98% of recruiters today use LinkedIn to post jobs and source candidates—and chances are, they’re on other popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as well. Your candidates are probably already active on social media in their personal lives so why not reach them where they’re naturally spending time?
There are a few different ways you can employ social media recruiting strategies to reach job seekers in your area. Automating your recruitment social media posts and launching recruiting campaigns can both be highly effective for reaching potential candidates. Scanning your employees’ connections and aggregating and sorting data from social networking sites using automated processes are excellent ways to source potential candidates as well. Recruiters also utilize social recruiting platforms and social scheduling tools to automate their social media publishing processes.
Do these all sound like capabilities you want to add to your recruiting process? If so, the tools below are the best way to automate your social media outreach and engagement and use these platforms to help you connect with the right candidates.
The top social recruiting automation tools at a glance
- Hootsuite – The best overall tool for social media recruiting
- SeekOut – Best tool for sourcing passive candidates from social media
- CareerArc Social Recruiting – The best for posting jobs across multiple social media channels
- LinkedIn Recruiter – The best tool to optimize your LinkedIn hiring
- Avature – The best tool for data-driven social recruiting
- SmartDreamers – The best tool to automate social recruiting campaigns
- AmazingHiring – The best tool for sourcing candidates from social media platforms
- Skillfuel – The best free ATS with social recruiting functionality
- Gohire – The best talent management tool with integrated social recruiting features
- GaggleAMP – The best tool for promoting culture and employee advocacy
- Buffer – The best social media management tool for recruiters
- Talentify – The best social engagement tool with programmatic job advertising
- Entelo – The best option for predictive analytics
- Improver – Best tool to gather contact information from LinkedIn
Full reviews: The best tools to automate your social recruiting
Hootsuite
HootSuite lets you keep your social presence active 24/7 by automatically scheduling hundreds of social media posts across your social accounts. You can track your performance and share meaningful insights with your team using customizable reports.
Pricing
- Professional: $99 per month (1 user, 10 accounts)
- Team: $249 per month (3 users, 20 accounts)
- Enterprise: custom pricing
Pros
- Easily schedule and manage posts across multiple networks
- See all social media data and reports in a single dashboard
- AI-driven suggestions for content, themes, and other improvements
- Excellent tutorials and knowledge resources
- 30-day free trial available
Cons
- Missing some smaller social media platforms such as Mastodon
- Limited flexibility for editing video content in the app
SeekOut
SeekOut is one of many recruiting tools for sourcing passive candidates, with a database of over 100 M US professionals. Their search engine can handle complicated queries and find fresh candidates using a combination of AI and over 20 filters. You can also get email addresses for candidates in one click and export profiles in bulk to integrate with your existing workflow.
Pricing: Available upon request
Pros
- Helpful for finding specialized, niche, or diverse talent
- Advanced search features and Power Filters speed up social media sourcing
- Sources talent from multiple places, including LinkedIn and GitHub
- Multiple options and methods to search for candidates
- People Analytics feature provides helpful candidate insights
Cons
- Email messaging tool can be a bit clunky
- Can’t always find contact information for candidates depending on where they’re sourced
CareerArc Social Recruiting
https://www.careerarc.com/social-recruiting/
CareerArc’s suite of social and mobile applications help deliver the right first impression to any candidate with time-saving automation tools, real-time reporting, and one-on-one account managers. CareerArc distributes your jobs to the largest combined networks of social, mobile and web platforms. Their SaaS solution automates online and social job sharing to boost the volume of qualified applicants.
Pricing: Starts from $10,000 (details available upon request)
Pros
- Customer service team is responsive and helpful
- Nice range of automation features to streamline and simplify social recruiting efforts
- Full customization control over campaigns
- Comprehensive dashboard for reports and campaign management
- Integrated employer branding features
Cons
- Can be challenging for new users to find the features they need
- Only works with the major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, and LinkedIn)
LinkedIn Recruiter
https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/recruiter
LinkedIn Recruiter is a platform for finding, connecting with, and managing candidates within LinkedIn. It surfaces quality candidates and member signals so you can prioritize candidates most open to hearing from you. Their smart suggestions create a stronger search with recommended skills, locations and titles for your role. Instead of re-creating searches for every role, you can use saved searches and alerts for candidates open to new opportunities, and get notified when top candidates update their LinkedIn profile.
Pricing: Available upon request
Pros
- Particularly useful for connecting with passive candidates
- Helps with both lead generation and market research
- Collaboration tools let you organize and share candidates across the team
- Customizable templates and bulk actions for engaging with candidates
- Create customized job posts to target qualified applicants
- Integrates with most ATS and CRM systems
Cons
- Cost is high compared to similar services
- Lacking some direct messaging features, such as read receipts or Whatsapp integration
Avature
https://www.avature.net/candidate-relationship-management/
Avature helps you nurture candidates with short, mid and long-term engagement strategies to grow your relationships with them. Avature workflows can include condition-based actions that keep automatic communications personalized and relevant. It also lets you build, share, reuse, and manage a library of fully branded and customizable email templates that can be combined with fine-tuned segmentation for relevant campaigns.
Pricing: Available upon request
Pros
- Top choice for data-driven recruiters and teams with complex hiring needs
- Flexible platform is easy to customize it to your needs
- Seamless workflow automation
- Support team takes a collaborative approach to resolving questions and issues
- Excellent reporting features
Cons
- Extensive features can take a while to fully learn
- Connecting with support can sometimes be slow
SmartDreamers
https://www.smartdreamers.com/
SmartDreamers claims they can automate any job portal or niche website in under five minutes. They allow you to schedule ads and post on channels that lack APIs using robotic process automation (RPA), collect and centralize data with RPA to gain a complete picture of the candidate journey, and integrate your ATS and CRM. With RPA technology, SmartDreamers can collect data from even the most niche web channels. Recruiters using this platform can make apples-to-apples KPI comparisons between different sites, all from a convenient reporting dashboard.
Pricing: Available upon request
Pros
- Great choice for connecting with younger and early career candidates
- User-friendly and intuitive platform
- Integrated career websites
- Comprehensive talent analytics across the candidate journey
- Built-in AI content generation
- Dedicated support agents
Cons
- No free version or free trial
- Not as feature rich compared to other options
AmazingHiring
With AmazingHiring, you can expand your talent pool by meeting candidates where they are. It scans over 50 online sources to populate candidate profiles with their skills, education, certifications, and other relevant information. The Chrome Extension is a helpful feature, too, letting you instantly view a candidate’s social media profiles right in your browser.
Pricing: starts at $4,800 per year
Pros
- Aggregates data from professional communities as well as social media platforms
- Ideal for pre-assessing candidates before moving them through the process
- Easy to use search functions and filters
- Strong collaboration features
- Helpful Chrome Extension
Cons
- Limited integrations with other software
- Pricing is high for the features it offers
Skillfuel
Skillfuel is robust talent acquisition software designed to manage the whole recruitment process in one platform. Its social media recruitment features include automated job posting, social profile behavior review, and one-click campaign launches. It also functions as an applicant tracking system and has built-in interview scheduling and communication features to engage with candidates after you’ve found them.
Pricing
- Free: 3 active jobs
- Basic: $49 per month (10 active jobs)
- Grow: $99 per month (30 active jobs)
- Pro: $249 per month (unlimited jobs)
Pros
- Adaptable to organizations of any size (SMB through enterprise)
- Multiple features to automate and streamline your hiring
- Integrated interview scheduling and candidate outreach tools
- Useful mobile app
- Fully functional free version
Cons
- Customer support could be improved
- No resume parsing or data collection features
GoHire
GoHire is another tool that promises to bring all of your talent management tools together in one platform, including job advertising, applicant tracking, applicant screening, and video interviews. Its social media recruitment features let you post across platforms with a single click, with data and tools to help you optimize your social recruiting strategy.
Pricing
- Starter: £65 per month
- Growth: £99 per month
- Pro: £199 per month
Pros
- Ideal for small and mid-sized businesses
- Strong communication automation features
- Connects easily with job boards and social media platforms
- Clean and intuitive interface
- Responsive customer support team
Cons
- Missing some integrations
- Career page has limited customization options
GaggleAMP
GaggleAMP is a slightly different type of tool than the other ones reviewed on this list. Its main purpose is as an employee advocacy program, helping you turn your team members into advocates of your culture. It excels in this regard, allowing employers to assign social media engagement activities like sharing job posts, then keep track of all of these advocacy efforts in one place.
Pricing: Starts at $8,800 per year
Pros
- Fun and easy for employees to use
- Excellent tool for engaging your employees in the recruiting process
- Top choice for promoting company culture on social media
- Useful reporting tools for optimizing your social recruitment
- Responsive customer service
Cons
- Cost is high for the features that it includes
- Limited scheduling features
Buffer
Buffer promises to provide an all-in-one social media management solution for small businesses. It does this through affordable tools that let you plan and publish campaigns across platforms. Recruiting agencies and hiring teams can make great use of these features, as well, letting you stay active across your social media channels without needing to invest too much time into the process.
Pricing
- Free: Connect up to 3 channels
- Essentials: $5 per month
- Team: $10 per month
- Agency: $100 per month
Pros
- Connects to the most popular social media channels
- AI assistant helps generate ideas and posts
- Useful analytics and data features
- Engage with and respond to commenters right through the dashboard
- Great value
Cons
- Lacks the data gathering and candidate management features of other platforms
Talentify
Talentify uses programmatic job advertising to enhance job distribution, generating more candidates for your jobs with the same budget you would have spent otherwise. It can help you automatically sync your jobs with Google for Jobs and provide a faster mobile-first application experience to convert more candidates. Talentify claims to give your candidates a better Facebook experience with Easy Apply, which syncs your current ATS to Facebook, and distributes an automatic candidate engagement sequence.
Pricing: starts at $500 per feature per month
Pros
- Top choice for manual labor and hourly hiring
- Automates posting jobs on popular sites like ZipRecruiter and Indeed
- Full service job advertising management
- Indeed optimization with custom dashboards and automation rules
- 2-month free trial available
Cons
- Very industry specific
- Can be a challenge to connect with customer support
Entelo
The Entelo platform uses big data, predictive analytics and social signals to help recruiting organizations find, qualify and engage talent. It has advanced search capabilities and in-depth candidate insights, similar to many other recruiting tools. Its main unique feature is its More Likely to Move function, which helps you identify passive candidates who are the most likely to be interested in another role.
Pricing
- Starter: $149 per month
- Growth: $499 per month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Pros
- Browser plugin speeds and simplifies candidate searches
- Strong on-demand talent campaigns
- Advanced and sophisticated candidate search tools
- Nurture candidates through SMS and live chat
- Access in-depth analytics and candidate data
Cons
- Doesn’t update or add new features often
- Candidate profiles in the platform can be busy
Improver
Most recruiters already use LinkedIn to source candidates. Improver is a Chrome Extension that makes that process easier by showing the contact information from LinkedIn profiles. It also can pull data from your CRM or enrich data and profiles you already have with new contact information.
Pricing
- 3 free credits per month
- $15 per month (50 credits)
Pros
- Provides verified emails
- Great tool for high volume and large organization hiring
- Automatically keep candidate information up-to-date
- API access lets it link to other tools easily
- Cost effective way to simplify gathering contact information
Cons
- Lacks the engagement features of other programs on the list
- Doesn’t connect to other social media sites
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