When posting jobs and other employer content to social media the use of hashtags can go a long way to making those posts more discoverable and generate more views. In this half hour webinar Matt Lozar from Haley Marketing and Chris Russell break down the use of hashtags for recruiting on social media.
TRANSCRIPT
Chris Russell:
But yeah, last gasp of winter there. All right, let's get to shout outs here. So we've got a number of people live on the call. Let's see here. Hannah, Vanessa Watson, feel free to say hello. Our returning champion, Bradley Cooper here is here. The recruiter, not the actor. Good to see you, Bradley. Erin, Adrianna, Angelo [Pocho 00:01:15]. Hey Angelo. How is it going? Hope you heard your podcast replay there. Michael [inaudible 00:01:21] is here from resume [inaudible 00:01:22]. Hey Michael. Laurie, Jonathan, Ray's here from Employee Diversity, Roy Robertson, Grace, Ray [inaudible 00:01:30] and Laura. So thank you all for joining, everyone. Feel free to network with each other, throw your LinkedIns and that in the chat room there. And we'll connect with each other.
Chris Russell:
Let's see here. So I just have a quick show note for next week. I'll be doing another demo day with a hiring platform called Chattr, C-H-A-T-T-R. And it's made for high volume, hourly workers out there. So if you do recruit in that arena, I'd love for you to come and check it out. I will have their CEO, Jim Schimpf, on the call and he'll walk us through a demo of that and show you everything you need to know about the product and tool and see if you like it or not. So go to rectechlive.com, sign up for that, or just visit us on Crowdcast. The RecTech Live URL actually just forwards to Crowdcast by the way. So you can use that as a quick shortcut.
Chris Russell:
All right here. Let's see. So why would you want to use hashtags? Well, in short, they make your job posts more discoverable and content more discoverable across the major social media channels. All the channels will let you use them, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And there's various ways to use them across those platforms as well. So we'll bring on Matt now. We'll go right into this topic. Matt, why don't you first define what a hashtag is, if you could.
Matt Lozar:
Sure. Let's share our screen here. I was just trying to share quickly in the chat, saw some good chatter back and forth. Yeah. Social media, let's see here, hashtags, what works in candidate recruitment. Been writing some content here at Haley Marketing to where we focus on recruitment marketing a lot where at Haley Marketing, we're focused on the staffing industry, but this stuff works in any industry. And really a definition of a hashtag is think of a pound sign on your telephone, where even if you're leaving messages now, I feel like that's changed from just saying pound sign to pound sign or hashtag, probably to reach a younger demographic, might not know what the pound sign is. But it's something followed by a word or phrase. And when you click on it, if you're on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, they're really big as well. You can see all the posts that have that word included in their content and it can be a really effective way to see content in a number of different ways.
Matt Lozar:
It doesn't have to just be recruiting. I was looking before here, today is Admin Professionals Day. I think there's a trending topic for simply that, just #AdminProfessionalsDay where I'm sure companies are recognizing their admin teams across different companies across the country and just showcasing them. And I'm sure it'd be a great way to see some really good content, but it's a great way to see content in your everyday life. And then we use those trends and bring them over here to recruiting and whatnot.
Chris Russell:
The pound sign is having its day, man.
Matt Lozar:
It sure is.
Chris Russell:
All these special characters are now, right? Because you've got to use them in passwords and the @ sign.
Matt Lozar:
Yeah, seriously. But I think it's important here. We'll get into it why the hashtags can really help us is our data at Haley Marketing, and everybody's seeing it, cost per application is going up. We work a lot in manufacturing in production with our clients and staffing, but I've even talked to a lot of direct hire companies right now, just got off a call with somebody in California. And they're like, "Why aren't people applying for jobs?" And I'm like, "I wish I had a great answer." Stimulus money and whatnot is one of them. I think it's also still uncertainty. And people don't want to, it's a relocation or they really want to focus on work for home, remote jobs, whatnot.
Matt Lozar:
But the data is showing us costs are going up because there's a lot more job offerings. The search trends on Google are down for jobs. They're lower now than they were at the bottom of the pandemic last year, back in March, which is kind of crazy to say out loud. But if it's lower now than March 2020, that means we have a supply and demand issue. But I think this can help us. We can use hashtags to our advantage to find active candidates on social.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. It's one of the ways you can maximize the effectiveness of your posts on social media. If you're not doing that, then you're losing out on traffic and views and engagement on these things.
Matt Lozar:
So I think a great way, we'll go into some examples here in a little bit, but how to get started. There's a number of different types we had in the blog posts. And you can use ones that are already common. I'll share some examples on the next screens, but if jobs, searching for work, if you want to get your posts found, now hiring, all those different areas. So you don't have to reinvent the wheel here, but you can jump into conversations of people that are talking.
Matt Lozar:
And I think the next step is it's really important to be careful. You might think a hashtag's really useful, but just do some research on it before you put it into your posts. There might be something just controversial you get caught up in that you don't want your content surrounded by.
Matt Lozar:
Be professional. And I think that you don't want to get too loose with your different hashtags and whatnot. And less is more in my thinking. There's some practices maybe on Instagram or if you load in 30, 40 different hashtags into a comment, that helps. But if you're posting something on Facebook or LinkedIn, it's not going to receive engagement if you put your couple of sentences of content and all of a sudden have a list of 30 different hashtags. I don't think the algorithm is going to like that, one. And two, I don't think people are going to engage with it just because it looks spammy.
Matt Lozar:
So from a company perspective and we can dig in here a little bit more, I think there's a number of different ways you can look at this from your company perspective. Obviously that first part of you have a job opening or now hiring. I'm actually hiring for someone in a programmatic space right now. And I've put some of those hashtags in there the other day. I think it was programmatic openings or job advertisement because literally what I did was I went over to LinkedIn and I typed in a hashtag and use what populated. It's similar to when we go to Google. If you type in Google auto-fills for us a lot, because it's a common query, it's a common question. And LinkedIn and Facebook's going to show you hashtags that are common in usage of people on the platform.
Matt Lozar:
They're not going recognize hashtags that are unpopular and just aren't getting a lot of traffic. So I think there's a number of different ways you can add them in here. This first one, if you have a job opening, if you're now hiring, et cetera, you can put information about your industry. Obviously healthcare, you'd want your candidates to search for those if you're looking for a registered nurse or a medical assistant. But if you're looking for a store assistant or someone in the retail space, those different hashtags are different because people will go to Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and have them saved in their profiles and see the new content that gets populated every day for those different hashtags. So you want to reach the right people with your postings.
Matt Lozar:
You can dig in more on somebody, what type of company are you? If you're small business, startup, Fortune 100, people want to work for different types of companies. So you can start to showcase a little bit of your culture with the content if it's a job posting or where I talk about employee story or community involvement if your team's out there doing a lot of social responsibility. Or if it's a company that really focuses on being environmentally friendly, some candidates want that, some candidates don't. So if you have that information in the posting, you're able to start to showcase your employer brand. And a big part of employer branding from my perspective is it's okay not to be connecting with every candidate because not every candidate is right for you. So you can start to showcase that through there.
Matt Lozar:
And then a couple of the other ones, I think the bottom one, if it's location specific, we're up in Buffalo, so Buffalo jobs. If it's Chicago, if it's Los Angeles, Florida, I'm sure there's different regions as well. The DMV area right down in Maryland, DC, Virginia.
Chris Russell:
I use CT jobs when I'm doing Connecticut stuff.
Matt Lozar:
Sure. I know there's an EB jobs one for employer branding I think. So and it's a lot of trial and testing to see what works, but also if your non-job posts, if it's office events, if it's birthdays, if a company is finally getting back in the office. We haven't been back in the office since March 13th, 2020. We gathered outside a little bit. But just when we get back to the office, some content around that at Haley Marketing to showcase that we're finally getting back together as a team.
Chris Russell:
Before we go on from that, Matt, we've got a question, which I thought was a great question, which I'll answer. Maybe you can add into this. But Jonathan asked, "Do social platforms have restrictions on the number of hashtags or do they penalize for too many?"
Chris Russell:
So great question, Jonathan. Here's what I know. Matt, you back me up on this. On Twitter, you're limited to your characters there, so you had to limit kind of the numbers on Twitter. When I kind of do a Twitter job posts, I'll usually do no more than three hashtags on their overall. Instagram however, that's where kind of the hashtag really one of the places where it's really grown a lot. And I've heard, Matt, that the ideal number of hashtags for an Instagram post is around 30. And there's a big wide range there. I think on the other platforms, Facebook and LinkedIn maybe, I don't know, I've seen five to 10, I guess, would be roughly ideal. We don't want to over go crazy with the hashtags and make it more text than the actual post is, but just use your judgment. Pick the most popular ones first and then kind of go from there in terms of what else you might need.
Matt Lozar:
Yeah. I tried to find a balance. I think those numbers were good, Chris. Obviously Twitter has a character restriction. So if you just want to put hashtags, you can just put hashtags. Instagram is a world that's just really different. To me, that signals users on Instagram are searching a lot of hashtags.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. That's how they search the platform is through hashtags mainly.
Matt Lozar:
Yeah. So and a lot of times, some people won't put it in the actual post on Instagram, they'll put it in the first comment so it doesn't clog up what you're actually trying to say.
Chris Russell:
Great tip.
Matt Lozar:
So it's you could say, "Hey, now hiring," or even, "Employee anniversaries for April 2021. Thanks to our team." And then in the next one, put all those different hashtags in there. And I think Facebook, LinkedIn, your numbers were very spot on, five to 10, with a good balance of more general ones and maybe some more specific ones, too. And honestly, Jonathan, I don't know if they're going to penalize you. They might not show your content on Facebook, LinkedIn, if you're spamming it with 20, 30 different hashtags. Testing's always good to see what works well. And I think just not overflowing it, as Chris said, with hashtags helped us here because you don't want that to be the main content of your post. You want that copy to be important and hopefully use hashtags at the bottom when someone's searching to help you bump up those results.
Chris Russell:
You mentioned testing. And I think that's a good thing to do. So 24 hours after your post, Jonathan, go look and see how many views it got on LinkedIn. And then check on Facebook and then things like that. Check the impressions there. That'll give you an idea of, as you go on over time, you can then see how you're doing as far as the engagement goes around there. So pay attention to those numbers after you post and that'll help you gauge what to use in the future.
Matt Lozar:
And it changes all the time. It's the answer on April 21st might not be the answer on June 21st. So it's the algorithms are a moving target.
Chris Russell:
[crosstalk 00:13:34] [inaudible 00:13:34]
Matt Lozar:
So these hashtags, I think, help from a company perspective. The next slide we're going to talk about from a job seeker's perspective. And I think this really speaks now to not a lot of job seeker activity. So we need to go out and I don't know if it's sourcing per se, but go out and recruit and try to find the people that literally have these hashtags in their job, in their postings. If it's LinkedIn, if it's in their profile on Facebook or LinkedIn, if it's in content they're posting, these are the people that are ready to go back to work that might been laid off recently or just their unemployment's ending, or just maybe they're a student literally here in Western New York. We are going back to school next week, five days, full time. So I'm sure there'll be some families that can go back to the workplace a little bit more than they could when their school was hybrid for two days a week. Everybody's schedule is slowly getting back to normal.
Matt Lozar:
So if you can search from these perspectives, it can work really well. And it's not going to be the same in every market. It's not going to be the same in Buffalo to Chicago to Seattle to Massachusetts. Just like different tactics work well and different markets, different job boards work differently in all these different markets. So do some searches in your area to see what's popping up for candidates with these hashtags.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. I'm on Twitter now. I just typed in #needwork. Looks like some employers are using it to track to their jobs. Got a couple of employers here. There's some articles that talk about work, about job hunting. But seeing a lot of, there's... Yeah. So it's a great sourcing tactic I think. Look for these hashtags as a sourcing activity and see who you can find out there. You never know. There's a big story to hear in the Connecticut Post today about restaurants are having trouble hiring. They just can't find enough workers right now. And they're worried about the reopening and are they going to have enough staff to actually fill demand? So it's getting pretty, pretty interesting around that stuff.
Matt Lozar:
It's a great way to join the conversation like you were saying, Chris, on Twitter. If someone has that in their profile or in a post that they've recently published, reach out to them and say, "Hey, these are some offerings we have, or would love to talk to you, give us a call or here's my email address at work." And the Facebook similar, you can tag people in posts. That happens a lot on job postings or maybe send them a Facebook message and say, "Hey, I saw you were looking for a new job or are you just ready to reenter the workforce? We have some great opportunities would love to chat. Here's the time."
Chris Russell:
There's a tweet in the chat there from... I'll give a shout out to a Murphy-Goode Winery. Looking for a fresh office? Good. We're hiring. It says apply now at murphygoodewinery.com. We got a link there. The hashtags are a really Goode job and the Goode is part of their name, so G-O-O-D-E. A Goode life, a goode time guaranteed, #newjobopportunity, #dreamjob, #pursuitofhappiness, #careergoals, needwork, wine contest, #contest, #newbeginning. So they got a nice picture there. So shout out to Murphy-Goode Winery.
Matt Lozar:
And they do a good job of balancing because if you have Goode job, G-O-O-D-E J-O-B, great for their employer brand, might not be great for someone searching. So they balance that with their company specific hashtags, but also some more of the traditional ones that are popular because if I'm looking for a job, unless I'm really specifically looking to work with that company, I'm not going to search for that content. I see Angelo also shared one. That's a really great tip. I think the O-N-O, open to new opportunities or open to work. Look for those locally and make sure they're the right content and jump in those conversations.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. You've seen those LinkedIn photo frames now with the open to work on for some people there. I'm assuming that's searchable there on the platform if we actually searched the open to work hashtag. Let me just see what we get here. I love searching content on LinkedIn. It's such a rabbit hole sometimes.
Matt Lozar:
Yes, you can go down rabbit holes when you search hashtags, for sure.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. There's all kinds of... And it's global too. There's people from all the world are using, #opentowork. So it is a little bit hard to sift through some of that. And you got to add more keywords to your search from there, I guess.
Matt Lozar:
Yeah. Try some different filters. I think Facebook's pretty good at that where you can just search geographic markets or might just have to go through those different posts you have and make sure you're finding people that you're in your market.
Chris Russell:
Yep. Grace has a tip, a tool such as Hashtagify, free features and are helpful in assessing popularity in demos of hashtags you wanted to use. Hashtagify, ever use that?
Matt Lozar:
I haven't. We've used RiteTag, R-I-T-E-T-A-G. Probably pretty similar in terms of what's popular in markets being able to find that information. I'm sure there's a number of different tools that have free features. And if you want paid subscriptions, they obviously give you some more bells and whistles. But those are areas, do some research. It helps with that. That helps with the testing because that data is available and out there, we just have to know what to do with it and leveraging those free tools can really help us to find what's popular since it's constantly changing.
Chris Russell:
Yup. All right. What's next?
Matt Lozar:
Yeah. I think for me, just kind of wrapping up, that was kind of the layout of the blog posts here, but what should you do? Search Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. Use some third-party tools. Use the auto-complete on those different platforms that show us what's popular. See what's trending. See what's working. It's going to be different in your local industry and your local geographic market. Don't be afraid to jump in that conversation, to do some different testing. I loved your tip, Chris, about to post content, try some hashtags. Log back in 24 hours later and see what happened, if you had impressions, if you had clicks, if you had engagement. And then use that data to help you make better decisions. And we didn't dig into this too much, but if you're going to have a company specific one, have a good plan to... It can work really well. And you can own that hashtag like that example Chris shared in the chat of Murphy-Goode wine.
Matt Lozar:
I don't think anyone else is posting or outside of that company or an employee with a company, Goode wine or Goode job, or some Goode career, G-O-O-D-E career. So it's a way to really own that hashtag to show to people in your company, whether it's your current team or maybe some higher level decision makers of what you're doing on social, just to showcase them and say, "Hey, this is a hashtag we've created. It showcases our culture. It has some job postings. This is the ROI we're getting from in terms of impressions and clicks and whatnot." And so if you have a company plan or specific hashtags, have a good plan and post content to it. Try to get the team to use it and see how it's working and constantly tweak and adjust.
Chris Russell:
Yep. Very cool. That's it for your slides, right, man?
Matt Lozar:
That's all I had.
Chris Russell:
All right, cool. Let's close that. You can close that out. And let's just wrap up here. I do want to ask the group, I want to talk a little about company career specific hashtags. So if your company has your own hashtag you use, throw it in the chat there. I know Angelo, you have something at Rockwell, don't you? For Rockwell Automation in terms of just your careers hashtags for your main careers hashtag you're using to talk about life at the company. Yeah. Life at Rock. Okay. So a lot of couples use life at or careers at or your company name careers as the main hashtags. Monica says SASR retail staffing. Aaron says VanderHouwen Recruits, Vanderfam, okay. Family. Very cool. Matt, you have any tips around how to create one of those or pick one or... ?
Matt Lozar:
I would think step one is if you're thinking of something, do some research on it first before you dig in to make sure someone hasn't claimed it or is using it. Because if someone already has really good content around it, do you want to be in that search result as well? I would think something that, obviously I love some of those ideas down there. I think Angelo said life at ROK, because that's their stock ticker. There's some other examples like the wine company. I think some other examples here with Aaron and Michael, just showing it and trying to find ways to get different plays on your company name or whatnot. Like the wedding hashtags we see all the time now when people get married. If you find someone who's really good at that to come up with the play on words or just works your content in there.
Matt Lozar:
Like at Haley Marketing, I would think we do a lot of Team Haley. That's our culture. H-A-L-E-Y. There's probably not a lot of other content around that. So do some research first. Try not to make it too long or confusing just because we'll forget it.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Keep it short. Yeah.
Matt Lozar:
Or just only the people who are really invested in it will use it. You want to try to get that to start to grow organically internally and try to be consistent with it because it's easy to launch initiatives like this really well and get buy-in for a day, a week, a month. But then month two, month three, quarter two, quarter three, how are we going to make sure we're sticking to it?
Chris Russell:
Yeah. That's a great point. You got to be consistent with your hashtagging and use it week in and week out. The other tip I'll give is share it with your employees, encourage them to use it across their channels as well. The more you can get your employees involved in your social media sharing, I mean, that's free advertising. You should all be doing that or trying to do it at least to leverage their networks in addition to your own. So that's something I see a lot of companies struggle with how to do overall, but...
Matt Lozar:
It's tough. We hear it all the time, but those employee ambassadors can be big because they're almost referrals or almost online reviews unofficially to where we trust the 87 people who left the review for a company or a hotel or a restaurant we've never met before more than maybe one person we do know, or just something like using our own research we crowdsourced really well. So if there's employee ambassadors who connect with their timelines or their audiences and help keep you top of mind or showcase how awesome your place is to work, that's really great. And hashtags don't help here, but it's also better than the alternative to where they're talking poorly about your company. And then that doesn't help your employer brand as well. So if you can get them to share positively and be really great with the content, that's a great way to, free way almost to increase the organic reach of your company on social.
Chris Russell:
Yep. Very cool. Any other questions from the audience? Roy Robertson, you work for a cannabis company? Or a cannabis job board? So #celebratecannabis, #cannibuscareers [inaudible 00:25:12] holding. Okay. Very cool. How's recruiting in your space? Is it easy or harder today? I'm curious.
Matt Lozar:
For me or for the cannabis [crosstalk 00:25:23]?
Chris Russell:
No. For the guy, for Roy. Hard he said. Okay. Even cannabis companies are having a hard time. Wow. Okay. Well, I guess that'll do for today, everyone. Matt Lozar from Haley Marketing, haleymarketing.com. If you are a recruiting firm, great company to go and build your website, help you with marketing. What else do you do, Matt, there? Anything else?
Matt Lozar:
We do a lot. Digital content. I focus on recruitment marketing.
Chris Russell:
By the way, Matt's one of the guys I follow, for the audience. He pushes out a ton of great content. That's how I got him on this show. I saw an article he wrote and definitely should follow him as well. So he's really knowledgeable in this space.
Matt Lozar:
Thanks. Appreciate it. Haleymarketing.com and recruitmentmarketers.com is our recruiter marketing focus site.
Chris Russell:
Excellent. All right. Well I guess that will do it. Monica says thanks so much. If you need help hiring for retail positions, check out SASR at sasrlink.com. All right, Monica. Well, appreciate you coming. I'll put the replay up on YouTube in the next day or two. So check us out. In the meantime, have a good day, everybody. Thanks a lot, Matt.