10 Image Tools for Recruiters To Strengthen Your Social Recruiting Strategy

By Lindsey Sanford

Social media strategies as it relates to recruiting can be difficult – we are often forced into a consumer space when our strategies don’t always align. We typically leverage products that are more specific to the consumer process than our own, and we can have challenges retroactively fitting technology into a space that adapts to our specific needs.

I’ll give you an example – if you’ve ever tried to leverage a listening tool for employer brand mention tracking, it’s a challenge. Tools like Radian6, Talk Walker, Sysomos, and the like, are all dependent upon your query building. The customer success managers and support are aligned with consumer mentions, but rarely have extensive experience building queries for employer brand mentions (“careers at”, “works at”, “employees at”, “NO stock”, “working at”). And if you have used social listening tools before, you know that most of your time can be pulled into building queries, assessing results, and weeding out the trash.

All of this is an introduction for a list of tools that can assist in your strategies for Social Recruiting. This includes suggestions and guidance for how those systems can better work for your recruitment and employer brand strategies. That being said, I think it’s important that we fit into the consumer space - the closer we are to consumer tools, the more easily we can match our candidates “consumer-like” expectations through the candidate experience. There are times that these tools allow for the perfect balance and other times that it might be just a tad too difficult.

Because there are tools galore, and most of us spend our time assessing, demoing, and measuring the ROI, we will be tackling these digital tools a few categories at a time. Find something we’re missing? Let’s add to it! Comment on the post below so that we can build this list over time to be as helpful as possible, leading to a good starting point for your strategy expansion and development. In the meantime, don’t forget to access chiefmartech.com’s  Marketing Technology Landscape’s Supergraphic – it’s got over 6,000 tools for the martech world. Granted, you’d have to actually mine through the data, so we’re going to simplify it for you in the blog series to follow.

 

Creative Assets

I’m starting with this category because creative assets and imagery are crucial to your strategy, but they are also, at times, the most difficult to acquire. I’ve spent much of my time looking to find tools that enable this process because we all know that HR, Employer Brand, and content around the EVP can be the last priority for our internal creative departments.

Canva – Canva is one of my favorite creative development tools for someone in a bind. Canva is like Adobe Photoshop, but for people who are Adobe Photoshop disadvantaged. It’s user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to develop templates for job features, employee highlights, hiring events, and email newsletters. There’s a brand feature that allows you to upload fonts, logos, and colors so that all designs are facilitated through the system to be “in brand”. There are stock photos included for free, and for purchase (but they are affordable). Most features in Canva are free, but when looking at up leveling to the brand feature or downloading different images and icons, it’s incredibly affordable. ($1 for images - $19-29 for pro features)

PicMonkey  – similar to Canva, this is an online tool that enables graphic design, but without needing to take a multi-hour course, or to pay thousands for a license. This platform is more intensely focused on photo editing, instead of flyer design (like Canva). Canva is somewhere you would take a photo redesigned from PicMonkey. PicMonkey is where you would spend time adjusting your photos to make them look professional, while Canva enables them to become templates, social posts, and more.

Pexels  – free stock photos. These photos are uploaded by photographers for your common creative use. These are professional photos – usually by aspiring photographers who are seeking to socialize their work. They are high quality, large images, that you can use for a plethora of elements within your brand components. Most images on the platform don’t even require attribution when you are using it. As someone who comes from a background of #agencylife, I can say that creative imagery was so difficult to find. Often, companies couldn’t supply it, the stock photos we could download were pricey, and we were forced to make templates from images that were less than ideal. Save yourself the trouble and use Pexels for background imagery, flyers, and templates. Of course, all of this comes with the caveat that stock imagery should be used lightly – and pictures of real employees should always come first. But, c’mon, I’m realistic if nothing else and know these are often difficult to come by, so in the meantime, there’s Pexels.

Flickr – similar to Pexels, Flickr provides a plethora of photos for your use. When searching for images, make sure you set the filter to “creative commons” use so that you know you can leverage these images for multiple reasons. Double check when searching for photos – each photographer uploads images with different restrictions, even when the creative commons filter is on. I prefer Pexels, but I like to provide multiple options in case on system isn’t providing the search results you are looking for.  

Creative Market – let’s say you’re like me, and creative design just is not your thing. Words, creative writing, sure, I’ve got that all day, any day. But creative imagery and design? Ha. That’s where Creative Market can come in. Thousands of designers leverage this site to build templates, font kits, and brand kits. It’s a bit more pricey – depending on what you are hoping to accomplish and purchase, but it does give you one thing for free: inspiration. I am continuously looking at websites like these to give me the means to describe what the heck it is I’m looking for. IF you’re like me and creative design is not a capability, finding design sites like this can help you better describe what you like, what you don’t like, and the get a better end result (whether you’re working with a designer, trying to build it on your own in one of the tools listed above, or working with an agency).

Piktochart – Who doesn’t like a good infographic? Especially for career path and growth information, hiring verticals, and company values statements? Okay, that answer is obvious. But who has the time to make an infographic? That’s where Piktochart comes in. This platform comes complete with templates for your infographic design, giving you easy layouts to accommodate any picture you wish to display. It’s not a free tool – but with the lite version starting at $12.50 per month, it might as well be.

Pinterest – let’s not forget the platform that created stressed out brides all over the world. This isn’t a creative tool so much as it is a tool for finding inspiration.  I regularly use this platform to inspire content – and I pull from consumer presences to give me ideas for how we can leverage that concept for the recruitment space. It’s a great place to find layout inspiration for infographics, template designs, and creative use of imagery.

PhotoFeeler – this one is a bit of a different use case, but it’s one that I’ve found immensely helpful. First impressions matter…a lot. It’s an unfortunate scenario – because they shouldn’t matter as much as they do, but a person can take away a lot of gut feelings from an image of an employee – and you want to make sure they are taking away the right one. You can create a profile to have people assess individuals – how competent, how friendly and engaging, how capable and likable they are. I know this sounds harsh – but we live in a world of snap decisions – make sure you are getting the one you are planning for.

Enhance, by Hootsuite – this is an application that adjusts the size of your images to fit social profiles perfectly. No one wants to remember social image size dimensions – and just once I’d love for LinkedIn to actually match the pixel size they say it is. But with enhance, it will crop and adjust your images to match the size for the specific platform you identify. It’s a cheat easy way to get your images to match the profile you are intending them for, without too much thinking involved.

Chrome Eye Dropper – this is a creative hack to adjust your imagery to the right color. It’ll enable your creative design because you can identify colors through your brand pages, background imagery, and create balance in your images. You use this Chrome Extension to identify color codes that you can use in Canva, Adobe, or PicMonkey. It’s a fast way to pick colors that work together or match another design.

 

Well, what are we missing? What are you waiting for? Be free to design – here’s hoping these tools can enable your brand to be more versatile in the social space.

For more content development strategies, attend SRSC San Francisco this January 30 - February 1, 2019.  #SRSC is where talent acquisition leaders connect to leverage emerging recruiting practices. Use the code SOCIALHIRE15 for an extra 15% off your registration.

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