To address the difficulty in talent recruitment, why not give the “social media + AI” approach a try?

In the United States, despite rising unemployment rates and job vacancies, labor shortages continue to plague industries such as healthcare and retail. To make matters worse, every day 10,000 workers from the “Baby Boomer” generation reach retirement age, leading to a massive outflow of labor, presenting challenges in knowledge transfer to sectors like technology and manufacturing.

While some state government officials have explored alternative solutions to the labor shortage, such as relaxing child labor laws, there are still unique talent pools in society waiting to be tapped into. For instance, although flexible and remote work policies have increased employment rates for people with disabilities, companies continue to overlook this valuable group in the recruiting process. Moreover, despite the rise of second-chance hiring, workers with criminal records remain underutilized. Apart from some relatively niche opportunities, as the labor market evolves, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to adopt new recruiting methods to bridge the gap between job vacancies and available labor.

Overcoming Traditional Recruitment Limitations

For many years, traditional talent recruitment methods have been tried and true and remained unchanged. Most companies still rely on job fairs, updating job listings on their corporate websites, and third-party recruiters to reach job seekers. While these methods are still crucial and help shape effective recruitment strategies, they also have limitations. For example—and perhaps one of the biggest limitations—these strategies can only reach active job seekers who are explicitly looking for opportunities, making it difficult to access all potential labor and underrepresented demographic groups, preventing the recruitment of a more diverse workforce.

In an extremely competitive labor market, these traditional recruitment methods are no longer effective, companies need to use creative strategies to showcase their employer brand and target job opportunities to suitable candidates.

Fortunately, something that corporate marketing departments have been doing for years can help solve the human resource issue. Companies can apply their existing consumer advertising strategies to recruitment, thereby solving recruiting challenges.

Setting Up Creative Recruitment Ads

Recruitment ads need to promote the company’s values, benefits, and overall attractiveness to recruit new team members. An effective recruitment advertising strategy not only attracts candidates for the respective positions (direct response marketing), but also creates brand awareness for the organization, making it the preferred employer for talents. The concept of an “employer brand” includes various strategies that can efficiently target and attract talent, not just traditional methods. These strategies can also target “passive job seekers.” Strategies include advertising on popular consumer media channels like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, showcasing the value of the company as an employer, the type of work at the company, and even individual job vacancies.

Some may say that the recruitment industry is behind consumer marketing, but the challenging job market is forcing recruitment to continually progress. The demand to find the right talent is becoming more urgent, and finding ways to bridge the gap is crucial for creating a competitive advantage during recruitment.

Unlike traditional methods, posting job ads through consumer channels allows companies to target potential job seekers more effectively and strategically place employer brand messaging in front of a specific audience. For instance, with the intensifying semiconductor race between China and the USA, the major limitation in the US is the lack of available talent. These companies need to attract young people to take up semiconductor development and engineering roles. Therefore, they should consider actively advertising on campuses, to place their brands in front of students, enabling them to learn about such engineering during their college years. In the tech talent market, employers can also leverage sites like Reddit to market their employer brands to technical talents in specific groups and post ads for particular positions.

By using targeted, innovative recruitment advertising strategies, companies can go beyond traditional recruiting websites and utilize popular platforms like Hulu, Spotify, TikTok, Twitter, and Threads.

Exploring TikTok and Other Content

While job sites like Indeed and LinkedIn continue to dominate recruitment ads and applications, a recent HireClix survey revealed that consumers are increasingly being exposed to employer brands on sites like YouTube, Amazon, and TikTok. This is a wise move since most consumers spend limited time on job searching sites but countless hours on consumer media websites. Launching paid placements on these sites enables companies to reach more active and passive job seekers. For example, to address the shortage of pilots, airlines could target the interests and content of their desired audience on sites like YouTube, the Steam platform, and Instagram.

However, leveraging platform traffic isn’t necessarily just about advertising. Many organizations are also utilizing their existing employees and Gen Z social media managers to refresh their recruiting messages. In this way, organizations have cultivated their own “online gurus,” thereby gaining an edge in the highly competitive recruitment market. Social media manager for Duolingo, Zaria Parvez, serves as an example, by showcasing Duolingo’s iconic owl mascot and sharing her work stories on her TikTok account. Viewers commented that they didn’t know whether to download Duolingo or work for it. Marketers have long realized the power of “online gurus” on social media platforms. Now, recruiters and HR leaders are also capitalizing on this trend by using these powerful and unexpected workplace authorities to attract top talent.

In fact, implementing this strategy doesn’t necessarily require companies to find employees with a large number of followers. Thanks to the ongoing evolution of social media algorithms, utilizing these authentic and approachable employee influencers to emulate company culture can attract talent in the local market or industry. However, representation is also important, organizations should consider the kind of talent they want to attract. Nowadays, with women returning to the workforce post-pandemic, innovative companies looking to attract this group might think to leverage employees who identify as female to showcase the unique advantages of this group, further encouraging women to re-enter the workforce. These recruiting strategies remain niche but becoming mainstream is just a matter of time.

Incorporating TikTok and other consumer media channels into the recruitment strategy is an essential course for any savvy recruiter. However, there are also other imaginative recruitment marketing tools that are becoming mainstream. The most forward-thinking recruiters are also paving the way for AI-driven recruitment processes.

Using AI in Recruitment: Complexity and Opportunity

Indeed, 88% of companies globally are applying AI in the field of human resources, but the reality is that we still lack guiding principles for successfully deploying AI in the recruitment process, with only a few emerging use cases. AI is being used to automate responses to common interview questions and to schedule appointments, freeing up recruiters to build more human relationships and put more effort into moving candidates through the hiring process. One of the most common use cases may be helping recruiters quickly draft job descriptions.

However, when using AI models for recruitment, the potential for inherent bias is a concern that deserves attention. Companies should carefully monitor the data that can improve AI algorithms; this data should be broad, representative, and diverse. Companies must also ensure that the AI engineers using these algorithms are trained to identify and correct biases in training data. Minimizing bias in the data is crucial, especially when creative recruiters will be using AI assistants in the future to track and pinpoint potential candidates, and draft more personalized content based on their specific experience, preferences, needs, and skills.

In the future, AI modeling could also build decision trees according to the life stages of candidates. For example, AI could analyze whether job seekers are willing to relocate or whether they can efficiently meet the level required by the position. In addition, AI could simulate interactions between job seekers and future managers or future team members. Thus, we can use AI to interact with job seekers in targeted recruitment efforts, show them potential employee experiences and career development paths, and incorporate this as part of the recruitment process, rather than distributing a simple, text-based job title and description.

Reaping the Rewards of Targeted Recruitment

Targeted recruitment advertising can also allow employees to enjoy the benefits of diversity. After the Supreme Court repealed the affirmative action policy in university admissions this June, businesses have a responsibility to prioritize DEI. By adopting strategic recruitment advertising, companies can better achieve diversity in their talent pools, making their workforce more inclusive and creative. To do this, it is necessary to devise thoughtful goals and targeting strategies specific to different positions, ensuring that the best talent can see these opportunities.

The potential to devise creative recruitment strategies is limitless.
By tapping into untapped talent pools, diversifying talent channels, and aligning company values with goal-driven candidates, businesses can find the talent they need to stand out in competition and maintain long-term growth and success.

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