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Best Practices and Ideas From the World’s Leading Companies

Facebook Recruitment

and Employer Branding

A White Paper by CKR Interactive and Work4 Labs

January 2013

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TABLE OF CONTENT

Executive Summary .................................................................................................................................................................3

The Rise of Social Media ........................................................................................................................................................4

Social Recruiting and the Facebook Phenomenon .......................................................................................................5

The 8 Building Blocks of Social Recruitment Success .................................................................................................6

Social Career Site......................................................................................................................................................................7

Employer Branding ................................................................................................................................................................11

Talent Communities ..............................................................................................................................................................15

Social Job Distribution .........................................................................................................................................................16

Recruitment Ads .....................................................................................................................................................................17

Employee Referrals ................................................................................................................................................................19

Mobile Site ............................................................................................................................................................................... 20

ATS Integration .......................................................................................................................................................................21

About The Authors ............................................................................................................................................................... 23

References ............................................................................................................................................................................... 25

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With the recent release of the Social Jobs Partnership’s Social Jobs App, there has never been a more critical time for your company to establish a social recruiting presence.

The following white paper has been created with employers looking to launch social recruitment efforts, or to optimize these efforts, in mind. The goal is to shed light on emerging trends, best practices, and provide tips and tactics to ensure your success in the social recruiting realm on Facebook.

At CKR Interactive and Work4 Labs, we’ve collectively had the opportunity to work with thousands of companies that have successfully implemented social recruiting strategies. This list includes more than 30 Fortune 500 companies, such as recruiting visionaries like Intel, VMware, Gap, L’Oreal, and UPS. Based on our work, we’ve identified eight common building blocks that we believe led to these companies‘ success. These building blocks, detailed throughout this white paper, illustrate what components can and should be used to augment any comprehensive social strategy.

Think of the social career site as part of the user’s overall Facebook experience. As with any company’s Facebook page, employer branding becomes a vital component of the process of building a social career site and of engaging potential employees. This white paper will walk you through best practices to ensure your success in strengthening your employer brand while connecting and engaging with top talent on Facebook.

Facebook is an astoundingly powerful tool that will help you reach thousands of qualified candidates, and by including each of these eight components in your own recruiting strategy, you too can harness that power.

Executive Summary

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We live in an era when friendships are quantified in numbers of “likes” and brand engagement is measured in “shares,” when virtual interaction pulls together networks of thousands who might never have met or bothered to stay in touch via traditional methods, when relationships – both personal and professional – are considered tentative until solidified through an online friend request. For the vast majority of us, social media has become an institution, a tool, a means of enjoyment, and, more recently, a place for companies to expand their reach and interact with the outside world. As illustrated in the chart below, nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of respondents to a recent Accenture survey considered social media an “extremely important” or “very important” channel through which to interact with customers, prospects, talent, partners, and other stakeholders. i

With more professionals flocking to social networks in search of jobs and HR departments relying on social profiles to recruit new talent, the effective use of social recruiting tools has become increasingly important. In fact, 92 percent of recruiters already use social media for recruiting purposes.ii Of course, with all of the various communication tools, from tweets to pins to +1s and more, the sheer noise can be deafening. This leads us to ask the critical question: How can my company make the largest impact and achieve the highest return on investment with both social recruiting and employer branding?

The Rise of Social Media

Recent Accenture Social Media Survey

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When it comes to social media platforms, there is a clear gold standard. Launched in 2004 and already at 1 billion active users, Facebook is the number one visited social media site on the Internet. In fact, it frequently competes with Google as the most visited website.iii Facebook gains 250,000 members each week, and its users are globally and demographically diverse.iv The average user has 229 friendsv who are connected to 80 community pages, groups, or eventsvi .

Facebook is used all over the world, with more than 70 percent of the social media site’s users located outside of the United Statesvii.

Although Facebook was originally targeted at a younger generation, the social media network is heavily used by the older generation as well. There are currently 28 million Americans over the age of 45 who are avid Facebook usersviii.

All of this information is acutely relevant to the average employer seeking to increase its network of future recruits. The workforce of tomorrow will be made up of a generation that has never known a world without Facebook. According to a study by UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and the YEC, by 2014, 36 percent of US workforce will be comprised of Millenials. By 2020, Millennials will comprise 46 percent of the US workforce. ixFor companies, this means that it is time to seriously consider the development of a Facebook brand and a Facebook recruiting strategy. The decision makers of tomorrow are the children who grow up with your brand today.

Besides being the largest, most diverse social network, Facebook is also one of the best suited for reaching passive candidates. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 16 percent of the talent pool is actively seeking a jobx, leaving 84 percent of the US population untapped by employers. Most likely, members of this passive talent pool will not be frequent participants in social networks meant for job seekers and professional connections, such as LinkedIn. However, Facebook is a social tool that this population already uses on a regular basis; therefore, it is one of the primary social media tools to reach out to this pool of passive job seekers.

Social Recruiting and the Facebook Phenomenon

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At CKR Interactive and Work4 Labs, we’ve collectively had the opportunity to work with thousands of companies that have successfully implemented social recruiting strategies. This list includes more than 30 Fortune 500 companies, including recruiting visionaries like Intel, Accenture, VMware, Gap, L’Oreal, and UPS. Based on our work, we’ve identified eight common building blocks that we believe led to these companies’ success.

Once you commit to building a Social Career Site on Facebook, employer branding becomes a vital component of the process of engaging potential employees. With your branding in place, you can then magnify its reach and target specific, desired audiences using Talent Communities, Social Job Distribution, Recruitment Ads, and Employee Referrals. Finally, you must make sure that your efforts are integrated into your existing processes and overarching recruiting strategy. In practice, this means using Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and Mobile, which grant easy access to both you and the applicant alike.

The 8 Building Blocks of Social Recruitment Success

The 8 Components to Social Recruiting Success

2.  Employer  Branding  

3.  Talent  Communi7es  

7.  Mobile  Site  

5.  Recruitment  Ads  6.  Employee  Referrals  

4.  Social  Job  Distribu7on  

8.  ATS  Integra7on  

1. Social Career Site

   

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Social Career Site

The Social Career Site is an organization’s foundational app experience on Facebook, and is a good starting point for your foray into Facebook recruiting: it serves the three-pronged purpose of being a solid point-of-contact for potential hires, increasing brand engagement with the community, and providing insights into the company’s culture and brand. When building a Social Career Site on Facebook, your ultimate goal is to use a solution that is scalable and easy to integrate with your existing recruiting technology. This is important as the scope and scale of your social recruiting solution will likely broaden as your needs and comfort with social recruiting increase.

There are two ways to implement your Social Career Site on Facebook:

1. Create a dedicated Social Careers Facebook Page.

2. Add a tab or a Facebook Recruiting App to your corporate Facebook Page that redirects candidates to a section of your corporate Facebook Page that is dedicated to career information and open jobs.

You can decide which option will be the most effective for you based on the size and geographical footprint of your company, as well as your company’s level of ambition.

Companies with limited resources or that are just starting out with Facebook recruiting may opt to simply install a Facebook Recruiting App like Work for Us on their Facebook Page. This app shows up as a small tile below your cover photo, and potential job applicants who click on it will be directed to a new tab that includes your company’s dedicated Facebook Career Site. From there, they can learn about your employer brand and browse and apply for jobs. This is a great strategy for companies with limited resources dedicated to social media management, as it does not require them to build, promote, and maintain a separate Facebook Page. Hard Rock Café is a great example of such a company. The screenshot provided here is of their General Facebook Page with an arrow pointing at their Careers “Tab”.

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Companies with dedicated resources to content and community management (such as social media interns, recruitment staff with time dedicated to social media management and/or agencies hired to help provide community management), may consider a second option: In addition to creating a corporate Facebook Page, they can create a separate Social Careers Facebook Page specifically dedicated to promoting their employer brand and driving applicants. This page will have its own fan base and “likes”.

For a good example of how social recruiting can grow with a company’s needs, look to Intel, which began its Facebook recruiting efforts in 2010 with a single basic Social Careers Facebook Page for its operations in Israel.

Today, Intel has expanded its Facebook recruiting strategy to include Social Careers Facebook Pages in 11 countries, complete with unique branding, mobile functionality, and full ATS integrations in each country.

Using the Work for Us application, Intel has automated the job posting process and made it easy for applicants to apply directly for jobs through their company Social Careers Facebook Pages worldwide.

Many companies begin their Facebook recruiting strategy like Intel, with just a single page, tab, or app, only to build and grow their strategy to a more sophisticated or even international scale.

What About Global? International Considerations

With nearly 84 percent of Facebook’s traffic coming from sources outside of the Unites Statesxi, global brands need to think through how to best present themselves to candidates wherever in the world they might be. Luckily, Facebook has thought about this need as well and introduced the concept of Global Pages.

Global Pages allow companies to tailor their Facebook recruiting presence to reflect the country-specific aspects of their company and produce the best candidate experience. This way, you do not have to worry about speaking the wrong language, forcing candidates to wade through pages and pages of irrelevant or foreign jobs, or sending candidates through application processes that are only available in specific countries.

Each Global Page is an opportunity to geo-target a different audience, from cover photos that celebrate country-specific attributes to status updates that resonate with a specific local audience, to an About tab that reflects the unique company culture in each specific country, there is much that you can do to take your Pages international.

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Structure

When you go Global, your original Social Career Site remains intact. It becomes, in effect, the parent page, to which each of your global child pages refers. These child pages are customizable to reflect your company’s strategy in each particular country.

One particularly useful feature of Global Pages is “like” aggregation. All of your company’s fans, no matter where they come from or which child page they see, will be shown the total number of your company’s “likes” as if they were looking at the parent page. Therefore, if you are a company with 1,000 fans accessing your child page in America, 1,000 fans accessing your child page in France, and 1,000 fans accessing your child page in Spain, all of your pages will say that you have 3,000 fans. In other words, you do not need to start building your fan base from scratch every time you launch a new international child Page.

Using the parent/child structure also allows companies to simplify their strategy through geo-targeting and URL redirection. When a candidate clicks on a link on the parent page, Facebook detects the candidate’s geographical location and automatically redirects him or her to the appropriate country page. This means that you can post a link once and rest assured that candidates in Germany will be taken to the German version of the site, while candidates in the United States will be shown information pertaining to them.

For a successful example of a Global Page roll-out, we can look to PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC). PwC, a professional services firm with offices in 158 countries had already established a Facebook brand page with information about the company itself – but after working with Work4 Labs, PwC established a series of Social Career Sites that deal specifically with recruiting talent for those international offices.

To the interested candidate, each Social Career Site represents a separate entity; to the company, each career site represents an offshoot of the main career page. In effect, the Global Social Career Site becomes the national face of an international brand, and the pages’ administrators become the curators of relevant content – content that must ultimately reflect the overall employer branding message.

How are global pages structured?

Parent / Global Page

Child Page Child Page

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Currently, Global Pages only segment the population to the country level. But if you’re looking to get even more targeted, don’t despair: you can install apps on various parent and child Social Careers Facebook Pages to further segment the population and target specific demographics. This option is available to all companies, not just those using Global Pages. If you want to target specific audiences, all you need to do is to add an app that targets your desired demographic. We’ve provided an example from PwC Careers in the UK that does exactly that for Students: a student-focused app within the country-specific Social Careers Facebook Page.

Language

Global Pages allow multi-lingual moderation, so it is easy to roll out multi-lingual support when your company is ready. That said, Global Pages do not translate themselves. In other words, if you are not yet ready to tackle translation you would be best served with setting up child Social Career Facebook Pages only in countries where the population speak the same language as the population you are targeting on your parent Page. This also pertains to job descriptions; you’ll want to make sure that those are posted in the appropriate language. This is especially important if you are syncing between a global ATS and your local Social Career Facebook Pages.

Analytics

Global Pages give your company the opportunity to segment your analytics by each child page, by region or on an aggregate basis. This makes it easy to get a global view of your social recruiting performance. If you notice that your traffic and engagement remain stagnant in certain countries but are robust in others, you can make decisions about how to best optimize your efforts in those underperforming regions. Keeping a close eye on the effectiveness of each country’s page will help you get the greatest ROI on your Facebook recruiting efforts.

Keep in mind that not every company will benefit from adopting Global Pages and creating country specific Social Career Facebook Pages. Take stock of your resources and decide whether you will be better served managing multiple pages in multiple languages or simply relying on a single Facebook Page in your main geography. Keep in mind that you can always expand the scope of your efforts as your brand grows and your recruiting needs follow suit. If and when you’re ready to go “global,” Facebook will support your company’s many faces while ultimately helping you promote a unified global brand.

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First impressions go a long way, and thus, a great emphasis should be made on employer branding in the social realm. In fact, 83 percent of global recruiting leaders say employer branding is a critical driver of their ability to hire top talent.xii Employers are seeing that job seekers utilize a variety of avenues to research and evaluate a company. Facebook is one of the top resources because it provides insight into the culture and transparency of an organization.

One of the first points of contact with your organization on Facebook for an individual will most likely be your Facebook Wall. Therefore, it is important to ensure that you have activity on your Wall with fresh content that is of interest. This is a great place to share information on what your organization is up to, highlight your employees, what it’s like to work at your organization, news coverage of your organization, and more.

An optimal way for employers to provide this insight is to maintain a Facebook page, either as a separate careers page meant to communicate with active and passive job seekers or one that is integrated with a corporate page that communicates on behalf of the company and/or industry as a whole. These pages enable recruiters to communicate with talent and share career and company information with ease. In turn, these pages (if well maintained) become informational resource hubs, strengthening the employer’s brand and increasing new and return visits, interactions, and content sharing.

Facebook is a great recruitment and talent pipeline communications channel because it allows companies to combine powerful employer branding with highly customized candidate experiences. More specifically, CKR Interactive continues to see a steady increase of both new fans and ongoing engagement on our clients’ recruitment-based Facebook pages due to the use of the following best practices:

Vanity URLs

One of your first tasks when setting up a page on Facebook should be creating a custom or vanity URL that uses your organization’s name or a recognizable naming convention, such as “facebook.com/companyname” and “workfor.us/companyname.” The custom or vanity URL also gives your brand the opportunity to provide a consistent name across the social web as well as the real world. (For example, you can put your custom Facebook career site URL on your career fair handouts.) It is much easier for potential talent to search for and remember you by name than by typing a string of randomly generated letters and numbers.

Employer Branding

“We use multiple ways to engage with talented people online and in-person because we know people lead dynamic lives. When career searching, they are likely to use several avenues to research and evaluate a company. We want to be there when they are ready. Our use of social communities like Facebook is an example of how we stay connected with our talent communities and provide valuable information, stories and job opportunities.” - Price Smith, Social Recruiting Community Manager, VMware

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Page and App Imagery

With the implementation of Timeline, Facebook has increased the ability for organizations to highlight and market their employer brands in an impactful, visual way. Companies are able to upload a large cover photo as well as a smaller avatar/icon photo. Many individuals and organizations have gotten creative with these branding opportunities, making the two images tie together to tell a story. Here are some great examples of companies who have used these images to tell a compelling story:

Companies can take this creative approach even further by uploading custom apps with corresponding photos that tie into the design on the cover photo and avatar (see the UPS example shared here). Apps have replaced the “tabs” of the past. These apps can be anything from links to your other social media profiles, contests, and promotions, and even apps for job seekers that integrate with your overall recruiting solution. Your Timeline also allows users to find your location on a map and to view any photos you have uploaded (or those that others have uploaded in which they have tagged your company – if you’ve enabled those permissions).

To strengthen engagement and encourage return visits to your page, you should consider changing your cover photo or profile pictures on occasion in order to correlate with specific campaigns, efforts, successes, etc. For example, at CKR Interactive we use the space to share messages with our followers, such as wishing them a Happy New Year, while promoting our firm’s services and solutions.

About

You should ensure that your About section is complete with information that gives a detailed overview of your company. In this section, you are able to pitch why you are the employer of choice, as well as explain where prospective candidates can go for more information. Many page owners neglect this valuable real estate, which is often one of the first areas job seekers will look to learn more about your organization.

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Timeline

You can use Timeline to create a complete story of your organization. The information shared via your Facebook page doesn’t have to start on the date you first launched the page – Facebook allows page owners to add Timeline events and milestones that occurred in the past. Adding this information allows page visitors to scroll through your company’s history (this information also appears on the About section, so it’s quite important to keep it up to date). Potential employees and general fans alike can see the events that you consider important, and that helps paint the picture of your company’s history and culture.

Images and Video Content

When it comes to engaging your fan base, you will want to focus on sharing material that includes images and videos. It has been stated by many sources that statuses containing photos or videos increase engagement by 120 percent and 180 percent respectively.xiii These media are also given more weight by Facebook’s algorithm, which means that they have a greater chance of being seen by your network than general text statuses. At the very least, consider adding branded image templates to your text updates to increase their chances of being seen as this gives you another avenue to visually strengthen your brand.

You can manually share your statuses and content, but you may also want to consider some form of automating your status updates, since it will save you both time and resources. You should also take into consideration what your network sees in its newsfeed, as many people will see the information you share through their feed and not necessarily via a visit to your page itself. As Facebook crops what is shared on status feeds, you need to consider how your templates are laid out. There are a variety of helpful cheat sheets online to help you implement these campaigns, such as the one by Lunametrics.

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Apps

As mentioned earlier, the use of apps on Facebook can help you manage your Social Career Site on this network. There are a variety of solutions available that will enable you to extend the reach of your employer brand to your prospective job candidates through Facebook. Work4 Lab’s “Work for Us” is a great example of a solution that provides multiple opportunities for employers to align their social media footprint with their overall employer branding strategy.

Employers utilizing “Work for Us” have the opportunity to create banners with graphics and embedded hyperlinks to showcase all aspects of their brand. They can use custom URLs to make their Facebook career sites easy to find, remember, and share (such as workfor.us/Intel). Employers are also able to embed static videos on their page to tell their story in an engaging and easily digestible way. These static videos differ from the videos discussed in the section above because shared video statuses are meant to engage fans through their newsfeeds in real time; static videos are meant to remain on the employer branding page and consistently represent a brand and its message.

You’ll want to customize banners and videos that show the type of job you are listing. For example, SAP targets specific job searches by displaying videos on its sidebar. All jobs that contain “business intelligence” or “BI” in the title will show SAP’s BI recruiting video and all jobs with “design” in the title will show their design recruiting video.

Remember

It is important to ensure the branding you use on Facebook relates to or mirrors your career site’s branding to ensure consistency across all your channels and media. While you may tailor your branding elements for promotional campaigns, remember that every piece of information and imagery you share is a reflection of your organization, and should fit into the overall branding mix.

Intel utilizes a separate careers Facebook Page, as well as a social career site app on its corporate Facebook Page, to ensure it reaches its target audience on Facebook.

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A talent community is an organic network of current, past, and future employees of a company who actively engage, share, and collaborate. This community gets together to solve problems, discuss the company culture, and take part in the social recruitment process.

Talent communities take work to cultivate, but can be done if you are willing to maintain your Facebook page, provide avenues and opportunities for potential applicants to engage with you, and take part in robust, honest two-way communication with your community.

You can leverage your Facebook page as a forum for your Talent Community by posting relevant links, asking questions, and actively responding to all who post or comment on your Timeline. You can also add a link to your page that redirects the potential candidate to your blog or company’s web forum. A survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) recently revealed that once a company begins to use Facebook, its recruiters are able to cast a wide net and connect with more potential job seekers than other services because of the widespread use of Facebook.”xiv If you encourage your own employees to utilize the service, you will be able to increase the impact of your online presence even more.

There are three main benefits to building talent communities:

1. Talent Communities are good springboards to project your company’s brand values and corporate culture. Community engagement is thus a natural extension of talent communities, which gives you the opportunity to clearly and consistently demonstrate your company’s brand, message, and mission with every interaction.

2. 25 percent of people switch jobs every year; however, a study by The Alder Group and LinkedIn found that 83 percent of job seekers do not actively seek a job. With Facebook’s network of 1 billion people, implementing and maintaining a talent community can become an effective early-bird sourcing strategy.

3. Talent Communities are not simply about amassing a quantity of members. In order to reach and maintain a number of quality members, you’ll need to increase your own efforts to engage and interact. You’ll also want to make it easy and desirable for your current employees to take part. Job applicants are more likely to apply when they feel a connection to your company, and talent communities are one of the best ways to foster that feeling of connection.

Intel is a prime example of a company that has seen all of the above benefits of its talent community. Intel has incorporated features such as a blog with career and application advice right on the Social Career Site. Not only can candidates register to be included in the talent pool, but they’ll also hear from the top leadership and learn more about becoming part of Intel.

Talent Communities

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While the first steps to developing a fully functional and scalable Facebook Social Career Site and presenting your employer brand includes creating a viable Talent Community, this alone is not enough to assure Facebook recruiting success. You also need to drive targeted traffic to your Facebook page. As in pre-Facebook world, you can do this in two ways: generate organic traffic, and use paid advertising (We’ll discuss paid advertising in the next section).

You may have built an amazing employer brand page, but at the end of the day, it won’t matter if no one sees it. Organic traffic is the holy grail of Facebook recruiting. Luckily, Facebook’s viral nature and culture of community sharing can help you generate this free traffic. All you have to do is make it easy for your employees, recruiters, hiring managers, and fans to share and distribute jobs to their social networks, using the built-in “like” and “share” buttons.

Facebook is one of the most cost-effective ways to get your jobs in front of thousands of potential candidates. In fact, if this process is automated it becomes incredibly powerful. Take a look at the numbers: The average social media user has 245 Facebook friends, 60 LinkedIn connections, 27 Twitter followers, and shares 1 job posting on each network per week. Assuming that 16 percent of Facebook shares and 100 percent of LinkedIn and Twitter shares respectively are viewed by that person’s connections, the job post will be seen by about 124 people per week. That means that a single share by a Facebook user can result in 6,400 free job listings in one year alone.xv

For example, when Work4 Labs rolled out automatic job distribution to just 25 of its employees, organic traffic to their Facebook Social Career Sites increased by 25 percent.

Once you’ve begun pushing your brand into the world through social sharing, you’ll begin to see organic pull in return. The more you update and maintain an active Facebook page, the easier it is to maximize your search engine optimization (SEO). Because some Facebook content makes it into organic search results (i.e. Google search), you have a greater opportunity to stand out simply by consistently sharing relevant content. Staying at the top of the search results should be your priority because job seekers are heavily utilizing search engines in their job search today.xvi

Social Job Distribution

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While getting organic distribution for your job listings on Facebook is key, using paid adverting is another great way to drive traffic to your page, and, luckily, Facebook ads aren’t just good for marketers. They also represent a tremendous opportunity in the field of recruitment because they allow you to target and attract candidates who are unreachable through traditional channels. The main reason is that Facebook has achieved an unprecedented level of integration into the lives of its users. 584 million people log into Facebook and spend 10.5 billion collective minutes on the site each day.xvii What does this mean for recruiters? Facebook is where you’ll likely find your candidates.

Facebook also offers the ability to run paid advertising with deep targeting functionality so that employers can get straight to their prime candidates. Targeting can be done to focus on students and/or graduates of specific schools, employees at specific companies, network users with specific interests, or members of specific organizations. They can also target ads based on education level, age, gender, and more.

Recruitment Ads

Facebook ads are also relatively low in cost, since they operate on a pay-per-click basis. As we mentioned before, 84 percent of the US population is not actively searching for a job. Only those who are truly motivated or inspired by your listing will click to find out more, so you’ll be assured a much better return on investment than simply posting your ads to a regular search engine for a passive audience or wasting money on print ads that cannot provide the precise targeting of Facebook. At this point, nearly 42 percent of active recruiters have used Facebook ads to promote their companies, with 88 percent of those using Facebook to decrease their spending on print advertising, according to a survey of employers conducted by NACE.xviii

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There is a multitude of Facebook advertising possibilities to be considered. Here are a few examples:

• Job-Specific Facebook ads: These should be used to target specific candidate groups with the purpose of converting them into applicants. Many companies have begun to successfully use targeted ads in order to strengthen their social recruiting initiatives. For example, Amazon targeted RV-owners for seasonal warehouse jobs in the Midwest, and Oracle used targeted ads to increase participation in its career fairs in the United States and Ireland. In France, L’Oreal recruited students from business schools for its graduate internship, which helped generate 153 pre-qualified applicants, leading to a faster and more efficient recruitment process. Uniqlo has used Facebook ads to recruit the vast majority of its employees for their new stores in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago.

• Sponsored Stories: This paid unit of advertising capitalizes on the idea that people are more likely to trust the recommendations of a friend than a stranger. According to Facebook sources, a Sponsored Story is a message coming from friends about a specific thing such as an event or a call to action, which appears in Facebook newsfeed with a small sponsored tag next to the date.

Sponsored Stories allow brands to be prominently displayed on Facebook newsfeeds via mobile devices and desktops, thus increasing their visibility and network. This type of advertising boasts authenticity and a 46.5 percent average click-through rate. Sponsored Stories can be an efficient way to expand an organization’s fan base and grow a talent community over the medium-to-long term.

• Promoted Posts: If you choose to promote a post, you pay to get a specific post increased visibility among your fans. Facebook allows you to promote any type of content including photos, videos, status updates or links. This specific type of Facebook advertising allows you to reach more fans via their newsfeed. Promoted posts increase engagement through compelling and meaningful content.

Due to Facebook’s current algorithm, when you post to your page, it usually reaches only about 16 percent of your fans/followers. Promoting specific posts allows you to greatly expand their exposure and reach by ensuring that the specific content gets included in your fans’ newsfeeds, often enabling you to reconnect to dormant fans. The promoted posts are marked as sponsored in the newsfeed and can only run up to 3 days.

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Not only can Sponsored Stories and Promoted Posts leverage the power of recommendations, they can also fuel employee referrals.

Recruiting is an inherently social experience, and with the advent of social media, your recruiting efforts can effectively expand beyond the function of the HR department. Your employees are already connected to a vast network of potentially qualified candidates, and all it takes to get in touch with those candidates is a status update and the click of a button. Tapping into your employees’ pool of talent transforms your entire workforce into recruiters.

Why seek employee referrals through Facebook? Because referred candidates are number one in volume, quality, speed, and retention.xix

Facebook is particularly advantageous for implementing Employee Referral Programs due to its wide reach and engagement. The quality of referral applicants from Facebook is extremely high due to your employees’ dual familiarity of the company work culture and the fit of potential hires.

If your company culture fosters trust and community, your employees will be more likely to recommend your open jobs to their friends. And if your employees are in touch with that company culture, then they’ll be more likely to recommend others whose values align with it.

Employee Referrals

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Mobile Site

When it comes to recruiting, you know how important first impressions can be. If a user comes to your careers site for information about a job and finds the site hard to navigate, the job description hard to access, or the application process too convoluted, he or she will be more likely to abandon the process.

Until recently, most job recruiting sites were not mobile-friendly, which meant that the 20 percent of job searches in the United States begun on mobile devices had to be put on hold until the user could access a computer. Because of the hassle – and, let’s face it, the lack of instant gratification – many of those searches ended there. However, because mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are beginning to overtake the market for personal computers (54 percent of us now own some sort of mobile device!xx), employers and recruiters realize the need to generate mobile sites designed specifically for job applications and searching.

Facebook is one of the top two most visited mobile sites in existence. As of March 2012, Facebook had 78 million monthly mobile users who spent 7.3 hours each on either the mobile app or browser, according to comScore.xxi Even before the company revamped its mobile app, people were more than willing to access the site via their smartphones. Now, with an enhanced user experience and the recently released “share” option, the Facebook app is a constant companion and an even more effective way for users to share your open jobs.

With more and more people turning to their smartphones and tablets and Facebook making it easier to connect with companies, it makes sense that you put a mobile Facebook recruiting strategy in place.

Specifically, that means it is very important for candidates to have a Facebook experience that is consistent with the one they’d have on their desktops. Mobile job experiences must allow for seamless access and a relevant job search. There are currently solutions available to streamline this process, and often it is as simple as installing an app that allows for one-click application.

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Once you have begun to use your Facebook page to attract and gain candidates, you’ll need a way to keep track of the candidates who apply. You’ll also want to know if your efforts are achieving results – and, if not, you’ll want to be able to understand the reasons so that you can make the necessary changes to your strategy.

Enter the Applicant Tracking System (ATS). These systems have traditionally been used at the larger-enterprise level in concert with HRIS suites, but the ATS is making its way into small- and medium-sized enterprises as an important solution for managing social recruiting efforts.

ATS integration assimilates your Facebook recruiting activities into your existing workflows, which enables the automatic synchronization of new jobs. When candidates apply through your Facebook page, their details are sent straight to your ATS.

A one-click apply feature helps focus on applicant conversion by reducing the number of redirections in the process of applying, and also captures as much information as possible directly within the Facebook environment. Just as employing a mobile strategy improves your “first impression” by giving job seekers a unified, easy-to-use, instantly gratifying application experience, one-click apply increases the likelihood that qualified applicants will follow through with their applications. You’ll therefore increase your ROI by decreasing the amount of work that you and your potential hire has to do.

Ultimately, you want to make this experience as quick, painless, and – dare we say – enjoyable for both you and the candidate as possible. The fewer barriers you place between yourself and the job seeker, the better the experience will be for you both.

TheLadders uses ATS Integration to fully optimize their services.

ATS Integration

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IN CONCLUSION

Facebook continues to prove itself to be an important tool to keep in your recruitment marketing toolbox. It provides an excellent resource for starting and maintaining communication with prospective candidates, draws qualified traffic to your career site, provides transparency to talent who is looking to research your company before applying, encourages employee referrals, and allows you and your company to entice the best candidates from a largely untapped talent pool to become yet another a part of what makes your company great.

No, it’s not all free. Social recruiting requires that you invest some resources. However, that investment is well worth the cost. We’ve seen a direct correlation between the amount of content shared and the amount of fan engagement created. The more content shared, and the more relevant it is to the audience, the higher the increase in fans and lower the likelihood that a fan will “unlike” you. This is also important, as the more engagement (comments, shares and likes) your content gets, the higher up that content appears in your network’s content stream.

Don’t fret if you don’t have the resources to shoulder the responsibilities of a Facebook recruiting strategy on your own. There are professionals and organizations that can be a huge asset in content curation, content creation, content and community management, training/workshops, analysis and more.

The data is there to support using Facebook and other social channels for social recruiting, and the resources are there to get you started and support you in your search to increase the efficiency and efficacy of your recruiting and hiring campaigns. We have helped companies utilize Facebook to strengthen their employer brand and connect with top talent, and we have seen how impactful a little bit of time and effort invested in a Facebook page can truly be. So get out there and start – the talent is already there, waiting to fall in “like” with your company.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Skye Callan

Skye is the marketing director for CKR Interactive, where she specializes in lead generation and brand management. In particular, she focuses on all areas of search engine marketing (SEM) – paid advertising (PPC, PPA, CPM) – search engine optimization (SEO) and social media/online brand management. She is driven to help clients get the exposure needed to attract top talent, while effectively managing their brand online and standing out amongst the competition. She received her B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from University of California-Berkeley and an M.B.A. with specialization in Marketing from N.Y.I.T. She is an Inbound Marketing Professional and an active member of the American Marketing Association.

Kasey Sixt

Kasey Sixt has more than two decades of recruitment marketing and video production experience, including working with top global organizations such as Rogers & Associates Advertising, TMP Worldwide, JMG and reelPOWERED Productions. Today, Kasey is vice president of emerging media for CKR Interactive, where she helps organizations across the globe tell their corporate story through special events, social media, and online video.

Kasey is a sought-after speaker, sharing her insights on video and social media at major industry events, such as NAHCR, NACE, SHRM, SCAHCR, IMPA-HR, The Recruiting Conference and OnRec conferences. Her strong track record of award-winning work, includes the 2008 National Staffing Management Association Dansker Award (Best in Show, Employer Brand) for Invitrogen’s “I’ve got the Science in Me” campaign. The campaign also garnered 13 additional awards at the 2008 CEAs and 13 awards at the Hermes Creative Awards. Kasey holds a B.S. in Communications and TV/Film from Ball State University.

Stéphane Le Viet

Stephane is the CEO and co-founder of Work4 Labs. He oversees the company’s daily operations and is responsible for leading product development, technology and business strategy. Having co-founded two other tech businesses and taught at Sciences Po and the London School of Economics, Stéphane brings over ten years of startup experience and HR technology expertise to the company. Prior to Work4 Labs, Stéphane worked at McKinsey & Company in New York and at Hellman & Friedman, a leading private equity firm. Stéphane earned his M.A. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and his B.S./M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Ecole Polytechnique.

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About CKR Interactive

Founded in 2001, CKR Interactive is a recruitment marketing agency delivering comprehensive services to today’s employers. Focusing on interactive solutions, the firm’s areas of expertise also include research and planning, creative development and marketing communications. With offices throughout California, New York, Illinois and Ohio, and partner agencies in the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, China and India, the award-winning firm’s growing list of clients represents a range of industries, from healthcare/biopharm, energy/oil and high tech to government, finance/insurance and hospitality/food service. Follow us: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

About Work4 Labs

Work4 Labs develops Facebook’s #1 corporate recruiting solution, which enables tens of thousands of companies — including VMware, Gap, and L’Oreal — to hire qualified candidates across industries, geographies, and pay-grades. Our award-winning products help recruiters easily launch branded corporate career sites on Facebook and mobile devices, and drive traffic, job applications, and employee referrals from the network’s 1 billion users. Work4 Labs was founded in 2010, and is headquartered in San Francisco with an additional office in Paris. For more information, please visit work4labs.com and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

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REFERENCES

i Data based on survey of 200+ North American companies with revenues of $1 billion or more. Accenture, “Making Social Media Pay.” Accessed December 1, 2012.

http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/PDF/Accenture-Making-Social-Media-Pay.pdf

ii Jobvite 2012 Social Recruiting Survey, http://web.jobvite.com/2012-social-recruiting-survey.htmliii FaceBook, Accessed October 8, 2012. www.facebook.comiv Arthur Jue, Jackie Alcalde, and Mary Kassotakis, Social Media At Work, (John Wiley and Sons, 2009).v Keith Hampton, Lauren Sessions Goulet, Cameron Marlow, Lee Rainie; Why most Facebook users get more than they give- Pew Internet and American Life Project, February 2012 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/your-facebook-friends-have-more-friends-than-you/2012/02/03/gIQAuNUlmQ_story.html)vi Kendra Ramirez, “Kendra Ramirez; Social Media Strategy,” Smart Business, http://www.sbnonline.com/2011/08/kendra-ramirez-social-media-strategy/ (accessed October 8, 2012).vii Amit Misra, “Facebook Facts and Figures 2011: An Amazing Insight,” Daze Info, http://www.dazeinfo.com/2011/01/18/facebook-facts-figures-2011-an-amazing-insight/ (accessed October 8, 2012).viii “Facebook Statistics, Stats and Facts for 2011,” http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/facebook-statistics-stats-facts-2011/.ix Matt Miller, “Why You Should Be Hiring Millenials,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/mattmiller/2012/07/03/why-you-should-be-hiring-millennials-infographic/ (accessed October 8, 2012).x Bureau of U.S. Labor Statistics, also at Weedle http://www.weddles.com/recruiternews/issue.cfm?Newsletter=338

xi As of March 2012, there were 152.8 million active users in the US and 955 million active users total. http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/17/the-facebook-stats-game-brazil-has-the-highest-active-reach-bangkok-tops-the-list-of-cities/xii LinkedIn Talent Connect 2012 report, as cited in Forbes LinkedIn’s Newest Crusade: Fix That Employer Brand! http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2012/10/10/linkedins-newest-crusade-fix-that-employer-brand/

xiii fMC- Facebook for Marketing Conference 2012, based on internal Facebook studies and represent average results https://www.facebook.com/business/fmc/guides/bestpracticesxiv Use of Facebook in the Talent Acquisition Process, National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), November 2011xv The average social media user has: 245 Facebook friends, 60 LinkedIn connections and 27 Twitter followersxvi SimplyHired’s Today’s Job Seeker Report 2012, http://success.simplyhired.com/rs/simplyhired/images/TodaysJobSeekerReport_2012_US.pdf xvii Facebook Statistics on Digital Trends, Facebook now has 901 million monthly active users, 526 million daily users, http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/facebook-now-has-901-million-monthly-active-users-526-million-daily-users/ xviii Use of Facebook in the Talent Acquisition Process, National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), November 2011xix Ibid.xx Reconverse Mobile Survey Results, April 2012 http://reconverse.com/2012/04/16/mobile-survey-results-event-conclusion/xxi Heidi Cohen, “Social Media: Who Will Win the Battle for Mobile Research,” Heidi Cohen: Actionable Marketing Research, http://heidicohen.com/social-media-who-will-win-the-battle-for-mobile-research/ (accessed October 15, 2012).