Best social media tools for recruiters and employer branding

The careers page posts three times a week and gets nothing. An engineer writes two paragraphs about why she joined and four candidates apply that fortnight, two of them naming her post in the form. The employer brand budget is attached to the first thing, because the first thing is the only one that appears in a report.

The best social media tools for recruiters have to see two kinds of account that never connect to anything: your own employees, and the rival employers you lose candidates to. This page is organised around that.

TL;DR

Employer brand is measured on the wrong object

Almost every employer branding report is a report about the careers page. The page is the asset the company owns, so it is the asset the tooling can connect to, so it is the asset that gets measured. None of those three facts says it is the asset that works.

Candidates decide from people. A hiring manager describing what the team is actually like carries information the careers page structurally cannot, because everybody knows who wrote the careers page.

The content that changes a candidate's mind is published on accounts your employer branding tool cannot see.

Where advocacy platforms fit, and where they do not

DSMN8 is built for employee advocacy at enterprise scale, with a content library employees share from, and Haiilo is built for internal communications for large organisations, with employee advocacy sitting on top of the intranet. Both are strong when a communications team produces content and staff distribute it, which for a large employer with a formal programme is a genuine fit.

The limit is the same as everywhere else in this cluster: they count shares from a library. An employee writing about her own first month contributes nothing to the participation number, and that post is the one candidates actually read. The category comparison is in top employee advocacy software.

There is also an adoption cost specific to recruiting. Asking employees to install an internal tool in order to talk about their job reads as managed enthusiasm, and it usually produces exactly that. The argument for running the programme without an app is in employee advocacy without an app.

Watching the employers you lose candidates to

The other half of the job is competitive and it is almost never tooled at all. You are losing engineers to four named companies, and what those companies publish about working there is public, free to read, and nobody is reading it systematically.

• Their cadence. A rival employer who suddenly triples their hiring content is about to compete with you harder.
• Who is posting. Recruiters only, or engineers too. The second is far more dangerous.
• The themes. Compensation, remote policy, team autonomy. What they push is what they think wins.
• Engagement from candidate profiles. Public comments tell you which message landed.

A suite cannot do this. Sprout Social is built for enterprise reporting, social listening and a shared inbox, priced per seat, and rival employers are not going to be connecting anything to it. The method for a watch list is in track competitor social media.

Say out loud that you are counting

Reading public profiles needs no technical permission, which is exactly why the social permission matters more. Employees who discover they are being counted, rather than being told, will read the whole programme as surveillance, and they will be right to ask.

Say it plainly at the start: we count posts published, we read nothing private, and the number exists so nobody has to be chased on a Friday. Write down what is not tracked as well, which is messages, drafts and anybody's private analytics.

In practice this is welcomed more often than not, because the alternative most employees have experienced is a manager asking in person. Frame it as removing the chase and it stops being a monitoring conversation.

Four numbers worth reporting

1. Employees publishing, against how many said they would. The whole programme in one number.
2. Posts about the work, not reposts of the careers page. Count them separately or the second will swamp the first.
3. Applications naming a person or a post. A free text field on the application form beats any attribution model.
4. Rival employer cadence. Their volume, tracked monthly, as competitive context.

Three of the four are collectable without asking anybody for access, and the fourth is a form field. That is a reporting pack that survives a busy quarter, which is more than most employer brand dashboards manage.

How to choose, by hiring shape

• A recruiting team of one or two. Public profile tracking and nothing else. Skip every platform on this page.
• A large employer with a comms function. An advocacy platform for the library, plus public reading for what people write themselves.
• An agency recruiting on behalf of clients. Two tools, because half your accounts belong to somebody else.
• Hiring against four named rivals. Public reading is the only route that reaches them, at any budget.

The version of this decision for a company that is not primarily hiring is in best social media tools for small business.

The job post trap

The easiest content to produce is a link to an open role, so that is what most employer brand accounts publish. It is also the content candidates scroll past, because it says nothing they cannot read on the job board itself.

The posts that move candidates are about the work: a decision the team made, a problem they are stuck on, what the first month is actually like. None of it is a vacancy announcement, and all of it is harder to schedule.

Track the two kinds separately or the vacancy posts will swamp the count and the report will show a healthy programme producing nothing.

Hiring content is seasonal and the reporting rarely is

Employer brand output tends to spike when a role opens and stop when it is filled, which is exactly backwards. The candidates you want are not looking on the week you start looking, so the content has to exist before the requisition does.

1. Publish through the quiet quarters. That is when the audience is built and nobody is competing for attention.
2. Expect a lag. A post read in March produces an application in September, and no attribution model will connect the two for you.
3. Measure cadence across the year. A monthly count hides a programme that ran for six weeks and stopped.
4. Watch rival cadence too. A competitor ramping up hiring content is a leading indicator of who you are about to compete with.

The lag in the second point is the reason this programme needs a cadence number rather than a results number. Results arrive too late to steer by, and the publishing record is the only thing you can act on in the meantime.

One sentence for the hiring manager

When somebody asks what employer branding is producing, this is the sentence: our people published this many times last quarter, these are the posts candidates mentioned, and here is what the four employers we lose people to are publishing.

Three facts, all collectable, none of them requiring an attribution model. It is a more useful answer than an impressions number, and unlike an impressions number it can be checked by anybody who wants to open the profiles.

Say what is missing too. Nobody can prove which post produced which hire, and a programme that pretends otherwise loses credibility the first time somebody tests the claim.

How Groowth handles this

You paste the public profile links of the employees in the programme and of the rival employers you are watching. Groowth reads them once a day and shows what each published, when, and whether the agreed cadence held. Nobody installs anything and nobody opts in.

Because there is no connection, your engineers and a competitor's engineers sit on the same board with the same columns, which is the comparison employer branding usually has to do from memory. It shows no impressions and no candidate data, and it does not publish. Three accounts free with no card.

Frequently asked questions