58% of recruiters quote social media as a top channel for quality hires.
But what comes to your mind when you think of social media recruiting?
LinkedIn? Of course! It’s the go-to platform to source and engage with potential candidates. However, a very prominent option that you might be overlooking is Facebook (now ‘Meta’).
In a research,
- 70% of employers voted Facebook as an effective recruiting tool.
- 43% of these found Facebook to be cost-effective for talent acquisition.
- 88% admitted that Facebook reduced their dependency on print job ads, and subsequently helped them reduce cost-per-hire.
Additionally, 50% of employers use Facebook as a hiring channel. And it's very likely that your next candidate too can be hired through Facebook. So, how do you optimally use Facebook for recruitment? Well, read this blog to find the answer.
Fun Fact:
Did you know that alongside social recruiting, 58% of employers say that existing candidates in the ATS have been their 2nd best source of quality hires? How do you find the best matching candidates for a role in your ATS' candidate database?
(Answer Hint: Use Skima AI)
Why Use Facebook for Recruitment?
There are a host of reasons why Facebook should find a place in your sourcing stack.
Build A Larger Candidate Pool
For everyone who believes that the platform is a dead medium and networking sites like Instagram and TikTok have taken the reins, they should consider the flexibility of networking and user base that Facebook provides – it’s still unparalleled. With a massive user base of 3 billion users, Facebook is more than a social networking tool. It’s a goldmine for recruiters looking to build a pool of quality candidates.
Yes, the competition has certainly tightened for Facebook, but from the lens of a recruiter, building a recruiting strategy with Facebook as a key lever to source candidates could be an absolute hit.
Social Recruiting Focused Features
"Facebook as a recruitment tool," most probably wasn't exactly the first thought Mark Zuckerberg would have had when envisioning the platform. However, Facebook launched the Jobs Feature for Facebook Business Pages to create job posts on the Facebook web & mobile app. This feature also allowed candidates to apply natively on the platform. Facebook also launched a job board to let its users explore jobs.
Note: Facebook discontinued the Jobs feature in 2021/2022 except for the USA & Canada markets.
Razor-sharp Candidate Targeting With Facebook Groups
Meta, the largest social media platform in the world, hosts a number of communities specific to job seekers and recruiters. From niche underrepresented groups to location and job role-specific communities, you will find more targeted people here than on any other social networking platform. It's akin to publishing your job posts on niche job boards. Basically, you can go from zero social presence to interacting with multiple candidates in just a couple of hours or days using Facebook Groups.
Save Recruiting Bucks & Reduce Cost-per-hire
If instantly being part of a community was not enough, Facebook also saves you big bucks and reduces cost per hire. Whether it’s LinkedIn or Naukri, to optimally use job boards today you need to have a budget set aside. But not when you use Facebook Jobs in the USA or Canada. The platform is free to post jobs, through and through. Don't be surprised if your Facebook or FB messenger continually starts buzzing with application alerts. If that isn’t the perfect advantage of social recruiting, what is?
By the way, even for the geographies where Facebook Jobs is not available, you can still squeeze value from Facebook; all you need to do is identify relevant Facebook groups and share your job posts in the group. If you seek help creating job posts, use Skima's AI Job Description Generator to create your job posts optimized for maximum reach.
There are multiple other things you can do on Facebook to attract and hire top candidates. Continue reading the next section to make the most of Facebook recruiting irrespective of where you are located.
6 Ways To Effectively Use Facebook For Recruiting
Create An Attractive Facebook Page
To process an engaging talent acquisition plan that works for you as opposed to you working for it, create an attractive Facebook Page. Build an audience. To attract the right audience, ensure that specific details like Company logo, address, timings and contact information are accurate, and also consider a few other things, including:
Highlighting the company’s culture, mission and working atmosphere on the company page by sharing regular posts around the same.
This helps attract candidates who prioritise workforce diversity. Read our blog on DEI to know more about this.
Sharing testimonials from clients or employees; they are always a great way to reassure ideal candidates about the company’s internal and external success.
Sometimes, your ideal candidate is already employed and has a good pay. To excite them you need to offer them more than just salary.
Sharing about your projects and client testimonials are great means to attract quality candidates. Read more about candidate personas, aka jobseeker personas to understand what drives who.
Sharing job posts as often on your Facebook page as you would on other job boards.
Don’t consider the Facebook page as a secondary option. Make the posts engaging in nature.
Don’t Just Post Jobs, Share Them
When you post a Job on LinkedIn, its algorithms work to make sure your job appears in the feeds of relevant candidates. With Facebook, it’s a little bit different. Putting up job posts will not get you eyeballs, especially if your page is small and still growing. You must share the job post to attract job seekers. Your Facebook job posting must include a list of groups where you distribute relevant jobs. This leads us to our next point.
Join Relevant Facebook Groups
If there is one tool that shouts community building, it’s Facebook. It has a group for everything. Spend some time in these groups, understand what the people in the group are talking about, actively participate in discussions relevant to you and most importantly, use them to spread the word - “you are hiring”. These communities are not only a good source to discover active applicants but also filled with passive candidates keeping a keen eye on the next great opportunity for them.
- Read our blog on how to source passive candidates to sharpen your recruiting tactics.
You may also want to read our blog LinkedIn InMail best practices for recruiters.
These insights are useful to reap the maximum benefit of social recruiting.
Create Your Own Communities
The next best thing you can do while recruiting using Facebook is to create your own recruitment-focused Facebook groups. As opposed to Facebook pages, groups are more likely to find a bigger, more tailored audience. Imagine a place where employers and job seekers actively communicate and share.
It will be your own database of candidates; your own little LinkedIn, but with the right people. How? When creating these communities, you can set specific rules and guidelines that allow only specific people to participate. Try it.
Integrate Facebook With Your ATS
If you are using an ATS like Workday, it allows you to populate your job posts across varied job boards and social media, including Facebook. Use this feature to centralise your sourcing efforts. An ATS can provide better control over how you employ social media for recruiting.
- Read our blog on 10 best applicant tracking systems to consider for your startup hiring team.
- Also, check the blog on AI recruiting tools, to ensure that you're not wasting time falling prey to common recruitment challenges.
Use The Boost Post Option To Reach More Targeted Candidates
Advertising on Facebook is relatively affordable and provides multiple benefits, all at once. For starters, your job post gets a good boost. Second, the traffic that comes from these posts is targeted, and they are actively looking for jobs. So, they will follow your page to stay updated on the latest job opportunities.
What Not to Do When Recruiting Via Facebook?
As easy as it is to follow predetermined steps to recruiting on Facebook, you can also find yourself tangled in the complexities of the process along the way. So, here are a few things that you avoid to optimally use Facebook for recruiting.
Stale And Generic Copies
When it comes to Facebook, you must consider the fact that it is a social networking platform after all. So, if your content isn’t engaging, your page will just as easily become obsolete as the many company pages out there. Also, don’t rely on ChatGPT to produce relevant content. Take some time, and work with your marketing and copy team to produce content that resonates with the target audience. Read our blog on creative recruitment ideas to get inspired for an out-of-the-box approach to recruiting.
Not Being Active
Publishing job posts and company updates isn’t the end of your Facebook recruitment journey, it’s the beginning. In addition to actively posting content on your page and groups, you must also interact with the audience. Yes, it's a manual task but with a long-term benefit. To start engaging, take control of the Facebook page to track any comments or questions asked by potential candidates. Also, pick 4-5 most relevant groups and actively participate in them. Put up questions, share Polls and respond to active discussions.
Pick Your Manual Battles
From job posting to responding to comments, monitoring job posts and tracking them, there are a lot of moving parts in the Facebook recruiting process. Thus, a lack of time can make you select which actions you want to do and which you don’t. Don’t rely on fighting your battles manually. Use the right recruiting & talent intelligence tools to make your recruiting strategy more effective.
End Note
Adapting your recruiting strategy to make it Facebook-friendly is important. Gone are the days when traditional sourcing strategies were enough to discover top talents.
Today, you must use everything in your hiring arsenal to create a recruiting strategy that works for you, and Facebook must be its part, if not at the forefront of it. Use the Facebook recruiting tips in this blog to expand your talent hunt.
What's Skima AI & How Do We Help You With Recruiting On Facebook?
First, we help you create stellar job descriptions.
Second, when you get a lot of candidates and their resumes, you would also need a way to efficiently process them whilst keeping bias at a distance. This is often challenging when you have to deal with 100s or 1000s of resumes. That's exactly where Skima AI comes in to do away with your resume screening challenges.
Skima's AI Matching Score feature helps you identify the best candidates from your available pool of talent by processing 10,000+ data points from candidates' resumes and CVs, and vetting the same against the job role description and requirements. It assigns a score to each of the resumes; the higher the score, the better-fit a candidate.
Try Skima AI now.
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