6 Ultimate Ways the Social Media Outage Affected HR and How Hiring Platforms Came to The Rescue

The majority of us, in one way or another, are tethered to our phones. We can spend endless hours scrolling through social media apps. And when we’re done, we’d reopen the apps all over again. Just in case we missed out on something important in the past few minutes.

It can be a serious addiction.

Three vital apps that the majority of us use on a daily bases – if not hourly –  experienced one of the worst outages since 2008.

WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook were out for 6 hours not so long ago, which threw active users into a state of frenzy. Including talent acquisition teams.

Recruiters today rely on social networks to reach out to candidates on the platforms they use on a daily basis. In fact, 92% of them use social media to boost their recruiting efforts. And when that’s gone, recruiters tend to feel lost.

A hiring platform, on the other hand, won’t leave recruiters feeling debilitated when their favorite social media apps are down.

Gone in minutes, but out for hours – here’s how the social media outage affected recruiters, and why they should rely more on a hiring platform instead.

Harder time to post jobs

Although Facebook and Instagram are useful recruiting tools, they’re not as powerful on their own. When paired with other tools (and used correctly), they tend to elicit better results. When recruiters rely too heavily on one tool, such as Facebook, then the quality of hires will significantly drop. It’s like putting all your eggs in one basket. When you solely rely on your company’s Facebook page to get candidates, it severely limits your audience to only Facebook users.

And what happened when Facebook was down? Poof. Recruiters couldn’t post their jobs anymore.

If they were using a hiring platform though, they would have been able to alternatively post their jobs on thousands of channels, job boards, and niche sites. Not only expanding their reach, but also reaching millions of candidates from all around the world.

For example, our hiring platform EVA-REC integrates with a broad range of free and paid job boards – over 2000 of them. This makes cross posting on different channels easy and hassle free. Instead of only relying on Facebook and Instagram, you can alternatively attract the biggest audience from all around the world – with a single click. You can also choose to post on renowned job boards and sites like Monster, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn – and thousands of others.

Inconsistent selection processes

When it comes to the selection process, being consistent is key. So once social media turns into a setback in the selection process, all candidates are held to that standard and criteria as well. For example, let’s suppose you whittled down your candidate pool to three candidates, and you want to use Facebook to get some more information about them. You’ll find that one candidate has Facebook, the other doesn’t, and the third one has a private Facebook account. Or even worse – the social media outage happens and your hands are tied. You can’t do anything about it.
Except you can. You can use a hiring platform instead.

A hiring platform like EVA-REC can help you get all the information you need about candidates, in one place. Including their social media accounts. When recruiters are looking for candidates with specific career levels, majors, or job titles, they can simply upload a mass number of resumes into the platform and provide EVA-REC with the keywords that they’re looking for in a candidate. Maybe they’re looking for a “Business Development Representative” who lives in Spain and is looking for a “part-time” position.

Consequently, EVA-REC will be able to filter through these resumes and help you find the most qualified candidates in seconds. You wouldn’t even need to rely on Instagram or Facebook for that.
To make it even easier, our hiring platform will then rank candidates from highest to lowest match, and provide a matching percentage that signifies how closely their qualifications match the job requirements.

Facebook and Instagram advertising is stopped

Running job advertisements on Facebook and Instagram is similar to running your own Super Bowl commercial for your job. It appears in front of the people who may not be looking for a job, but might be interested in it. You can’t be certain. At the end of the day, these people are similar to the people you’ve seen take an interest in similar jobs. And to top it all off, the social media outage made the process even more challenging than it already is.

Why not follow a more targeted approach though?

With a hiring platform like ours, you can make sure that your job posts are reaching the right people. Where you can get channel recommendations based on the job requirements. All you’ve got to do is simply select the region, channel type, job category, industry and job title. Afterwards, you’ll instantly get a list of channels that meet your sourcing needs.

This way, you’ll make sure that you’re targeting the most effective job boards for your open role. And with a more focused approach, you’ll also reduce the administrative burden of manually searching for the most appropriate job boards and candidates.

Failure to connect with passive candidates

Perhaps you like to depend on Facebook and Instagram to source passive candidates. You just boot up the apps and search for specific hashtags. Maybe you’re looking for a Content Manager. You’ll just search for hashtags like #SEO or #ContentIsMyWorld. Or maybe you take it up a notch and look for companies that are performing well, and connect with their people.

Midway through the process you get the 404 error page and your efforts are thrown to waste.

Now what?

Now you start using a hiring platform instead!

Believe it or not, rejected candidates from the past could be the best candidates in the future. Blast from the past?Something like that.

With a hiring platform, you have an abundance of resumes at your fingertips. Even if the majority of them were rejected in previous hiring processes, they might have gained more experience today. So, see what they’re up to.

Through the hiring platform you can quickly build a talent pool as your safety net, just in case you get an impromptu departure from one of your top performing employees. To save time on sourcing, you can simply compile a list of qualified candidates that sparked your interest over time, and store their details within your hiring platform Then, you can categorize them based on their skills, experience, and education to create a talent pool that you can dip into when the time is right. Without even needing Instagram or Facebook to do that.

Inability to reach and attract Gen Z candidates

We all know that Gen Z have been raised on social media. They’re hands are technically glued to their phones. So if the social media outage threw you off balance, can you just imagine what it did to them?
As a recruiter, you know that the secret way to their hearts lies through Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. It’s the natural way to communicate with these digital natives. But when these platforms are down, you’ll need to rely on another reliable platform instead.

You guessed that right.

A hiring platform can help you engaged and reach out to Gen Z candidates in various ways. Either through a branded career page, that highlights your perks and benefits, company culture, and unique value propositions. Or, through automated and personalized emails that are nothing close to the spam emails that we see flooding into our inboxes.

The point that we’re trying to get across, is that engaging Gen Z candidates isn’t necessarily tethered to these social media platforms. Actually, you can seamlessly engage them through a personalized communication strategy, beautiful career pages, and gripping job descriptions. All of which you can do with a hiring platform!

All efforts to engage with candidates are paused

You’ve probably got other candidates that you need to engage with other than Gen Z. The senior sales manager, the experienced front-end developer, or the quirky social media specialist you found on Craigslist. The point is, you used to rely on social media to engage with them. But Google is exploding with the news that the outage is the worst one we’ve seen since 2008.

Now what?

You got that right. There’s no need to wait hours or days for the platforms to start running again. Why not use a hiring platform instead?

A hiring platform can help you create a personalized candidate experience, engage in conversations that flow in real-time, automate communication, and keep candidates in the loop on their application status. Therefore, allowing you to boost candidate engagement by a massive 85%!

In closing

While Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are awesome marketing and recruiting tools, they can limit your efforts as a recruiter. There’s no denying that the social media outage threw us all off balance, but the truth is, there are other platforms out there that can do the deed just as well. If not better.

A hiring platform can meet all your hiring needs, with or without these social media platforms. Although their benefits are vast, a hiring platform offers a plethora of benefits that exceed them by far.
Don’t believe it? Start your 14-day free trial with EVA-REC and see how it can take care of all your hiring needs from sourcing to hiring. All in one place.

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