Employer branding and recruiting with SnapChat

About a month ago, we talked about Instagram and how social media can help both job seekers and recruiters in their search. While the great potential of Instagram for employer branding is made clear to us now, there is another social networking service that has been attracting employers and job hunters’ attention, and that is SnapChat.

For those of you who may not know, SnapChat is a video messaging application that allows users to take pictures, record videos and customize them with text and drawings for their contacts to see. With 100 million active users every day, SnapChat’s daily video views have tripled since May going from 2 billion to 6 billion, surpassing Facebook’s 8 billion daily views.

Today an increasing number of companies manage Instagram and SnapChat accounts to both recruit young talent and win new business. Yet leveraging such social networking services is not relevant for every single firm out there: it all depends on the company culture, strategy and audience. But when it is, social media can be extremely effective and profitable for advertising corporate culture, employer brand and career opportunities.

In terms of recruitment, video could clearly make a difference. With SnapChat’s short video format, recruiting can be innovative and more fun than usual. Unlike Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, SnapChat has a goldfish memory: within seconds or 24 hours – depending on the user’s settings – posts disappear and can never be viewed again. Yet this impermanence feature can also be a great asset: you can have fun experimenting and you can even make mistakes because your audience is playful and forgiving – or just forgetful by circumstance. Other social media such as Instagram can be considered if you wish to post permanent and slightly more formal pictures and videos that can be commented on.

SnapChat is an alternative to traditional recruitment with mini job applications that can help employers learn more about the candidate’s personality. With the video, applicants do not have to bank everything on their CV anymore. They can make it more personal and have a etter shot at landing the job than if they were simply sending out a flat document. For employers, video applications are similar to informal pitches or interviews. It brings back human interaction and gives candidates a face, a voice and a personality.

But then again, using SnapChat would be the means but not the end. It is not so much about using social media for the sake of it but about considering it and integrating it within your recruitment strategy if applicable to the target demographic. In any event, what seems to be key for any company willing to handle a SnapChat account are authenticity and consistency. Because after all, who wants to follow corporate accounts that seem fake, forced and/or random?