Social Recruiting with Facebook: The three pillars of Searching and Selecting with the World’s Largest Social Network

What’s the most effective way to do Social recruiting on Facebook?

If you’re a recruiter you’ll probably find yourself in this situation: you need to close an important vacancy soon, you can’t find candidates online and ask yourself if social networking is really effective or if it will really give you the chance to get in touch with the candidate you’re really seeking.

So you decide to deepen your recruiting techniques and start reading numerous internet articles that promise to reveal the ‘secret technique to attract millions of candidates with social recruiting on Facebook’. Suddenly you begin to doubt the real efficacy of these methods, which is normal.
In fact, for a recruiter, using Facebook to find and to attract candidates can make a big difference. Think about this: 40% of Fortune 100 companies receive more traffic on their Facebook page than their corporate site.

Actually, the real problem, as we have shown un this article on Social Recruiting, is that the recruitment expertise for social networks is really too low for many recruiters.

The fundamental Principal of Recruiting on Facebook

We believe that the only advice a recruiter needs to follow to do social recruiting on Facebook, is this:

“Let go of any secret techniques,

focus on the basics.”

If you really want to find candidates on Facebook, first of all you should completely ignore the rumours and inaccuracies of lots of generalist bloggers. Set the basics of your Social Recruitment strategy on Facebook (the fundamentals). Finally, measure your results and progressively improve your recruitment strategy (increasing the number of candidates that you’re attracting).

The Three Principles of Social Recruiting on Facebook

What are the pillars of social recruitment on Facebook?

We have identified three fundamental principles to which we must pay attention and we’ve called them “the Pillars of Social Recruitment on Facebook”.

1) Company Presence. Create a business presence on Facebook (start by creating a business page), involve your audience with quality content and provide them with the information they need.
Use the tools provided by Facebook, such as custom tabs, to further enhance your Employer Branding on Facebook.

2) Content. Share interesting content for your audience. Ask ‘what will interest the candidates who are fans of my page?’. Make a list of online resources (blogs, sites, etc) that you can use as a starting point for writing your content.

Interact with the fans of your page, working to continuously nurture the relationship with your business. Real talent will probably not be in an active search for work, so it’s important to share periodic content so that you are front in their mind when they are ready to change jobs.

3) Traffic. Use your fan base to promote open positions in your business (vacancies). It might be useful to share a link to your career page, integrated with an Applicant Tracking System.
Increase the number of people who follow your page by communicating its existence to your email list, inviting employees to share the link, including it in your blog or other corporate social networks.

Finally, why not also use Facebook ads? The powerful Facebook advertising system is very effective to quickly bring high quality and targeted traffic to your page.

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Doing Social Recruiting on Facebook is a lot different to traditional methods and requires a great deal of testing: it’s important to do tests and gradually refine your approach so that these three pillars are met and you get meaningful recruitment results.

In-recruiting also enables you to publish your job ad directly in Facebook from the ATS, find out how to do that with the free trial.