Snapchat as a Recruiting Tool: 5 Tips for Employers

Snapchat, that’s just for kids right? Wrong. Snapchat is a useful tool in recruiting, too, if you know how to mine the gold that lies within this social media platform.

Any good recruiter knows that employer branding is at the hear of a solid recruiting effort. But branding is about much more than a great logo and a Facebook page; it’s about being able to express your company’s values and culture to a broad audience. There are three important elements of recruiting that are influenced by an employer brand, all of which can be propelled forward through the use of Snapchat: boosting your company’s reputation, showing off an appealing company culture, and reminding users of the cool job opportunities your organization has to offer.
Read more to learn why Snapchat might be an underutilized free recruiting tool for your organization.

1. The Usage Stats Are (Still) Impressive

Roughly 158 million people use Snapchat every day for an average of 25 – 30 minutes. Compare that to 106 million people who log into LinkedIn each month for under 17 minutes, and it makes sense to add Snapchat into your recruitment toolkit.

More than 70% of users are under 34-years old, however 29% are older users. This means that Snapchat is versatile tool that appeals to a variety of ages, while enabling the easy creation of employee generated content and peer-to-peer insight.

2. Trust Your Employees

Social media is no longer a passing fad. Today, people understand that what goes on on social media does not stay on social media, and in 2017 they know to be careful! Both Facebook and LinkedIn have been around for more than 13 years so your employees have had ample opportunity to learn what that should and should not share online.

So trust them.

Your employees are your easiest talent attraction tool; they are connected, they understand your culture, and they can share your story. They can open doors and show an organization’s inner workings – the vibe, the look, the atmosphere and, most importantly, why they choose to stay with your company.

When you’re trying to recruit people whose skills are in demand, Snapchat gives you the opportunity to stand out from your competitors. You’ll be showing the real you, the authentic company culture, and this will set you apart from all of the other recruiters vying for their attention.

3. Give your employee advocates a voice

Ask your employees and I am sure you’ll discover that they want to be involved in the recruitment process. Maybe not with interviewing, per se, but often you’ll find that employees want to influence who your company is attracting and who they’ll be working with. Snapchat gives them an easy way to do that.

Cisco’s WeAreCisco team does this exceptionally well. Cisco has a team of 60 employee Snappers from across the globe, and have an impressive 70% completion rate. Completion rate refers to how many people have viewed your story and how many minutes they spent viewing the content.

What’s great about their channel is that they’re not relying on HR or Marketing to create snaps. The company allows interested employees loose to share content, which adds to the content’s level of authenticity. Since snaps only last 24 hours, followers know to tune in regularly before they disappear, which increases audience engagement.

Here Briana, an Intern in the Services Department, used Snapchat to share a tour of the office and showed off the fun facilities that encourage work-life balance. At Cisco, it’s not just Interns who have a chance to take over the Snapchat account. Previously I’ve chatted to Infosec analyst Tammy Nguyen, who shared her favourite shirts and encouraged followers to engage in conversation. By being so open to conversation, I felt like the hurdles to hiring were lowered.

4. Snapchat increases your shareable content

There is nothing wrong with sharing Snaps to other channels, and it’s really easy. Simply download each video or photo to your camera roll, or download your entire Story. For me, my iPhone stitches the snaps together for me, which is super handy.

Next, upload your Snaps to Instagram Stories or create YouTube videos, which can then be passed onto even more channels. Including your Snapcode, like WeAreCisco have done, will increase your followers and encourage more engagement, too.

5. Tell people!

Unlike other sites, it can be challenging to find Snapchat users without knowing their username so you’ve got to share your Snapchat code far and wide.

It looks like this below and you’ll find it top left when you’re in the app:

And remember to create a buzz… it’s hard to ignore the excitement in this Tweet:

Did you see the @CiscoApprentice takeover of the @WeAreCisco #Snapchat story today? Great snaps of the action at @GreenPark_Tri 🏊🏼🚴🏼♀️🏃🏻 pic.twitter.com/32YqPDKIn5

— Jonathan Hesketh (@jhesk1992) March 9, 2017