Reach Passive Candidates While You Celebrate The Holidays!

Table of Contents

• Background Check: Our Partners at Adway
• Why is the Holiday Season the Right Time For Recruiting?
• 4 Factors That Are Impacting TA Right Now
• 6 Holiday Recruiting Hacks
• We Wish You a Merry Recruitment Season!

‘Tis the season to be…. recruiting passive candidates! 

That’s right. It’s the most wonderful time of year to reach your dream candidates right where they are. 

Forget the myths about recruiting season cooling off for the holidays. With the right recruitment marketing strategy and the power of social media job ads, you can get a head start on your New Year’s headcount while your competitors are left in the cold. 

And that doesn’t mean you can’t shut down and enjoy the holidays yourself. In fact, this article will show you exactly how you can reach passive candidates while you celebrate this season. 

Background Check: Our Partners at Adway

Adway is a fast-growing HR tech company with a unique proposition in the global TA market: to help recruiters attract relevant candidates through social media advertising. By plugging the social media attraction gap for SmartRecruiters, our audience of large enterprises has seen sky-high recruitment volumes. 

Since the summer of 2021, Adway and SmartRecruiters have forged a seamless integration that enables Adway to build social talent pools using AI and data to strategically attract desired candidates on social media channels like LinkedIn, Google, Instagram and Facebook. For our mutual enterprise clients, this means the ability to leverage their employer brands to attract their dream candidates. 

Our partnership with SmartRecruiters is a huge commercial benefit to SmartRecruiters’ employer branding investments and allows for faster, cheaper, unbiased candidate attraction. 

Now, let’s get back to why right now is the right time for recruiting… 

Why is the Holiday Season the Right Time For Recruiting?

The below recruitment marketing strategy we are laying out is a classic, tactical move to save some budget during the year by avoiding overspending in November. Between the boom in eCommerce and the buildup to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s a classic time for the advertising market to heat up. 

By the time we get to mid December, however, advertising activity is already declining, making it a cost-effective time to direct spend to social media job ads. 

So, why is the holiday season the top time for attracting the best candidates? Here are three key reasons: 

1. Less recruitment competition – Many recruiters burn themselves out during the high-volume hiring demands of November, so it’s a great time to strike when things quiet down in December. There’s less competition from other recruiters and more opportunities to grab high-quality candidates who would otherwise be left on the table. 

2. Candidates have increased availability – Since many candidates are slowing down for the holidays, they may have much more time on their hands to a) chat on the phone with recruiters about new jobs and b) scroll around on social media. In fact, social media traffic spikes a whopping 73 percent during the holidays!

3. Candidates are contemplating their next steps – The end of the year is a particularly introspective time for many candidates as they rethink what comes next on their career path. It’s more seamless to transition out of one role and into another as you approach a new year, making it an intuitive time to search for a job. 

4 Factors That Are Impacting TA Right Now

There are four factors as we come out of the global pandemic that make this year an even more crucial (and opportunistic) year to focus on recruiting during the holidays: 

1. The Great Resignation

There is extreme movement in the candidate market right now, especially in employees who are between 30 and 45 years old. The resignations for this age range have increased more than 20% between 2020 and 2021, with further spikes predicted through December and January. The tech and healthcare industries are being hit the hardest, further enforcing why the time to strike for great talent is now! 

2. The Hardest Role to Fill? Recruiters 

Right now, demand for recruiters is skyrocketing. There are over 364,970 ‘Recruiter’ jobs advertised on LinkedIn worldwide. It’s actually more difficult to find a recruiter than it is to find a tech professional. If you don’t have enough recruiting staff, how can you fill all your job vacancies? When in doubt: automate as many processes as possible. Make your talent acquisition process as lean as it can be. 

3. Social Media Activity is Peaking

As we said before, social media traffic spikes a whopping 73% during the holidays. On top of that, 87% of Gen Z will be on social media to get inspiration for their holiday shopping. That’s a huge audience of potential candidates who are primed for social media job ads. Even better, the number of competitors who are buying ads on social media is declining at the same time. This puts your content front and center. 

4. The Stimulus Bills

The global economy is especially strong right now, and it’s positioned to stage its most robust post-recession recovery in 80 years. What does that mean for the world of recruiting? Most employers have the capacity to grow their businesses by speeding up their hiring. Not only that, the excess of stimulus funds that were injected into the economy are readily available to subsidize that growth. 

6 Holiday Recruiting Hacks

There are clearly many challenges and possibilities to be faced in TA right now. Here are a few concrete recruiting hacks to conquer the challenges and capitalise on the opportunities: 

1. Share your employer brand while your audience is active. If you don’t have job vacancies to be promoted from mid-December to mid-January, you should get ahead of the push by sharing your employer brand on social media while user activity is peaking! This can help you build awareness and consideration from candidates in advance, so the sooner you get your content in front of the marketing department, the better. 

2. Connect your ATS system to your social media. Redirect your focus from solely relying on job boards to leveraging social media to promote your job ads. Job boards are frequented by active candidates – candidates who are actively seeking employment. They make up only 30% of the talent market. Passive candidates, on the other hand, comprise the other 70% of the talent market and, since they’re not actively seeking jobs, they’re less likely to be checking out your listing on a job board. As a matter of fact, passive candidates are more likely to be on their mobile phones using social media. For these reasons, it’s imperative to stop sourcing solely from job boards and take advantage of social recruiting. 

3. Enable retargeting in as many places as you can. Whether it’s to make sure you capture all the traffic coming to your carrier page or the employer branding ads you’re pushing out during a lull in open vacancies, enable retargeting everywhere you can in the leadup to the holidays. For example, by posting an employer branding video on social media when user activity is at a high, you can use retargeting tactics to ensure everyone who watched the video  sees your job ads in the New Year! 

4. Use programmatic bidding. Programmatic bidding is an efficient way to use algorithms and AI to optimize your recruitment marketing strategy and get more candidates who fit the parameters you’re seeking. If you’re unfamiliar with the technology, try working with a trusted talent partner like Adway who can show you the ropes. 

5. Spend the budget you saved for end-of-year. Whatever funds you were able to set aside earlier in the fiscal year (particularly November), the period from mid-December to mid-January is a great time to put them to use.

6. Make sure you’re iOS 14 compliant. Without being fully updated, it can make it extremely difficult to access and interpret key analytics in your ATS system. Spend some time ensuring you’re iOS 14 compliant on everything from job boards to carrier pages to social media. Approach your marketing department now and tell them you need your tracking to work alongside iOS 14 updates. 

We Wish You a Merry Recruitment Season!

While everyone deserves some down time to reflect and reset over the holidays, we hope you enjoyed this lesson in how a few simple hacks right now can help you execute a winning recruitment strategy in the New Year. By combining a little bit of knowhow with the convenience of automation and HR tech, you can get a head start on the competition for top talent next year. 

If you’re still getting your feet wet with TA tech and automation, reach out to us at Adway. Our groundbreaking technology helps you attract the next generation of talent through the art of social recruitment marketing.