Social media is heavily involved in marketing, and within recruitment, it’s a platform used just as much. Social recruiting is just one of the methods of how you can use social media effectively. But what is going from strength to strength is paid social advertising because it’s becoming increasingly effective. However, this method isn’t talked about hugely in the recruitment world.
This form of advertising has grown drastically over the years, with a 24% increase over 2017, meaning the spend on paid advertising in the UK would have reached over £3.3 billion. However, the introduction to paid social advertising has been one of the main factors of decreasing engagement from organic posts on brand pages. According to Busssumo, the first half of 2017 showed a decrease of 20% and throughout 6 years, the reach for brands on social media is declining steadily (as shown in the graph). Posting on social media and gaining organic reach used to translate to free advertising for companies on social media. Unfortunately, this is not the case. If you are a recruitment company posting your jobs onto your account, you might not receive a great response.
All the same, recruitment companies can still benefit from what social media has to offer to take their job postings one step further and attract more candidates.
Boosting Posts via Facebook
Facebook is one of the leading social networks that have a proper functioning platform to conduct advertising activities. Also, in my opinion, its a platform that has the most features to get the most out of your advertising campaigns with better advert sets, campaign structures and account set up.
One of the great features that help with organic posts being on the decline is the Facebook boost post feature. The feature allows you to get even better results from the posts you put on your business page and you can reach a much wider audience as you are limited to people who already like your page.
It is as easy as clicking a button to boost your post, which is great when you don’t have much time on your hands. Along with being simple to use, it’s easy to control once live because you have the freedom to cancel anytime and to view the progress of the post.
To help you further with boosting a post on Facebook here are some straightforward steps you can follow,
- If you are starting with a fresh post and you want to boost straight away. For example, you have a job that you know you want to get interaction on, then click the grey Boost Post button in the lower-right corner of the post box with your post draft;
- From there you will be given the following fields to fill-out:
Audience – Set the parameters for who will see your boosted post, including their age, sex, location, and interests;
Budget – Select the budget you would like to set for this post;
Duration – Input the dates you would like the advert to start and finish; - Preview the post before boosting to prevent errors and spelling mistakes;
- If your payment details aren’t already set, then you will need to fill out the form to continue;
- Lastly, you are ready to post! You can check the status of your boosted posts at any time by looking at the Delivery column of your Ads Manager or the ‘Ad Tools’ tab which is located on top of your business page.
Facebook Ad Manager
Recruiting through Facebook adverts can be very effective, mainly because its one of the most used social media channels. Facebook’s advertising platform makes it easier for you to reach more people outside of your following and to expand your reach from your regular route which may be from job boards.
Investment is vital for a Facebook advert to work well. Whether that may be investing time to train yourself to operate the platform, getting another company onboard to run the adverts or to hire a social media expert to work within your company. Here are some more Pros and Cons to Facebook advertising.
PROS
- You can run a Facebook advert on any budget;
- An audience that you want to target can be as broad as age, gender, relationship status, education, workplace, job titles, location, interests and behaviours;
- Facebook has really outdone themselves of what sort of advert set you would like to display. You can be as creative as you want with video, carousels and slideshows ad formats;
- See the results for yourself! What Facebook has set up is an in-depth analytics page to show you how have your adverts impacted your business in visually, easy-to-read report.
CONS
- Can be complicated if you don’t know what you are doing. However, Facebook has a great training tool – Facebook Blueprint;
- A budget is fundamental for Facebook adverts;
- Creative is required if you want to run a successful advert. This may be tricky if you don’t know how to resize images or create ones.
Facebook Jobs
Facebook recently implemented a new feature in 2017 focusing on job posts. The purpose of this feature is for companies to find the right applicants for open job positions that they post on Facebook. How this can work if you are a recruitment company, is to advertise your current jobs on your page, this is another place where your job position can get more exposure.
PROS
- Free to post a job on your company page;
- Like other posts, you can boost your job post from your Facebook business Page to reach a larger or more targeted audience;
- You can track and review applications from within Facebook.
CONS
- This feature hasn’t hit the ground running just yet so organically you may not receive a massive number of applicants;
You may find the application process that Facebook has in place a little disorganised.
Example
Wave advertised its own Developer job role on Facebook Ad Manager to increase traffic and applications to the application page. Our main aim was to target work demographics and locations outside the UK.
Over the space of a month, the job advert campaign reached 46,079 people and gained 1,128 unique link clicks to the application page. On average the advert cost was 10p per landing page view. Just show as an example, these results can vary depending on the audience you are targeting.
LinkedIn Jobs
LinkedIn is a platform that embeds the professional life in their network by having a job search function and a way to connect with other professionals. The platform is boasting over 500 million members with 40% of monthly active users using LinkedIn daily.
One main feature that LinkedIn offers is the option to advertise open positions. Job seekers can then go on to find your jobs through the “Jobs You May Be Interested In” feature and search organically on the platform.
PROS
- LinkedIn offers a Premium Membership, which means if a job seeker looks into your job posting they can see how they compare to other applicants based on different things. This gives the job seeker a better candidate experience;
- A job seeker can create a Job Search Alert on LinkedIn which means the job seeker is notified of newly posted roles that meet their search criteria, so your job gets more exposure.
CONS
- The competition is fierce on LinkedIn Jobs. While LinkedIn Jobs may have more activity than Facebook Jobs, it means your job may not stand out if it’s not don’t correctly;
- Again it’s a platform where you have to pay for the engagement that you receive, so a budget is required.
However, If you want to take your jobs one step further then here is a step by step guide from LinkedIn on how to post a job.
