How to Use Facebook Recruiting to Find Top Talent
Did you know that 1 out of every 7 minutes spent on the internet is spent on Facebook?
In fact, Facebook users spend an average of 50 minutes per day on the network. This gives you a tremendous opportunity to find the candidates you need. Ever wondered how?
With Facebook Ads.
Facebook Ads leverages the social media site’s enormous reach and pairs it with robust ad targeting to ensure you’ll reach the exact candidates you need, when you need them. With targeting options ranging from location and interests to education and work history, you can easily define your ideal candidate profile to promote your employer brand, talent community, recruitment events, and jobs to your target candidates.
With all of Facebook Ad’s available targeting options, there’s almost no limit to who you can find. So let’s jump right in with a quick overview of how it works!
Getting Started with Facebook Ads
What are your objectives?
When you prepare to launch any ad campaign, the first thing you should consider is your campaign objective. Facebook Ads are no different.
Primary objectives for recruitment ads typically include driving applicants to a specific position, improving diversity hiring, increasing recruitment event registration, building your talent community, and advertising your employer brand. So before you get going, take a minute to think about what you’d like to accomplish.
Define your Ideal Profile
Once you’ve decided on your campaign objectives, think about what an ideal candidate would look like. What is their education level? How many years of experience do they have? Have they worked for specific companies in your industry? Facebook has the best ad targeting capabilities available on the internet to help you find the right candidates.
Let’s dig a little deeper into the criteria you can use for your search:
- Location:Country, state/province, city, or zip code.
- Demographic:Age, education, workplace, experience.
- Online actions:Users who have visited your website.
- Behaviors:Purchase history, device usage.
- Connections:Users who are connected to certain pages, apps, and events.
- Custom audiences:Users from a custom list of your creation.
- Look-alike audiences:Users similar to your page fans, custom audiences or website visitors.
- Interests:Hobbies and pages liked.
With these options, you can target as broadly or as narrowly as you’d like in order to reach your campaign goals. For instance, if you’re looking to staff a new retail location, you may want to broadly target people who like fashion. But if you’re looking for an experienced ER Nurse in El Paso, you may want to narrowly target professionals within 20 miles who have a specific degree and more than 6 years of experience. With other ad networks, the average online reach for narrowly targeted campaigns is only 38% accurate. But according to Nielsen, narrowly targeted Facebook Ads campaigns are more than 89% accurate. That’s over two times more accurate any than other ad network!
What Recruitment Campaigns are you Trying to Launch?
Fill a Specific Job or a Group of Similar Jobs
When you’re hiring for a specific position or several similar jobs, you could simply target by job title to find candidates that currently have similar positions. But what if a user hasn’t filled in their job title or it doesn’t exactly match your criteria?
The good news is you can target a much more precise audience with Facebook Ads by layering your targeting criteria with as many data points as you’d like.
Recruiting Restaurant Staff
Recruiting Truck Drivers
Drive People to a Recruitment Event
If you’re holding an event to grow your talent pool, you could target profiles near the event’s location and layer on demographic targeting to attract candidates with a variety of skills and experience.
You can also choose to hold a Career Fair when staffing for all positions at
a new location — such as a new retail store. When you’d like to hire for a wide range of positions, you could use location and interest targeting, and include the names of competitors and sub-brands.
For instance, a hospital that’s hosting a nursing recruitment event may target three distinct groups of people: current nursing students, recent graduates of nursing programs, and nurses currently working at other hospitals. You could target current nursing students and graduates using education level, field of study, and year graduated, and nurses currently working at other hospitals using current job title and employer.
Improve your Candidate Diversity
Many companies have launched initiatives to increase the diversity of their workforce. This is another area where Facebook Ads can help by targeting diversity candidates based on their interests, Facebook pages they like, and languages they speak.
Ensuring Success with Ads
Now you’re Ready to Succeed.
On average, customers who run Facebook Ads in addition to their other social recruitment efforts find new applicants at one-third the cost of those who don’t.
So what’s the secret?
That’s because as a company advertises its job openings and recruiting events, it’s also building brand awareness and trust with consumers. The next time a consumer is exposed to the brand, he or she will already have some familiarity and exposure to the organization. With a cost-per-click bidding model, that brand awareness comes at virtually no additional cost.
Understanding the Offline Effect
In addition to reaching specific direct response goals, Facebook Ads have the added benefit of what researchers are calling the “offline effect.” Studies have shown that regardless of whether a consumer clicks on an ad, seeing the ad itself has a powerful impact on their behavior. While most of this research has focused on eCommerce ads, there is likely a similar correlation between recruitment ads and job seekers.
In one such study, researchers performed an experiment with a major brand whose sales had increased significantly. They discovered that 78% of the sales increase came from consumers who saw an ad, but did not click on it. This suggests that online ads can make a huge impression on offline behavior, even when no action was taken on the ad itself. While ad click-through rates and online conversions generally determine a campaign’s success, the indirect benefits that ad impressions have on brand awareness should also be taken into consideration.
To Summarize
So what does all of this mean?
As you can see, there are many ways to use Facebook Ads to find new candidates, engage with your talent community, and share your employment brand. With the reach of Facebook and the relevance of its ad targeting, you can make a serious impact on your recruitment program, even with a minimal budget.
If you would like to learn more about Facebook recruitment Ads, Call us today!
