Recruiting on Xiaohongshu, the key to traffic?

定焦（ID：dingjiaoone），作者：苏琦，编辑：魏佳，原文标题：《小红书下一个最火赛道：招聘博主》，题图来源：视觉中国

Xiaohongshu has become a new recruitment platform, attracting a large number of users to post and reply to recruitment posts, but there are also risks of false information and fraud.

• 💼 The recruitment experience on Xiaohongshu is different from traditional platforms, with both parties focusing more on interests and communication.

• 🔍 Recruiters include enterprise HR, headhunters, startup company bosses, and employees from major companies, with a high level of diversity.

• ⚠️ Xiaohongshu's recruitment platform has false recruitment information and fraud risks, job seekers need to be cautious in discerning.

Just as the heat of resigning influencers has passed, a new traffic trend—recruitment posts—has emerged.

Some influencers share that a post with tags like recruitment, job search, major companies, layoffs, etc., along with a playful phrase "I heard it's easy to recruit on Xiaohongshu," can easily get over a thousand likes, hundreds of replies and private messages within three days, along with dozens of resumes.

Some joke that when the "resigning influencers" return to work, the popularity of recruitment posts also becomes understandable.

However, the recruitment experience on Xiaohongshu is completely different from traditional recruitment platforms, with both recruiters and job seekers carrying a hint of reserve and a different kind of expectation.

Recruiters are no longer dominant, but approach with a mindset of experimentation, seeking candidates who are more interest-oriented, easier to get along with, and have more specific job requirements; job seekers no longer immediately ask about "how much is the salary" or "can I interview," but first use emojis to make friends, and even if rejected, will ask for job advice.

The user base and community atmosphere on Xiaohongshu seem to provide a channel different from traditional recruitment platforms, meeting the recruitment and job search needs of some people, but beneath the surface, there are also many hidden concerns.

Since there is almost no threshold for posting recruitment information on Xiaohongshu, there are cases of false information or even malicious fraud disguised as high-paying recruitment. Recruitment posts are marked with a reminder to "pay attention to safety and carefully discern the other party's information."

The recruitment industry has long faced challenges such as demand mismatch, resource mismatch, and supply-demand mismatch. These challenges have given platforms with high traffic and user activity an opportunity to enter the recruitment business, but whether the recruitment posts on these platforms are opportunities or traps, users need to be vigilant.

Whether recruitment on Xiaohongshu becomes popular depends on luck.

There are many recruitment posts on Xiaohongshu, many of which have hundreds of likes and comments, and the recruiters behind these posts can generally be divided into the following three categories One type is corporate HR and headhunters.

"Best Zhang Zhang" (referred to as Zhang Zhang below), a headhunter with 7 years of work experience, has recently been posting recruitment posts frequently.

"Is anyone willing to go to Vietnam to work in HR? Serious position." After posting this recruitment post for a HR manager in Vietnam, Zhang Zhang received nearly 100 comments. Some people can speak Vietnamese but have no HR experience, some are senior HR professionals but do not speak Vietnamese, and others inquire about other job opportunities in Vietnam, as well as salary and benefits.

The same situation also occurred in the comments section of her other overseas recruitment posts. Previously, she had posted positions such as HRBP in Seoul, sales manager in the Spanish power industry, and finance manager in Turkey.

The reason she chose to recruit on Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) is because she values the platform's differentiated user base and free posting. She mentioned to "定焦" that expatriates have a relatively narrow circle, traditional recruitment platforms have relatively saturated talent pools, candidates are not updated in a timely manner, and it is difficult to receive matching resumes. At the same time, headhunters find it difficult to open paid recruitment platform accounts in different countries for a single position. The platform gathers Chinese people from various countries, and headhunters can find relatively accurate target groups for free using tags.

Many headhunters also use Xiaohongshu to handle the needs of overseas companies wanting to recruit domestic employees. After LinkedIn China closed its services, Xiaohongshu partially took over and absorbed some of the demand for cross-border recruitment.

Another type is startup company bosses personally recruiting employees, and Heheqi Culture founder Zhang Lei is one of them.

In early June this year, when Zhang Lei did not find suitable candidates through conventional channels, he chose to post recruitment ads. In less than a month, he recruited three customer executives. This post still has a continuously increasing level of interaction, "even bosses from other companies are recruiting in my comments section."

Recruiting on Xiaohongshu is related to the company's attributes. Heheqi Culture, which has been in the entertainment industry for nearly 10 years, has long-term cooperation with major clients. Zhang Lei believes that being a customer executive is a job that "is not too difficult, but requires a bit of passion." The younger generation who seek jobs based on interests are relatively more on Xiaohongshu.

After posting the recruitment ad, Zhang Lei received dozens of resumes, nearly 200 comments, and countless private messages. Some people did not meet the requirements, some were overqualified (such as master's students from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and overseas students from prestigious universities coming to apply for jobs). Zhang Lei explains to them that they are "not suitable" while also giving some career planning advice, "recruiting such people will not last long and is not responsible for both parties."

Another type is business personnel looking for colleagues.

On Xiaohongshu, many employees from large companies clearly state their identities, and by stating "want to transfer to find a successor for myself" or "internship ending soon, is there anyone to take over," they post internal referral opportunities, attracting many onlookers and inquiries from job seekers. Internal referrals have also become a popular side job for employees of large companies.

Xiao Qiao, a business manager at a large AI company, needed to recruit an operations talent for her team because HR has been busy lately. With not much time to browse resumes in bulk on traditional recruitment platforms and wanting to find a colleague who is a good fit and easy to get along with, Xiao Qiao finally decided to try her luck on Xiaohongshu A week after the post was published, she received a lot of private messages and nearly a hundred comments, but the situation was completely different from what she expected. Many people without relevant work experience also sent her job interview applications, and she had to keep rejecting them in the early communication stage. In the end, only 3 people were selected for interviews, all of whom were stuck at the second round because the leader wanted more professional and experienced candidates.

Since everyone spends a long time at the company every day, Xiao Qiao originally didn't want recruitment to be a cold process. She hoped to find more compatible colleagues. However, due to the job requirements that applicants need to understand both technology and financial scenarios, with high professionalism, she eventually turned to traditional recruitment platforms for hiring.

In summary, Xiaohongshu can indeed help some recruiters find the candidates they want due to the diversity and youthfulness of its user base, precise traffic recommendations, and friendly interactive atmosphere. However, there is a certain degree of randomness involved, and it also requires a lot of hidden costs.

Atypical recruitment, higher costs than imagined

It is not difficult to imagine that recruiting on Xiaohongshu, a platform originally used for leisure and relaxation, is completely different in terms of recruitment experience, process, and user profile from traditional recruitment platforms.

The feedback from many recruiters is that users browsing Xiaohongshu do not have a clear intention to seek employment. It is more of a random thought triggered by chance, without prior preparation. In contrast, users on traditional recruitment platforms have clear objectives and actively drive the recruitment process.

Many recruiters have encountered users with no internship experience, no resume preparation, and no sense of job hunting, only with a desire to find a job. "He may describe his career and educational background orally, without a resume, and ask me to recommend job opportunities for him, which is both funny and frustrating," Zhang Zhang said.

Furthermore, traditional recruitment platforms focus on skills, industry, and salary levels for screening, while Xiaohongshu focuses on interests and circles for screening. Therefore, recruiters on Xiaohongshu cannot easily determine the background and profile of job seekers at a glance. Suitability needs to be assessed through conversation, requiring more time to understand each other.

Zhang Lei also noticed that job seekers may have the same feeling. They are not clear about the true identity of the recruiters or the specific requirements of the positions. Recruiters need to "popularize" to every inquirer, which incurs high costs. "Both parties are vague, raising the cost of mutual screening."

In this process, both recruiters and job seekers strive to make the conversation more personal. On recruitment platforms, people directly get into the topic of interviews and salaries, while on Xiaohongshu, expectations are lower. People first greet each other and make friends. Even if they sense they won't proceed to the interview stage, they will chat about other things and give each other advice. "Even if the 'transaction' doesn't work out, we can still be friends. Recruitment is no longer a cold one-way communication," Zhang Lei told "定焦".

On Xiaohongshu, although job seekers do not have background introductions, they have lifestyle account content that recruitment software lacks. Different people have different opinions on the importance of account operation.

Some HR personnel prefer job seekers with rich account content, believing that such job seekers have higher credibility, more skills, and a richer persona Some bosses will not choose job seekers who operate their social accounts very well. Zhang Lei has seen many job seekers write their tens of thousands of fans on Xiaohongshu into their resumes as a bonus point, but in his view, excessive operation of social accounts actually reflects some negative signals - conflict between energy allocation and work, the need for a job but also an exit route as a blogger.

In addition to the cost of communication and screening, several recruiters mentioned another high cost of recruiting on Xiaohongshu, which is posting job descriptions, resume submissions, and contact information acquisition under the premise of complying with community operation rules. The entire process is relatively long and can easily be judged as a violation if not familiar with the rules.

In recruiting on Xiaohongshu, there are also limitations on the types of positions suitable for recruitment.

Several recruiters told "Dingjiao" that targeted, low technical threshold, generalist jobs, small and beautiful, interest-driven, and non-professional skills-based companies are more suitable for the image of young people who love life on Xiaohongshu.

Xiaoli, a senior HR at a listed company, once found a tutor for her child on Xiaohongshu because it was a private matter and she could not directly recruit using the company account. Traditional recruitment platforms also cannot recruit in the name of individuals through friends' introductions, and the cycle is very long. Xiaohongshu helped her solve this problem, and she received three or four good resumes in one night.

Later, she also tried to recruit through a company account registered on Xiaohongshu, but it proved to be mismatched. She explained to "Dingjiao" that for positions that are easy to recruit, posting information on recruitment websites can receive one or two hundred resumes a day, so there is no need to go through such a convoluted process; for positions that are difficult to recruit, there are usually reasons why they are difficult to recruit, either low salary or special requirements, which require them to actively search or be recommended by headhunters. It is difficult to accurately match on Xiaohongshu.

Undeniably, on social platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, Weibo, many listed companies and consumer brands will also register company accounts to post recruitment information or hold activities such as forwarding lottery offers, but the brand promotion purposes of these behaviors are greater than the actual recruitment purposes, and account operators and job recruiters do not belong to the same department.

Under the "traffic password," there are many hidden concerns.

Why have recruitment posts on Xiaohongshu suddenly become popular?

On the one hand, it is related to the continuous cost reduction and efficiency improvement in the Internet industry in the past two years, and the influx of 11.79 million college graduates in 2024 into the job market. They have started to widely submit resumes on various recruitment platforms.

The online recruitment industry in China has been around for 27 years. Although traditional recruitment platforms such as Zhaopin, Zhilian Zhaopin, Liepin, and BOSS Zhipin are still popular, where there are many people, there can be recruitment. This year, people have also started to post recruitment needs on social platforms such as Kuaishou, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu.

At the same time, with the previous trend of "resigning influencers" on Xiaohongshu, the entire workplace, interview, and recruitment-related topics on Xiaohongshu are becoming increasingly popular, and similar posts are turning into templates that can be infinitely copied, attracting people with different purposes to share the traffic Young people who used to browse resumes on Maimai and BOSS Zhipin have now turned to frequently seeing job recruitment posts on Xiaohongshu. However, they gradually discovered something was amiss.

Alan, a Hangzhou native, decided to transition from her old profession to e-commerce this year. But she found that in the e-commerce hub of Hangzhou, she, as a newcomer, was not in high demand. Most of the information on BOSS Zhipin either went unread or received no response. So, she turned to Xiaohongshu to check the situation in the relevant industry.

Although Alan didn't browse Xiaohongshu with a job-seeking mindset, she could frequently come across job recruitment posts and even found ideal positions. After observing for a few days, she realized that "these recruitment posts hide many pitfalls."

Many companies do not specify salary ranges in the posts, and some do not mention the work location, working hours, or specific positions. They omit important information and only state that they are hiring, guiding users to chat privately.

After submitting resumes and communicating with these recruiters, Alan found that many companies are recruiting on Xiaohongshu with the intention of offering "low-paying jobs." Often, after she mentioned her expected salary, no one replied to her.

In legitimate recruitment platforms, different positions have standard hourly wages. Even if one is not familiar with the industry when submitting a resume, the system will provide the average salary range for reference during the communication process.

Furthermore, she observed that some job recruitment posts contain false positions. She once had an interview through Xiaohongshu and later found out that the recruiter guided her to sign a contract with an MCN company, which included many unequal terms.

A professional recruiter pointed out that because social platforms do not conduct strict qualification screenings, posting job openings and collecting resumes have almost no threshold. Some companies or individuals with qualification issues, operational problems, inadequate staffing, or high turnover rates will recruit on these platforms, and there are even many scams among them.

As job seekers cannot determine the authenticity of a company's qualifications and recruitment information, "high-paying job" posts also contain some false or even fraudulent information, increasing the trust cost for both recruiters and job seekers. It is worth noting that now, on every job recruitment post on Xiaohongshu, there is a reminder stating "Pay attention to safety, please carefully discern the other party's information." Both Zhang Zhang and Xiao Qiao have been questioned in the comments and private messages as to whether they are scammers. Helplessly, they had to show their work badges to prove their identities.

To successfully receive an offer on Xiaohongshu, job seekers need to remember that no matter where they see job recruitment information, the interview and onboarding processes should be the same as on legitimate recruitment platforms. When encountering attractive conditions such as high salary or flexible hours, it is even more important to spend more time discerning.

"Companies that cannot be found on legitimate recruitment platforms are basically suspicious. 90% of HR personnel and headhunters who charge individuals are scammers. If something seems off, even if you have to give up what seems like a good opportunity, do not blindly get involved," Zhang Zhang cautioned.

Most recruitment industry professionals do not support social platforms providing professional recruitment services. They believe this raises personal privacy issues. Young people use social platforms to hide their identities, such as using pseudonyms, to occasionally vent online. Once their account is linked to job-seeking, they will feel like they are being monitored all the time Even professional recruiters or young job seekers in urgent need of work do not always want to see job information at all times. When they open social platforms to relax, let social activities be social, and work be work.

\* At the request of the interviewees, Alan and Xiaoli are pseudonyms.

DingJiao (ID: dingjiaoone), Author: DingJiao Team