The battle to reach candidates in a tight labour market has sparked an eight-fold rise in the number of companies using TikTok as a hiring platform.
Socially Recruited, a social media recruitment platform, says 11 per cent of clients were using the site to place job ads in January 2022 but this had risen to 92 per cent a year on – a 736 per cent increase. The share of applications being received through the site has also increased by 723 per cent – climbing from 0.85 per cent of applications in January 2022 to 7 per cent, 12 months down the line.
Among the companies using it are department store Harvey Nichols, Amazon and high street retailers like Superdrug, restaurant chains KFC and Nandos and supermarket Morrisons.
TikTok is expected to have 16.8million UK users by 2024 and is still experiencing explosive growth around the world. Last October the company revealed a 477 per cent rise in turnover for 2021, with the UK and Europe accounting for more than 80 per cent of total revenues.
The rise of TikTok recruitment emerges as a tight jobs market is forcing employers to fight harder to secure candidates. While the latest labour figures saw the UK’s unemployment rate rise slightly to 3.7 per cent, according to the ONS, it remains at a historically low level.
And the video-hosting site isn’t just being used to reach the young. While a quarter of users are aged 10-19, nearly a third are over 40, meaning recruiters can use it to target hires across the age spectrum. Amid a shortage of jobseekers, employers and the Government have been trying to tempt older workers and the newly retired back into the workforce.
Socially Recruited uses social media to place adverts in front of hard-to-reach candidates, maximising the chances of attracting passive jobseekers who aren’t actively looking. As soon as a candidate engages with a job advert, the company shortens the length of time it takes to collect their details, resulting in more high-quality expressions of interest for employers.
“We’ve used the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google for years but the rise of TikTok has been something to behold,” said Ben Keighley, founder of Socially Recruited. “The platform is exploding onto the recruitment scene and its short, punchy videos are energising legions of passive jobseekers in a way that recruiters often struggle to achieve. This will only increase as its following grows. Grabbing the attention of those with only half an eye on the jobs market is worth its weight in gold to employers with huge numbers of open positions to fill and too few candidates to fill them.”
