On the face of it, the reason why Facebook should be a part of your recruitment strategy seems obvious: It’s the world’s largest social media network with over 2.5 billion active monthly users. That’s a pool of 2.5 billion people to recruit from.
But once you start to dig deeper, it’s clear that executing a Facebook recruiting strategy isn’t always straightforward.
How do you find qualified candidates? What’s the best way to advertise your available positions? How can you actually engage with candidates who aren’t actively looking and seem to be more interested in posting group photos than in your company?
It might seem easier to stick with traditional recruitment channels such as LinkedIn and job boards. But there are serious benefits to be gained from a Facebook recruiting strategy, a fact that recruiters are coming to realise. In fact, social media marketing is considered to be the most in-demand skill for HR professionals. To show off your social media recruiting chops on Facebook, you just need to keep certain things in mind.
Strategise for passive candidates
Focussing on traditional recruitment channels is appealing primarily because people on those sites are actually looking for work. They’re part of the active candidate market.
On Facebook, however, most users are part of the passive candidate market. There’s no way to tell if they’re actively looking for work, and if they are, they’re probably not doing it on Facebook. That’s why your Facebook recruiting strategy should advertise your employer brand more so than it does your available roles.
You want to celebrate your employees’ successes, laud your company’s culture and explain what it is that makes working for you unique. That way, when people do enter the active candidate market, they’ll remember your company. They might even seek you out through other recruiting channels, but they’ll have heard of you first on Facebook.
This mindset is so crucial, in fact, that it’s one of our top five ways to attract talent over social media channels in general. So long as you target passive candidates with the right message at the right time, passive doesn’t have to mean uninterested.
Make use of Facebook’s paid campaigns
Your Facebook recruiting strategy has to make the most out of the tools that Facebook has to offer, which includes paid campaigns.
Some companies may not want to dedicate a portion of their budget to recruiting advertisements on a social media network, especially smaller ones or those who haven’t seen a demonstrated return through Facebook yet. However, one of the nice things about Facebook’s advertising platform is that it’s completely flexible in terms of budget — you can spend £10 or £10,000.
Additionally, paid campaigns enable you to target your posts better. You might not be able to target your recruiting efforts to, say, “MBAs with statistical modeling experience” as you could on LinkedIn, but you can target by your audience’s interests, their geographic location, where they went to college and other variables. Those factors can be even more valuable in turning up hidden gems of candidates than specific role-related categories.
Furthermore, Facebook’s paid campaigns are automatically targeted (to a certain extent). Based on the keywords in your ads, Facebook will expose your ads to the users its algorithm flags as the most relevant.
Dress your posts up
Those used to social media know that Facebook posts should incorporate multimedia. If you’re more used to advertising open positions through traditional job boards, however, you may not have considered this aspect of your Facebook recruiting strategy.
Don’t leave engagement on the table. Use the tools that are available to you in this platform: Facebook posts that include photos have 179% more interactions than those without, and video posts are the most frequently shared type of posts, averaging nearly 90 shares per post.
Stand out from the crowd
It’s also important to remember that because more recruiters understand them, traditional recruiting channels have significantly more competition. Fewer people know how to execute a Facebook recruiting strategy successfully.
If you’re building your employer brand on Facebook, potential recruits are going to be even more impressed by your company simply because you have a Facebook presence. After all, the companies that are pulling in top-quality candidates are the ones on the cutting-edge; candidates respond to modern companies that have evolved with the times.
So long as you know how to approach it, recruiting on Facebook can expose your brand to billions of people. With these tactics, you’ll have access to this massive pool of potential candidates that other recruiters are leaving behind.
