6 Ways to Use Facebook Advertising for Recruiting

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A like message on enter keyboard for social media concepts.Facebook, like recruiting, seems to be ever evolving. While many are up in arms over the changing page and fan terms, a new “custom audience” feature can be used for social recruiting in entirely new ways.

Essentially, custom audience campaigns are highly targeted campaigns that go out to laser focused candidates and prospects. Since marketers and recruiters follow very similar guidelines when reaching out to their audiences, here are 6 ways you can use the new feature in your social recruiting strategies:

Get insight into candidates who visit your career site, download stuff or click on a job ad. By keeping a consistent call to action, you can use Facebook to interact with those who are already familiar with your company (like a consumer) or have already visited your jobs page (like an applicant). This allows social recruiting to be more comprehensive and similar to online marketing.

Recruiters are already familiar with products like Work4Labs and Jobvite’s Facebook plugin, that allow candidates to see jobs that make sense for them or others in their network. But have you considered using Facebook campaigns in the same way for jobs? A no-brainer for third party recruiters, this can also work for large companies that multiple, say, marketing openings in different departments or regions. Focusing more closely on the location of the candidate (which you can totally do in Facebook Campaigns) also makes a ton of sense.

By now, if you follow the marketing world at all, you’ve heard of “drip” or “nurture” campaigns. If you are actively building a community or talent network from your CRM or ATS (or email list) then you know who’s responded (and who hasn’t). Use Facebook campaigns as another approach, especially with the plethora of custom marketing tabs available for companies now.

Your current candidates or applicants aren’t the only ones you can reach with this new feature. You can also run campaigns to friends of those folks. This gives you demographics on an entirely new set of people. Make sure that you have a great landing page and Facebook presence (don’t need tons of fans, just something for them to read, peruse or click on) before running what could be a costly campaign. As this article points out, choose engagement over “likes” since Facebook is constantly changing how advertisers can use those anyway:

While targeting based off of likes is important, paying attention to the friends of those customers who have interacted with the company more deeply than a “like” is also useful.

Finish your job fairs with a flourish! Job fairs seem old school but they’re still a huge part of recruiting, especially on colleges and in smaller towns. Even large startups scenes like those in New York are getting in on the job fair action. Upload a list of booth visitors or bsuiness cards and create a targeted campaign. It will be more memorable than email and you can target only those who you spoke with, visited the booth, didn’t finish an application and host of other custom features. You can even have simultaneous campaigns for those you spoke with face to face versus those who registered but never visited the booth.

Allow them to self-select….or not. While lots of jobseekers use social when looking for a job, sometimes they don’t go through the entire process of submitting an application. Create a custom list and reach out to those people via Facebook, essentially retargeting them with similar or even the same job, if you think they’re qualified.

Want to experiment with mobile recruiting but aren’t sure how? Facebook Mobile Ads to the rescue! Upload a list of email addresses or phone numbers for customers and those in your ATS. Then run a Facebook mobile campaign to reach them only on their mobile or smartphone. Since a lot of passive candidates use their mobile phones to surf the internet (and check Facebook) from work, this can be particularly effective. Got a competitor close by? Only run the campaign in cities where you want to recruit from a specific location.

By Maren Hogan