This advent calendar presents 24 practical suggestions on how to learn from candidate behavior to improve your HR marketing, based on early results from Potentialpark's upcoming 2024 Talent Comm study.
This survey result might surprise you, it certainly still leaves me slightly baffled every year:
Asking over twenty thousand students, graduates and early career professionals about social media career channels, the one thing they rate as most important globally is a link from the social channels to the career website.
Why?
Now leaving Instagram is not the best thing about Instagram. Why worry so much about an exit link? The whole point is the feed, right?
The thing is, like with many parties where people arrive alone but don't leave alone, what is the most impactful is not what happens at the party but afterwards.
In a similar fashion, social media marketing is not primarily a show for entertainment and branding on the platform, but an effort to move traffic of your target audience to your home where you can, well, convert.
It almost seems like candidates know this, and they can't take a social media career page seriously if it does not link to the company's career website.
Which, by the way, is why it's a huge advantage if you have career-specific social media channels where you control which link to show in the bio. As opposed to shared channels with corporate comms that insist the bio link lead to the company's front page.
(More on career vs. shared channels in tomorrow's Door.)
The one-link limit
Even better than one link to the career website would be a different link for each post.
As discussed in Door 1 of this advent calendar, career website landing pages: If you post a nice story for chemical engineers, you ideally have a specific landing page for chemical engineers on your career website and link straight to that.
Sadly, it's not that easy.
Club owners have the opposite interest
The problem is, coming back to the party analogy: the social media platforms are the club owners who don't want anyone to leave early because they make money selling you drinks while you're there.
Hence, they make it notoriously difficult for you to link out. Instagram and TikTok limit you to one link in the bio. X is accused of punishing tweets with links. And so on.
Their main effort is to optimize their algorithm into being ever more endorphine-enducing to make users stay. (The "fashion drug" that keeps young people on the dancefloor these days is an endless stream of attention-grabbing short videos that force you to keep swiping up, as introduced by TikTok.)
But there are solutions even for this.
Smart linking
Let's check out some best practices. Instead of linking directly to the career website, more and more use these options:
Both Linktree and a landing page on your career website serve as in-between pages. Here you can leave as many links as you like, for example one for each of your posts.
Every platform is a little different. But the principle should be to try and attract talent to follow you to your home turf where you control the content, lead them closer to applying, and where you can use your charm to make them join your family. None of this costs much, but can have a lasting effect.
BONUS: Would you like to receive the results of the new Talent Comm study when it comes out? Sign up on the Potentialpark website to secure a free research expert talk (no strings attached) and tickets to Potentialpark's events to meet peer HR marketers.
Come back tomorrow for the next Door of this Advent Calendar.
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