Last updated on February 15, 2024
TikTok is the fastest-growing social media platform at the moment, and its enormous success is changing recruitment marketing. With TikTok becoming a part of everyday life, employers are starting to use recruiting videos on the video-sharing app to attract the best talent.
There are still twice as many open roles than unemployed individuals in the U.S. at the moment, and TikTok can get you ahead of the competition quickly through its ever-expanding user base. TikTok has 150 million active users in North America today, which allows you to tap into a robust pool of passive job seekers who won’t be browsing postings on job sites but would consider a gorgeous job opportunity coming along their way. And the importance of paid ads is critical here:
You can build a profitable organic presence for your employer brand on TikTok, but sponsored video ads will provide you with a higher ROI.
What is a recruiting video?
A recruiting video is a short-term video created for attracting best talent. These videos are an effective way to enhance your employer brand and improve your cost per lead because they engage candidates more effectively than any other content type.
According to statistics, 75% of leading companies use recruiting videos to generate more candidates. In recruiting videos, you can use a broad range of content types, which makes them an effective recruitment tool. From job announcements to team introductions to day in a life videos, you can showcase your company culture and interact with your prospects in a more human way, attracting more applicants into your pipeline.
Why use TikTok for recruiting?
Young generations
Even if you’re not an avid TikTok user yourself, you might have seen people around you looking for information on TikTok first. Whether it’s a physical product or a trending topic, TikTok is becoming the number one source of information. Data showed that 40% of Gen Z chose TikTok over Google for search. So, if you’re looking to strengthen your team with workers from younger generations, TikTok is definitely your place.
Specific employment ads
TikTok video ads leveraged for recruitment fall into the special category of employment ads. When you run ad campaigns for hiring, there are specific features that ensure that your content only serves recruiting goals. For instance, these ads have an age limit. On TikTok, you can only advertise to users older than 18, so you won’t lose a penny showing your ad to the wrong audience.
Stands out from other social media platforms
Several things set TikTok apart from other social media platforms:
- It’s all video, so you have to create a video to run a recruiting ad.
- The majority of its users are under 30 years old.
- You can interact with prospects in a new, engaging way, which helps you increase trust with your candidates and get ahead of your competitors.
- The compelling visual and audio components give your brand a personality so that you can humanize your employer brand.
TikTok Ad strategies that can remarkably reduce your cost and time to hire
The video types you should use for maximum impact
For your ads to succeed, the context of your video is crucial. To be able to capture prospects who you can later convert into qualified candidates, the videos have to be highly engaging and customized for the TikTok experience:
- Vertical, mainly selfie-style
- Snappy, around 10 second-long
- Created with a user-generated style
Style is key to the performance of these ads. While you might think that TV commercial-style, high-production value-type of videos are a must-have for a stellar return, we have found that TikTok videos with the impression of being made with a few taps on the phone massively outperform the ones that give you professionally produced videos. Surprising, right? People actually love the content on TikTok they believe was generated by another person just like them a lot more because it makes the whole viewer experience for them more relatable.
Therefore, we suggest you focus on user-generated-style videos when starting your journey to recruitment advertising on TikTok instead of content that generates an over-produced vibe.
Watch the recording of our live webinar on how you can make the most out of TikTok for your recruitment advertising dollars
Best practices for measuring success
Make sure you take the candidate journey as the foundation of measuring your success on TikTok. Hiring metrics will only make sense from a dollar’s standpoint if you analyze data with the applicant experience in mind:
What does the prospect experience when encountering my ad?
How does that make them feel?
Does it convert them into applicants easily?
The secret to achieving better cost per applicant and cost per hire on TikTok than on job boards is the shortened time period for connecting your prospects.
Traditional job applications can take up to an hour. But people are reluctant to give away even 10 minutes of their time for something that might not work out.
Compared to this, the whole recruiting process on TikTok is extremely short. The motion and audio components of video influence prospects faster than graphic and textual elements only. As a result, you can improve your pipeline and increase the chance to interview them.
Ready to take the first step to an increased applicant flow through recruiting with TikTok Ads? Sign up to join the Boostpoint Attract TikTok Beta and be the first to gain early access to our new recruitment tool.
Sam Beiler
As the CEO and Co-founder of Boostpoint, Sam dedicates himself to empowering organizations in creating successful workplaces where team members can truly flourish in their strengths. He tirelessly works with this team to provide talent acquisition professionals with cutting-edge recruitment marketing tools that enable employers to attract top-tier talent faster.
