Expect to see YouTube and Meta's Instagram and Facebook as the dominant social media sites for recruiting advertising videos in 2025, with Tik Tok, Reddit and Spotify drawing an increasing level of interest from companies seeking job applicants, according to a recruiting ad agency executive.
Meanwhile, companies in hiring mode are losing interest in advertising on X, formally known as Twitter, mainly because advertisers don't want their brands associated with polarizing or disagreeable content, says Neil Costa, founder and chief executive officer of the HireClix ad agency.
The goal of the social media campaigns is two-fold: To find new sources of candidates beyond Indeed and LinkedIn, which are currently the most popular job boards, and to present branding messages describing the companies and their cultures, Costa says. "Given how much time people are spending on social media sites, we want to get the brand and then particularly the jobs in front of them where they can have some brand recall," he says.
Job searchers are spending only 3% of their online time on the Indeed and LinkedIn sites, so advertising on social media can create "table-setting" brand impressions for companies with potential candidates before they're actively searching, he says: "Then, when they are thinking about flipping and having a higher degree of intent, we've got some mindshare from that audience."
The Meta sites and YouTube allow the advertiser to target specific audiences or geographical areas. A company recruiting diesel mechanics, for example, could target ads at car repair searches and content on YouTube, Costa says.
With Tik Tok, the appeal is the opportunity to reach younger audiences. "My kids are 16 and 18; their behavior is to use that as a resource not just for entertainment, but for ideas, for how to's. They're using that as a way to start a search," Costa says.
Spotify has become more viable as an ad channel, mostly for creating awareness about a company hiring through audio ads embedded directly in the music programming, though an advertiser can also buy clickable ads on the Spotify player itself, Costa says.
With Reddit, advertisers have had success reaching prospects with specific skills, such as software engineering, and who live in specific geographic areas, he says.
For social media channels and for company career web pages, short video is the storytelling form of choice.
"We're just not doing the seven-minute CEO video anymore; we're doing 15, 30, maybe 60 seconds," Costa says. "It's what people are capable of consuming."
"What we're trying to do is just spark interest. Our job is not to close them with that video content; it's to get them to ask the next question," he says.
His company shoots on-site video at client workplaces to snip into 15- to 60-second clips for social media content, and it uses apps like JobPixel to send blanket texts to company employees inviting them to submit self-filmed testimonials. Or, a 5-minute off-the-shelf video from a company event can be broken down into short snippets, with branded intros and end-screen templates with links added to create "edit and go" videos to be quickly uploaded for a social media campaign.
"It's about how do we showcase our employer brand; how do we bring that flat careers page—'About us;' 'Benefits;' 'What it's like to work here'—and really pump some life into that by showcasing what it's like to work at one of those organizations," Costa says.
Self-filmed videos tend to be the most authentic option, and company HR teams should consider offering "ambassador" incentives like gift cards or small stipends to employees who can create content on their phones, he says.
"If you have enthusiastic employees, that's been the most effective and natural way," Costa says. "People who are already naturally on the platform, who are already posting content, who already have some interest in posting content about their job and their work and some level of pride that they're a good brand ambassador."
Companies can determine how best to reach their target audience of potential applicants, known as personas, by asking about the tastes of their own employees, Costa says. For sales positions, for example, they can ask their sales associates about their favorite music genres for Spotify ads or their reading habits to target other social media ads. Or companies can glean persona information from focus group research.
Over time, employers can develop their own target audience data based on past applicants and what worked in attracting them, Costa says.
Another option is to advertise through multiple social media channels and with several audience targets for a set period—30 days, for instance—and then double down on the channels and targets that produce the best response rates, Costa says. "It's really something that has to be actively managed. We talk about it like being like a stock portfolio that we're an investment manager for."
"You're going to spend money to figure it out, to get to the bottom of the persona, whether you do it through research or whether you do it through putting ads in the marketplace and just testing," Costa says.
When HR execs are pitching for ad budgets, small ad buys can show that the targeting is effective and ideally driving more applications through LinkedIn or more traffic to the company's career site, for example, Costa says.
"Those are all things that a CFO can understand to help in granting the blessing on that kind of proposal for new channels," he says. "You need a baseline to show what's working, then have a bigger conversation with the CFO about spending."
