Last month, I gave some tips on how to use social media in your job search. This month, I’m turning the tables and giving advice on how to use social media as a recruiter. Over 90% of recruiters use or plan to use social media for hiring, and they’re expected to invest 73% more in social recruiting in 2015 to try and beat out competitors. Make sure you’re ahead of the curve!

1. Use hashtags. I also gave this advice to job seekers – it’s an easy way for people to find you and your job posting! Hashtags could be as broad as #jobs or as detailed as #accountsreceivable. The city where the job is located is a good idea for a hashtag as well (#indy). Here are a few more of our favorites:

#jobsearch                                     #hiring                             #jobopening

#nonprofitjobs                    #parttimejobs

2. Be strategic about what day of the week you post. The most popular job search times among candidates in the U.S. are Mondays around 11 a.m. and Tuesdays around 8:30 or 9 p.m. in every time zone. Why not post at those times, when most people are already looking?

3. Show off your culture. According to a 2014 study by Jobvite, 4-year college grads are turning to social media to check out prospective employers’ culture. Sell yourself! Post about the great things going on in your office…it might attract candidates to your company.

4. Don’t focus all your efforts on one form of social media. 76% of social job seekers are looking at Facebook, but LinkedIn is where most job-seeking activity happens, and they go to Twitter in search of help and advice. If you only use one type of social media, you might be missing out on part of the market.

5. Don’t post exactly the same thing on all of your pages. On Twitter, which limits you to 140 characters, you’ll have to boil it down to the most important information. Usually there will only be space for the job title, company description (if you’re recruiting for another company like we do), the link, and a couple hashtags. On Facebook and LinkedIn, you can elaborate a little more, so take advantage of that! Don’t make the post too long, though – people probably won’t want to read several paragraphs. If they want to read more, they can follow a link to the job description. It’s also a good idea to have a difference between your posts on Facebook and LinkedIn so people aren’t seeing the same information presented in the same way everywhere. I think of it in this way: people on LinkedIn are more likely to be there specifically to look for a job, and while the same thing may be true of Facebook users, I think of job searching on Facebook as more of a secondary action to catching up with friends. I like to try and post more interesting things about the job on Facebook to get them hooked, and more specifics, like salary range, to LinkedIn.

Of course, if you don’t want to have to worry about whether you’re recruiting right, you can always ask Purple Ink to do it for you! We’re happy to help!