Social recruiting can be a huge help when you’re hiring for diverse and high-volume roles. Recruiting on social media is great, but for best results, you’ll need different strategies for different platforms. Facebook recruiting can be especially powerful—but there are quirks to Facebook that you should understand before you jump in.
Here’s everything you should know about recruiting on Facebook, from the features that are changing to optimizing your business page.
1. Understand the Demographics of Facebook Users
Who’s on Facebook? Practically everybody.
Facebook is widely used by pretty much every demographic. Around 69% of the entire adult American population uses the platform. That includes around 77% of American women and 61% of American men.
Many social platforms skew strongly toward a certain age group (Snapchat and TikTok are dominated by users under 30, while Nextdoor and LinkedIn are popular among people aged 30-49), but that’s not the case for Facebook. Most Americans aged 18-29 use Facebook (70%), along with 30 to 49-year-olds (77%), and those between 50 and 64 (73%). About 50% of people over 64 use Facebook, making it the most popular platform for older Americans.
Facebook’s wide appeal is great for recruiters, but you should be aware of your filtering options so you can actually connect with the right people.
Because of rules related to employment laws, Facebook won’t let you target candidates within a zip code by age range or gender. You’re not going to be able to find, for example, women aged 18-24 who live in a certain zip code. But there are still ways to narrow down your target audience.
You can’t target demographics by zip code, but you can specify a city or state. You can also target ages 18-65, and gender more broadly.
2. Set Up Your Facebook Business Presence
Before you jump into Facebook recruiting, make sure you have an established business page. This page can be a home for job posts, candidate engagement, and information about your organization.
While you’re setting up your business page, follow these best practices to make the most of your Facebook presence.
Facebook Business Page Best Practices
- Verify your business through the Facebook Security Center
- Fill out your About page with a description of your company and contact information for potential candidates
- Add a header image, a business profile picture, and other relevant pictures
- Use correctly sized images. Your profile picture should be a square image, while your cover photo should be about 820 pixels by 312 pixels.
- If relevant, add page rules to guide what your audience can post on your page
- Pin a post to the top of your page featuring your most recent piece of interesting content
3. Recruit From Your Business’s Facebook Page
Once your business is set up on Facebook, you can start recruiting directly from the page.
Your business page comes with a built-in jobs tab where you can post your openings. When you’re looking for a new hire, it’s a good idea to post the job description on your page and to make a separate post about your recruiting. This will give your followers something to share with their network, and will increase the visibility of your jobs.
Adding your jobs to your Facebook business page serves more than one purpose. You’re getting your jobs out there, but you’re also establishing your page as a place where job seekers can find openings. It’s helpful whether you’ve already got an online following or if you’re working on building one.
4. Use Facebook to Build Your Candidate Pool
As you build your audience on Facebook, you’re also expanding your pool of potential candidates.
If you’re mainly posting content for your peers in the industry, consider mixing in some posts that will also be interesting to job seekers. Ideally, you want a mix of both leaders and job seekers in your network.
With enough content related to work opportunities and on-the-ground industry trends, you’ll gain followers who might apply to your open positions. Managers who follow you, meanwhile, may be willing to repost your job openings to their own followers, if you’ve given enough indication that your business would be an exciting place to work.
5. Recruit With Jobs on Facebook
As of February 2022, the Jobs on Facebook feature is changing. In the past, anyone could publish jobs for free and collect applications from Facebook. Starting in February, this feature will only be available to employers in the US and Canada.
If you’re in Canada or the US, you can still use the Jobs on Facebook feature to publish your open positions and accept applications. Candidates from the US or Canada will still be able to find your jobs without following your business page.
It’s free to post jobs with this Facebook feature, but to help job seekers find your jobs, keep SEO in mind. Review the best practices for writing a job description, and be sure to prominently include information like location and job title. If you want to take your Facebook jobs even further, you can opt to boost them as paid ads.
6. Track Facebook Recruiting Analytics
Another major benefit of recruiting on Facebook? Easy access to analytics.
Facebook makes it simple to see how well your posts are performing. Without any other kind of analytics tool in place, you can see a lot of information about your reach directly from Facebook.
Facebook recruiting will show you important information like what kinds of posts succeed and what time of day your audience tends to interact with your posts. You can see the number of engagements you get on individual posts and quickly adjust your language, schedule, and content type depending on results.
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Want to up your social recruiting game? We’ve got you.
Apploi helps employers source candidates, streamline hiring, and onboard new recruits. We automatically distribute jobs to dozens of the top job sites and integrate with social platforms so you can promote your positions across the web. Create digital employee records, track documents, and get automated alerts when paperwork is missing or soon to expire.
Interested in learning more about how you can recruit, hire, and onboard new staff quickly? Contact us today for a free demo of our end-to-end talent management solution, or learn more about how Apploi helps you keep candidates engaged.
