Earlier in the week I attended the Recruitment Agency Expo and the big message to be heard (besides the fact that social media can no longer be ignored!) is that job seekers are on Facebook and recruiters are on LinkedIn! Not great if you’re looking for a role!
This has been backed up with articles during the week including this interesting one from Business Insider stating “Facebook is the least-used network by recruiters, although more candidates are looking to use it as a professional tool” and even further evidenced by the comment added to my previous post, Using Social Media to Search for Work, by Bryce Christiansen
I agree 100%. Social media is an amazing job finding tool. To this day, one of my favorite jobs I ever had I found on Facebook of all places. I got to consult for Microsoft and work with all kinds of great tech stuff. Good to meet you. Bryce
Bill Boorman, of #TruLondon5 fame, spoke at the expo on the topic of The Social Agency – aimed at the 90% of the audience who were Recruitment Agents – discussing how recruiters can use the social channels to generate new candidates and business.
He began by reinforcing the fact that there has been a substantial shift, a very fast shift, from traditional recruitment to social recruiting and that he has shown 3 blue chip corporations how to reduce their cost-to-hire by £26 million! A startling fact to many in the audience.
Bill made some interesting points…
- Using social media networks to source is easy but to attract and convert to a hire is not so easy.
- Use the “law of the pub” when communicating on social channels i.e. do not broadcast instead become known as the “go to guy”
- Get organised by using social applications like Tweetdeck, Bullhorn Reach‘s radar and word search for conversations to engage in, listen to and add value to.
- If you’re attracting people to your website make sure that your application process is simple and optimised for mobile!
- Job seekers search by location and skills not by job title and industry sector.
- LinkedIn is a notice board and a profile must have location, skills and a professional headline so use them when searching for candidates.
- Don’t forget to use YouTube.
So how does Bill suggest you should use Facebook to recruit?
- Recruiting on Facebook is based on “interest” targeting as 1/3rd of people list their business interests.
- Use Facebook pay-per-click advertising and the smaller the target audience the more effective it will be
- Lead them to your own engaging Facebook page and you can reduce your pay-per-click spend by 75%
- Take them to an outside website and you’ll lose 60% of them on the way!
Personally, I have used Facebook to attract and hire staff and found it very useful. In the same way that you find an applicant via LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube etc it is, as Bill says, about how you then engage with them that will make all the difference.
It will be interesting to see how internal and agent recruiters address this Facebook job seeker vs LinkedIn recruiter disconnect going forward.
Have you used Facebook to recruit? Have you got any tips you can share below in the comments? How do you feel about being approached on Facebook about a role? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Interesting challenge for the recruiter. I think that given less than 100% of the working population is either a job seeker or non-job seeker the challenge is the blend you choose. This is going to be the LI/FB martini. What is the correct amount of vermouth(job seeker) to gin (non job seeker)??
Market segmentation, skill set and profile of candidate all come to play don’t they?
Targeting the job seeker makes a lot of sense for all recruiters but FB is predominantly going to be a tool to engage the proactive “time to change” brigade. The majority of the clients I work with are in professional mid-senior recruitment where a very dry gin is likely to be the recipe for success.
Ultimately flexibility in the recruiter is required from campaign to campaign.
Thanks for your great comments Jeremy!