600 things; 10 Simple Facebook Recruiting Tips That Get Results

As part of our 600 Interesting and Useful Things for Recruiters series Ryan St. Germaine, CEO of JobCast Recruitment App shares 10 tips for Facebook recruiting.

I work with clients trying to improve their Facebook recruiting strategies all day, everyday. That’s my job, well a huge part of my job at least! Over the years I’ve learned quite a bit about what works, and what doesn’t. Here are ten strategies I’ve learned, that you can implement to improve your Facebook recruiting right now.

1 – Treat Job Posts Like Ads

Most job posts are composed of a long boring description of the advertised position, accompanied by a laundry list of required skills, experience, and education.

This may work for company career sites (although I’m not convinced that it does), but it doesn’t work for social recruiting, and especially not for Facebook.

You need to make each job post a sales pitch. They should be short and sweet, and must include a “call to action”. A “call to action” is basically a short line that tells your potential hire exactly what you want them to do. It may seem a bit silly that you have to tell them to “apply now” or “click here for more information”, but the reality is that study after study has shown that call to actions are extremely effective.

2 – Mobile is Mandatory

More than 2 out of 3 Facebook users log on via mobile, and even more importantly, about 1 in 6 users use Facebook from mobile exclusively

Not only are people using mobile more often, they are using it specifically to hunt for work. According to a recent article on Mashable 77% of job seekers surveyed were using mobile specifically for this purpose.

That’s a lot of candidates you’re missing out on if your mobile experience is causing friction. You need your Facebook Employer Page and Facebook Career Page to be mobile optimized and responsive. Especially if your company career site is not.

3 – Be Social, But Really

Think about the kind of person you enjoy chatting with at a cocktail party. That’s who you want to be online.

Charming, witty, interesting, and interested.

This is what builds online communities, which, in recruiting terms, means talent pools. Post interesting and varied content, ask questions, use casual language, show your face and/or the faces of your employees, and always respond to comments.

4 – Get Your Team On Board

There are two important ways that your employees can improve your Facebook recruiting.

The first is by providing social proof. Get your team to Like and comment on your Company Page, share employee profiles, and encourage employees to engage with each other and potential candidates in a positive way. You can do this by simply asking, or you can add some incentive, like the promise of a Starbucks gift-card for the most engaged employees.

The second way your team can help is with referrals. Get employees to reach out to their connections via Facebook by sharing the jobs you post on their friends timelines, or suggesting that their friends Like your Company Page. This will help you to both hire for currently available positions, and build a talent pipeline for future openings.

5 – Post Pictures of Cats

Okay, so it doesn’t have to be cats; puppies, and Ryan Gosling images work too. Or videos, actually video is even better! These images may have nothing to do with recruiting, your company (unless you are a pet shop), or even your employer brand, but they do boost engagement and sharing. They also make your company Page more fun and relatable which is a huge part of what being social is all about. The Cynical Girl, HR pro Laurie Ruettimann’s blog is a great example of how to combine business (critiques and tips) with fun (Monday Morning HR Humour and pictures of her cat) for social media success.

6 – Stay on Schedule

The content you share on Facebook has a relatively long shelf life. Unlike with Twitter where you have to post constantly in order to get your Tweets seen. Facebook for the win!

But you still have to post consistently. You also need to spread out your posts so that you don’t come off as spammy. No one likes an over-sharer, neither in life, nor online.

Using a scheduling tool is the best way to manage your sharing. You can set up 1 – 5 posts ahead of time to be posted at peek hours throughout the day.

(More about how to schedule Facebook posts)

7 – Take Aim

The best thing about Facebook for recruiting is how it allows for effective candidate targeting. By using Facebook Ads you can be extremely specific in who your job posts reach. For many of our clients we’ve found this to be the best way to get large numbers of applications from qualified candidates.

Facebook Ads allows you to reach users based on demographics, work experience, and even interests.

Let’s say you need to find servers and hostesses for your upscale Japanese restaurant. You can use Facebook Ads to specifically target young women who “Like” fashion, and sushi with your job postings. This both increases applications from that population, and decreases applications from unqualified candidates, which means higher ROI, and better overall conversion.

(Here’s a tutorial on how to use Facebook Ads for recruiting)

8 – Make a Specific Long-Term Goal

It’s easy to get lost with social. There are always new networks to try, new “Best Practices” being promoted by experts, and new upgrades to get used to (especially when it comes to Facebook!).

It is important to stay on trend, but not at the expense of what really matters. This is why setting specific goals is necessary. Whether you choose to focus on increasing Page Likes, or strengthening your employer brand, or improving your content doesn’t matter. Just choose one large, measurable goal to hit every month. Doubling your Page Likes is an excellent and completely achievable example of a long-term Facebook recruiting goal.

9 – Make Even More Specific Short-Term Goals

This is hands down the best way to reach your long-term goal, and improve your Facebook recruiting. Some would even argue that this is the best way to improve at anything you do.

An excellent example of short term Facebook recruiting goals for beginners to focus on would be:

– Share content once per day

– Add two Images to your photos per week

– Use Facebook Ads once per week

10 – Experiment with Purpose

Last, but not least, for the best Facebook recruiting results you need to experiment. Experimentation is the only way to find out what strategy works best for your recruiting. Play around with different content, post timing and frequency, language, imagery, and Ads. Measure the results you get and re-work your recruiting strategy based on that data.

Experimentation is the only way to find out what works and what doesn’t, but only if you make sure to keep detailed metrics and continually assess the data you gather.

For more information about making your recruitment better using Facebook please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Ryan by email at ryan@jobcast.net.