How to advertise a job with Facebook

With so many million of users worldwide Facebook has become the de facto social media platform and, as a consequence, offers recruiters recruitment opportunities.

In this article we look at one very simple and straightforward way for you to ‘advertise’ your job vacancies on Facebook.

Understanding Facebook for recruitment

Facebook is simply a platform on which you share information with your “friends”. You share news with your friends, photos, videos, what you’re reading, or you play games, do quizzes or lots of other things. For our purposes, however, it is this network of friends that offers you the recruiter a truly valuable sourcing channel. It is simply a case of exploiting this network of friends to your recruitment advantage.

Tell your Facebook friends you are hiring

The simplest way of using Facebook to recruit is simply to tell your Facebook friends that you are hiring or that your company is looking for somebody. It’s as simple as that. Your friends may be looking for a job or may know somebody looking for a job and then will be able to use this information. And telling your friends on Facebook about a job really couldn’t be simpler. Simply, go to your Facebook wall and post an update.

Fig 1: Posting a job to your Wall on Facebook

“mycompany is looking for a Sales Manager in Online Media in London £40K. If you know anybody who may be interested in the role to please let them know. You can find the full job description and application details here: http://www.mycompany.com/job-details-URL”

You don’t have to post a whole job description in the wall post. This is meant to be an alert to your friends who might be looking for a job or who might know someone who is looking for a job. Keep the post short and sweet. Get the most important information into the wall post and interested parties will know exactly what it is about and what to do.

You’ll also notice that we have included a URL or web address in the post. Ideally, you’ll want to drive interested Facebook friends to a page where they can find out more about the job and, hopefully, apply for it. Facebook allows you to post web URLs into your wall posts but if you have a very long URL, it might be worth using a URL shortener like http://www.bit.ly.

All your Facebook friends will get an alert via their news feed of your wall post. They’ll know you or your company is hiring. And, if you are lucky, they might alert their friends about it too. It couldn’t be simpler.

Fig 2: Your wall post appears in your news feed

Your staff have Facebook friends too!

That may be as far as it goes for you and Facebook, but don’t forget that there are lots of people in your workplace who will have Facebook accounts and have many hundreds of Facebook friends too. Ask them to post an update about the job vacancy on their walls too. By doing so you will utilise a wider social network to get your job out to more and more people. The more people you reach the better.

Of course, there are many more ways you can use Facebook to recruit but there are few as straightforward as simply using Facebook to do what Facebook does best: keep people informed about you. And in spite of appearances, this is a very traditional way of recruiting. In the olden days people nearly always used to find jobs through friends. In these new days people can still find jobs through friends, but now you can add your Facebook friends too.

Next steps? Check out these other guides and articles:

• An Introduction to LinkedIn for recruitment
• An Introduction to Social Media Recruitment
• Creating a Social Media Strategy for Recruitment
• How to advertise a job with Facebook