attention to and optimise your social media strategy based on what you learn.
Need help with recruitment marketing?
If you need support in rolling out any of the above social recruitment tactics – or better still, some experts to handle your college’s recruitment marketing for you – FEjobs can help.
Get in touch with the team today to learn more about how FEjobs can transform your recruitment marketing strategy into your college’s biggest hiring asset.
About the author
Katie Paterson
Katie Paterson is a writer and digital marketer specialising in recruitment, marketing, HR technology, and business growth. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.