Money

Use Facebook for Recruiting

By Susan M. Heathfield, About.com GuideJune 21, 2012

Follow me on:

Once the online place where students hung out and exchanged pictures and advice with their friends, Facebook has morphed into a resource for families and friends of all ages to share pictures, maintain contact, and keep up with the comings and goings of business associates.

Facebook offers opportunities for businesses to advertise and increase friendships and good will with customers. (Wonder what 10,000 Facebook "likes" are worth in terms of attracting customers?) For employers, you can use Facebook to recruit employees in numerous and increasingly effective ways, too.

Use Facebook to Recruit Employees

These are a few ideas about recruiting employees using Facebook. I am sure there are more and I will share them as I learn them. Have a method you use? Willing to share? Post a comment.

Recruit new employees using the reach and the passion of your current employees. If multiple current employees send out job postings with links to your recruiting website or your company's Facebook fan page, your job openings reach a wide audience.

You can send messages about job openings to fans of your company fan page. At the top of your page, you can use the "build audience" function to promote your jobs and page. You can also promote individual posts for a fee.

You can post job openings on the fan page, just like you'd post any other message, when job openings occur in your company.

New Facebook applications for recruiting appear regularly, and I find it difficult to keep up with them, but you can use an application to add a tab called "Jobs" to your Facebook page. For example, Linkup.com, a job search engine that searches company websites for openings for job searchers, provides a Current Jobs at Our Company application that is entirely automated. When a company adds, removes, or edits the jobs on their company's website, their Facebook page is automatically updated without any additional work from the employer.

Work for Us is a Facebook application that you can use to create a customized job board on your Facebook page. Candidates can submit resumes through the app or be redirected to a company's career website. Recruiters can also create custom Facebook ad campaigns to target specific segments of candidates based on attributes like education, interests, and location.

Are you using Facebook to recruit employees? Give it a try and share your results.

More About Recruiting

_{Image Copyright istockphoto / Sean Locke}