hiring_via_social v1.0.0

name: "hiring_via_social" description: "Runs recruiting campaigns on social platforms: plans employer-brand culture content, sets up an employee-story program, builds an inbound candidate pipeline, and keeps ad targeting and candidate screening on the right side of employment law. Triggers when a team wants to hire through LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook, needs a culture-content calendar, wants employees posting about life at work, or is about to run paid job ads on social."

Hiring via Social

Purpose

Turn a company's social presence into a working recruiting channel: culture content that attracts candidates, employee stories that carry more weight than corporate posts, a pipeline that captures inbound interest, and paid promotion that does not discriminate.

Workflow

1. Audit the baseline. Look at the company pages on LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and the socials where candidates spend time. Note what a candidate sees in the first 60 seconds: is there a real person anywhere, are employee voices visible, is there anything posted this month? A LinkedIn-cited survey found 75% of job seekers weigh the employer brand before applying, so the audit answer is the campaign's starting line.
2. Pick the pillars. Choose 3 to 5 content pillars from the pillar library (references/pillar_library.md). Keep them specific enough that a candidate can tell what the job actually feels like: a day-in-the-life from the role you're hiring for beats generic "we value innovation" every time.
3. Set up the employee-story program. Recruit 3 to 8 volunteers from the teams you're hiring into. For each story, fill out assets/employee_story_brief.md together: the angle, 3 sample prompts, the format (short video, photo carousel, live Q&A), and the posting slot. Employee voice carries roughly three times the credibility of CEO statements when people talk about working conditions, so the stories, not the brand account, are the engine. Get written consent before anything featuring a real person goes out, and let people talk in their own words: scripted testimonials get ignored.
4. Build the calendar. Run bin/content_calendar.py with your pillars and start date. It produces a 4-week calendar CSV: pillar, format, owner, slot, call to action. Pair organic posts with one job ad per week posted natively on the feed (with relevant job hashtags), and answer every comment: the conversation under a hiring post is where passive candidates first talk to you.
5. Build the inbound pipeline. Every post links to one landing page per role. Track: reach, profile visits, applies, qualified screens, hires. Define a reply SLA (answer DMs and comments within one business day) and a nurture rule: anyone who engages twice and fits the role gets a personal message, not an autoresponder.
6. Run paid promotion carefully. Read references/compliance.md first. On LinkedIn, LinkedIn Jobs plus employee sharing is the safest high-return combo. On Meta, employment ads go through the special ad category: age, gender, and ZIP targeting are unavailable for job ads (they were removed after the 2019 settlement), and you must not try to proxy them with interests or lookalikes tuned to skew young or male. Document who saw the ad and what targeting was used, in case questions come up later.
7. Screen without the feed. Do not look at candidates' personal social media as part of screening. If leadership insists on social screening, route it through someone who redacts protected-class information before the hiring team sees anything, and judge only job-related criteria. Final hiring decisions stay human and documented; tools that score applicant social activity are a litigation minefield per EEOC guidance.

Output Contract

A complete engagement ends with: (a) the audit summary with the three biggest gaps, (b) the pillar set with rationale, (c) the 4-week calendar CSV from bin/content_calendar.py, (d) filled story briefs for each volunteer, (e) the pipeline sheet with funnel definitions and reply SLA, (f) the paid-promotion plan with targeting documented, (g) the compliance checklist from references/compliance.md signed off against the plan. No step (f) or (g) is optional when paid ads run.

Operating Rules

1. Never target or exclude job ads by age, gender, race, ZIP, or proxies for any of these. Ever.
2. Never screen a candidate's personal social feed for protected-class information (photos, bios, listed interests). Knowing it and then deciding is disparate treatment.
3. Every factual claim about hiring stats carries its source and its date. Recycled employer-brand numbers (like the old LinkedIn 50% cost-per-hire figure from ~2015) may only appear framed as directional, never as current research.
4. Employee stories need real consent, real words, no scripts. If a story would embarrass the person a year from now, cut it.
5. Candidate DMs and comments get a human reply within one business day. A recruiting channel that goes quiet looks like a company that does not answer.