Recruiting Through Facebook Dos and Donts
Facebook crossed the billion active user marks, as on December 2012, creating one of the largest pools of potential candidates. This makes Facebook an essential component of any company’s social recruitment strategy.
As per a Nielsen report, users spend approximately 23% of their time spent online, on Facebook. However before using Facebook as a recruiting tool, companies need to have clarity on
• Whom do you want to recruit and time frame for recruitment
• What kind of person will be a good fit with the organisation's culture
• Social connections of the potential candidates
• What kind of messaging would you like to give them
Devising an effective strategy for a social recruiting process through Facebook essentially involves ticking out the Do’s and Don’ts outlined below
The Do’s
• Do Create an Engaging Facebook Page for your company
Facebook currently features over 9 million company pages with some even maintaining multiple pages to communicate different products categories or even for different geographies.
Any company worth its name has a Facebook page featuring job opportunities available to tap into the latent talent pool available on Facebook. However, simply having a Facebook page for your company is not enough, you need to ensure that the content is engaging and regularly updated. Some tips for this include:
Company Facebook page
• Communicate effectively regarding your products and services
• Share your company culture along with employee speak on the aspects of the job they like
• Provide links to your career page on the company website on your Facebook page.
• Actively seek referral through your Company facebook page
• Post job opportunities and provide details on the recruitment process and action steps
• Do Build Traffic for your website
With a billion active users on Facebook, there is no dearth of numbers. However the challenge lies in attracting them to your site as a majority of them will not know about you.
Being active on Facebook means actively seeking out people you would like to engage over a sustained period of time to build a loyal fan base.
Facebook users who will see your job postings can basically be categorized into 5 kinds and your messaging needs to be both dynamic and customized to pull and engage traffic from each of these categories:
• Active job seekers who view your Facebook page to look at the job openings
• Individuals who visit your page seeking information and happen to visit the job opening section as well
• Employees and their network who visit your Facebook page as they have heard about your company from employees
• Individuals responding to your Facebook ads
• Individuals who receive the job posting in their timeline because someone in their network shared it
Making your Facebook recruiting efforts successful depends on paying attention to each category.
The Don’ts for Facebook recruiting are rooted more in the privacy and confidentiality domain:
• Don’t post anything on your Facebook page which can be the source of controversy as things go viral very fast on social media and can cause irreparable damage to your employer brand
• Don’t ignore the privacy issues with Facebook and ensure that no confidential information is accessible through your Facebook page
• Don’t update or post openings too frequently as that could turn away good candidates from your page
• Don’t miss out on checking on candidates on other social networks. A candidate’s Facebook page provides only limited information regarding working life and qualifications and can be a cause for potential disaster if it is the only information considered before hiring.
• Resume submitted on a job site as well as the candidate’s linked in profile can also provide a good deal of information on the candidate’s experience as well as official connections.
Facebook is a virtual globe in itself and hence keeping in mind the Do’s and Don’ts will help you connect and engage with a never ending source of talent.
It is for this reason that facebook has found acceptance in all areas of recruitment especially in employee referral programs. With employee referral tools now being integrated with facebook and other social media platforms; social recruiting is certainly the way to go.
