Some years back, a typical talent acquisition strategy used to look like this: Employers would pepper newspapers with ads and trawl through their go-to recruiting sites, leaving candidates to wade through generic job descriptions and dozens of cold reach-out emails.

And even after all the effort employers put in, most often they couldn’t identify the best talent because they had been looking for it at the wrong places.

Let’s face it! Attracting the right talent can feel like a battle tough to win — unless you work for Google, Facebook or Amazon obviously. Nevertheless, staffing your company with top talent is extremely important in order for you to help it succeed.

To compete with these tech giants, you would have to offer enormous benefits and perks on top of competitive salaries to make your job opportunities look attractive. Fortunately, today’s hyper-competitive market presents you with a more creative sourcing strategy, which not only allows you to stand out from the crowd but also to engage, inspire, and even amuse the finest Millennial talent in the process.

Yes, we’re talking about social media! A powerful tool for companies to engage with Millennial talent on a one-on-one basis with more personalized messaging, making candidates feel more valued and cared for.

Today, social media is no more a novelty. Rather it is an indispensable tool when it comes to creating a successful recruiting strategy. Not only is the use of social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other job posting websites – an effective way to discover talent, advertise jobs and converse with potential candidates, it is also an awesome way to showcase your employer brand and company culture.

Companies are going all-out for social media recruitment. It is an important strategy for them to meet millennial candidates – where they actually hang out – online. Much like other aspects of workplace, talent acquisition is also becoming more and more virtual now. It is now being driven by the online marketplace and is built on information that is accessible, shareable and responsive.

And it is not only the large companies that are leveraging social media for recruiting millennials. Statista reveals that “over 90 percent of companies are presently making use of social media networks in their hiring process.”

This ultimately means that to compete for the best millennial talent in your industry, you need to have a social media presence that will impress and engage the most outstanding candidates.

Social platforms are reporting robust growth owing to their ever-increasing usage. This is why social media surfing has, undoubtedly, become one of the most popular activities that users indulge in.

Statistics from 2019 suggest that there are 3.5 billion social media users globally – equivalent to about 45% of the current population – and this number is only increasing.

Plus, now that social media is becoming more integrated in our daily lives, it opens up plenty of opportunities for businesses who are looking to reach out to their potential candidates through social media.

Let’s be honest. We all are slowly getting addicted to social media. In fact, many of us already have. Whether it is about scrolling down our infinite Facebook feed or posting the perfect dinner photo on Instagram before digging into our food, social media has become somewhat a part of our lives.

Social media statistics indicate that on average each person spends about 3 hours on social networks and messaging.

Emarketer has broken down the use of social media by generation, and the results, though interesting, aren’t surprising. According to the study, 90.4% of Millennials, 77.5% of Generation X, and 48.2% of Baby Boomers are active social media users.

Millennials top the charts with the highest use of social media, and also the easiest access to smartphones. In contrast to that, Gen X are more likely to be using tablets.

Finally, Baby Boomers are also making an effort to bridge their gap with technology and are familiarizing themselves with social media platforms. This statistic is an unequivocal evidence of why social media is a valuable tool for attracting the millennial talent.

Here are some great examples of companies doing social media recruitment right.

Mastercard went on a global hunt for millennials with high hopes and big ideas for a cashless future. The multinational financial services corporation ran a campaign on social media for recruiting millennials with the hashtag #internswanted, giving college students a chance to compete for an internship at their company.

Each applicant submitted an idea for an app, product or a technique to help the company direct towards creating a cashless future. Successful candidates validated their application through social media and were judged on the number of likes and retweets their idea earned.

In the end, 532 candidates qualified for the internship program. MasterCard even stretched their program intake to hire an additional intern due to the talent quality.

In 2019, The Heineken Company launched a campaign “Go Places 2.0” that aimed to engage and inspire future talent. Informed by the real-life experiences of employees, the campaign showcased the brand’s entrepreneurial culture by featuring the stories of 33 Heineken employees from around the world.

The interactive video demonstrates the kind of the talent Heineken intends to recruit while encouraging bold ideas and granting potential recruits and employees full authority to shape their career.

Heineken also visited several universities and hosted career talks where they shared with students what it is like to Go Places with Heineken.

As for social media, the digital campaign on Heineken’s corporate Facebook page reached a broader audience and inspired many potential employees to understand how the company operates and what it would mean to become a part of the company.

Believe it or not, Marriot’s career page has 1.2 million Facebook likes, four times more than Facebook’s career page. The company engages with the audience by posting at least twice a day, shedding light on its employee’s accomplishments and showing what it feels like to work for the company.

What makes the Marriot’s social media so unique is the personal feel that it adds; its career chats give practical advice to prospects on how to get accepted for a job in the company and also in the hospitality industry in general.

The Talent Games, with its carefully curated social media strategies, helps companies draw in the top millennial talent. Global organizations use our AI-driven gamified assessments as their candidate pre-screening tool.

We also offer our clients social media recruitment marketing to attract top millennial candidates. However, this is optional for them, since our forte is to make recruitment games for organizations.

Once our clients’ Ready-to-Play (C-Factor) or Customized Game goes live, we run social media campaigns to generate buzz for that particular company’s recruitment.

Let’s check out a few of them:

Having more than 2000 brands ranging from global icons to local favourites, the largest food company in the world, Nestle is always in quest of attracting the finest millennial talent. In June 2019, their Facebook page turned into a hugely successful recruiting channel.

The global food and beverage conglomerate corporation launched a campaign to hunt candidates for its Nestlé ESAR Future Talent Graduate Development Programme, inviting them to try gamified assessment to evaluate their personality and cognitive skills.

By gamifying the millennial recruitment process, Nestlé ESAR got 6,147 new applications (candidate registrations) from East and South Africa. Cherry on top, the gamification of the recruitment process enhanced both the candidate experience and the efficiency of the application process.

In 2018, Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL), the largest integrated Information Communication Technology (ICT) company of Pakistan, joined hands with The Talent Games to get a customized gamified assessment platform to woo Millennial talent.

PTCL ran a campaign ‘Climb the Summit’ all over its social media, enticing people into playing its game to land their dream job – while also dedicating a page especially for recruitment purpose.

In total, PTCL received over 70,000 candidate applications, out of which 26,000 candidates played the game. The power of the campaign was such that PTCL was in the end able to sift out the 100 best candidates as management trainees.

The company’s Facebook page also garnered over 1.3 M page likes as a result of the campaign, killing two birds with one stone – both recruiting millennials with social media and promoting their employer brand at the same time.

As one of the largest pharmaceutical companies by both market capital and sales, Novartis has around 8000 job openings annually. The company is, therefore, continuously in need of unearthing the most outstanding Millennial talent through innovative ways.

In 2018, Novartis used social media to lure millennials with its “You Are The Future” campaign for its Management Trainee Program. The powerful social media campaign pulled in over 11,304 candidate applications whereas 5,487 candidates played the game to land a job at Novartis.

It’s indisputable that when talented millennials are seeking job opportunities, they access social media as a part of their search activity. And when they come across certain companies whose social media project an environment and culture they find attractive, they are likely to apply for the position openings with those organizations.

This provides employers a golden opportunity that they can capitalize on to discover genuine millennial talent. Clearly, companies who tend to leverage social media for recruiting millennials are more desirable to work for.

And companies who are still falling behind will lose top millennial talent if they keep on shying away from utilizing social media for their millennial hiring.