Talent acquisition

Social media's edge in reaching top talent

In today's hiring market, the primary challenge is distribution, not a lack of jobs or pay, because attention decides who wins, and attention currently resides on social media, where over 5.6 billion people spend an average of 2.5 hours daily. This is key because most desirable hires are passive candidates who are not actively searching job boards, and traditional recruiting methods only reach a small segment of the market—active job seekers. By leveraging social media, which reaches the entire talent market and creates intent, companies can meet people where their attention already lives, a strategy that consistently outperforms traditional job boards, especially for frontline and high-volume roles. Ultimately, this shift to social recruiting is a fundamental and necessary change in modern hiring that solves the distribution problem and leads to better applicant quality and retention.

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You cannot hire people you do not reach

You cannot hire people you do not reach.
And right now, attention decides who wins.

In today’s hiring market, the biggest constraint is not job availability, pay bands, or applicant tracking systems. It is distribution. The companies that win are the ones that show up where attention already lives.

And attention lives on social.

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Why attention matters more than job postings

There are more than 5.6 billion people on social platforms worldwide. The average person spends roughly 2.5 hours a day scrolling, tapping, and watching content.

That matters because most of the people you want to hire are not actively job searching.

They are not refreshing job boards.
They are not updating résumés.
They are not typing “jobs near me” into Google.

They are passive candidates. And they represent the majority of the workforce, especially in frontline, hourly, and high-volume roles.

But passive candidates are not unreachable.

They are on social.
Every day.
For hours.

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Job boards only reach part of the market

Traditional job boards are built for active job seekers. People who already decided they want something new. People willing to search, filter, apply, and repeat.

That is a small slice of the total labor market.

Social reaches everyone. Active seekers and passive talent alike. It does not wait for intent to appear. It creates it.

That is why social consistently outperforms job boards for frontline and high-volume hiring. It meets people where their attention already lives, instead of asking them to change behavior just to apply.

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Hiring is a distribution problem first

Most hiring teams treat recruiting as a sourcing problem. More postings. More spend. More tools.

But before sourcing ever works, distribution has to work.

If the right people never see your role, nothing else matters. Not your employer brand. Not your compensation. Not your benefits.

Once distribution is solved, the rest gets easier. Applicant quality improves. Drop-off decreases. Retention goes up. You are no longer convincing people to care. You are showing up at the right moment, in the right place, with the right message.

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Why social sits at the center of modern recruiting

Social recruiting is not a trend. It is a shift in how hiring actually happens.

It aligns with how people discover opportunities today. Through short-form video. Through feeds. Through content that feels human, local, and real.

For employers, this means fewer wasted applications and more intentional ones. For candidates, it means seeing a job come to life before ever clicking apply.

That alignment is why social now sits at the center of modern recruiting strategies.

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What comes next

This is Part 1 of a short series on why social belongs at the core of how teams hire today. In the next posts, we will break down how social changes applicant intent, improves retention, and outperforms traditional job boards in real-world hiring scenarios.

If you want to see how this could work for your team, send us a link to an open role. We will share a social strategy tailored to that job, no guesswork required.

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