Instagram isn’t new, but it has some of the best engagement levels of all the social channels, in fact it has the highest engagement after Facebook (just look at the diagram on the below!). So obviously one of the big questions often raised in our training sessions is: can we recruit using Instagram?

My answer has always been that there are better channels out there, purely due to the limited availability of personal information on Instagram.

That said, you are probably reading this article because you have exhausted most other candidate sources, so the good news is that you can recruit on Instagram. I’ve read lots of other posts on how to recruit on Instagram, with most focusing on putting out engaging images with relevant hashtags. In my eyes this isn’t the way to do it, instead there are two clear options available:

Option 1 – Hashtag Recruiting

Simply type your hashtag into the search box and run the search. The problem with doing this is that you are searching the whole of Instagram and relying on Instagram to find profiles that it thinks are most relevant.

A more efficient way to do this, is to search for conference hashtags either whilst they are happening, or even post event, such as:

The only other search solution is to use a third party tool such as Mixagram to search multiple hashtags at once.

It works, in fact, it works really well. The downside is that it is slow. Really slow. Below is the search I started (but didn’t finish) running for #auckland and #coding.

As you can see, the result is someone coding in Auckland (with the obligatory ice cream).

Option 2 – Marketing

Instagram has now made it incredibly easy to advertise on the platform. All you need is a Facebook Advertising account.

Just like Facebook adverts you can select your audience by demographic data. This is picked from Facebook data, so targeting options include location, interests, job title, industry, age and more. Once you have this in place you just need to select your artwork and then push go.

Mobile vs Desktop

Instagram is designed to be used on mobile, so the app has more search features than the desktop version (such as the ability to filter results by Tags or People). The desktop version is however absolutely fine, and almost essential in order to advertise. It can logically be found at www.instagram.com.

Summary

Until search improves (please let me know if you have another way to search for location and a hashtag in one search), my pick would be to advertise. The key to getting the most out of advertising is to ensure you design a great image, and that it points to an equally great landing page.

Good luck

Chris

P.S. if you’re looking to up-skill your recruitment knowledge or would like help with your recruitment marketing, please feel free to get in touch.