provided by FACEBOOK RECRUITING BASICS: A Guide to 21st Century Employment Branding

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1 provided by FACEBOOK RECRUITING BASICS: A Guide to 21st Century Employment Branding

2 INTRODUCTION WHY USE FACEBOOK IN THE FIRST PLACE? JOHN SUMSER Principal Consultant HRxAnalysts 1 Mashable: Sept, com/2011/09/12/23-percent-online/ 2 Neilsen: Sept, com/documents/nielsen-social-media- Report_FINAL_ pdf 3 Pew Internet: March TechCrunch: Nov 19, Facebook: May aspx?newsareaid=22 6 ibid The essence of great recruiting is to fish where the fish are. As times change, the recruiting waters get overfished. This is what makes the profession so highly flexible. Over the course of a decade, the success of one technique creates the demand for the next. More than any other corporate function, recruiting involves adaptation to rapidly changing markets. Companies that shift their methods with the times thrive. Companies that don t, wither. In 2012, that means learning how to use social media as a part of your recruiting effort. In a few short years, the center of the Internet moved from static sites to the more vibrant and interactive universe of online networks. Job Boards give way to social media as users migrate to the new world. Here are a few stats that put the story in perspective: 23% of all hours spent online are spent on a social media site 1 80% of all Internet users are members of at least one social network 2 66% of all Americans use a social network 3 25% of all American internet traffic is on Facebook alone 4 With nearly 1 billion registered users, Facebook is the largest single social network by far. 5 It s where the fish are. Having a recruiting program that does not address the Facebook marketplace is like having fishing gear without ever going fishing. There is no other single marketplace in the world that gives you the ability to directly reach 526 Million daily users. 6 The real question is whether you want to reach anyone else. That s a different discussion. Share This Whitepaper HRxAnalysts: Facebook Recruiting Basics // 2

3 CONTENTS SPONSORSHIP FACEBOOK RECRUITING BASICS This work was produced under the sponsorship of Work4 Labs COPYRIGHT 2012 John Sumser All rights reserved No portion of this material may be reproduced without written permission, except a short excerpt in a review Send requests for permission to john@hrexaminer.com Copies may be purchased at hrxanalysts.com For bulk purchase or licensing please give HRxAnalysts a call at Start with a Clear Picture (Who are you recruiting?) Facebook is a Closed Ecosystem Facebook Recruiting has 3 Integrated Components Building your Facebook Page Posting your Jobs Building Traffic Employee Involvement: The Foundation Targeted Traffic Measuring your Effectiveness 12 Steps to Start Recruiting on Facebook Share This Whitepaper HRxAnalysts: Facebook Recruiting Basics // 3

4 START WITH A CLEAR PICTURE (WHO ARE YOU RECRUITING?) Using Facebook requires the development of several key skills and insights. Unlike traditional recruitment advertising (classified ads or job boards), recruiting on Facebook gives you extraordinary control over the kinds of people you reach. Effective recruiting always begins with a single question: Who do you want to recruit? Without a clear answer, your results will be muddled. In order to use Facebook as a recruiting tool, you need to have a good idea about: This will help you understand which of the daily Facebook users you want to reach. Historically, recruiters are accustomed to indiscriminately broadcasting jobs with no guarantee of candidate quality, quantity, or cost. Facebook s rich segmentation and performance-based distribution tools usher in a new and welcomed era of pure targeting. Who you re recruiting and when you need them (Workforce Plan) What kind of person who makes a good fit at your company (Culture) Who they know/how to find them (Networks) What you want them to know about your company (Messaging) How available they are as a class (Scarcity) Share This Whitepaper HRxAnalysts: Facebook Recruiting Basics // 4

5 FACEBOOK IS A CLOSED ECOSYSTEM Twentieth century employment branding and job advertising was a lottery style crapshoot. Big media companies, with large audiences, sold you the opportunity to possibly be seen by the right members of their readership. You bought the ad and took your chances. Some percentage of the readership responded. They were often not the ones you wanted. This dynamic is at the heart of a problem that most recruiting organizations face: a staggering percentage of job applicants are unqualified or ill matched. Without the ability to segment the audience, advertising was delivered to everyone. The responses were a representative sample. And a representative sample of a big media audience is guaranteed to be a bad fit for any specific job. Old methods produce low quality results, a low ratio of quality candidates to the total number of resumes. Facebook changes that. Rather than a buckshot approach to advertising, Facebook makes it possible to develop an audience built from the things you already know about your potential employees (see above). It works because Facebook is a closed system. In Facebook recruiting, you do everything inside of Facebook. Old methods produce low quality results, a low ratio of quality candidates to the total number of resumes. Facebook changes that. Share This Whitepaper HRxAnalysts: Facebook Recruiting Basics // 5

6 FACEBOOK RECRUITING HAS 3 INTEGRATED COMPONENTS In order to gain total control over your recruiting results, Facebook offers three interrelated functions: Facebook Pages (Company Page) Facebook Content/Interactions (including Job Listings) Facebook Targeted Ads (Traffic Development) Effective results depend on mastering and balancing these three elements. Company Page Job Listings Traffic Development Share This Whitepaper HRxAnalysts: Facebook Recruiting Basics // 6

7 BUILDING YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE On Facebook, employer branding and effective recruiting both begin with the development of your company page. Many large firms, from General Motors to Apple, have active company pages on Facebook. Smaller companies appear somewhat less likely to have one. If the company already has a page, it becomes a question of finding a balance between marketing outreach and recruiting. Sometimes, a separate careers page is the answer (although this is less desirable). Companies without a page are free to start with a clean slate. An even more complex question arises when the company has multiple divisions, branches and operating units. Some companies choose to have a page for each subordinate entity. This is clearly a matter of brand management and each company will have a different strategy. In general, though, the fewer pages the better. Consolidation of efforts and resources result in a more powerful presence at a lower cost. Once the page is designed and launched, keeping the content lively and interesting becomes a central concern. Potential employees are looking for ways to understand what it s like to work for the company. A changing flow of material featuring employees, videos and material about the culture will be essential to ensuring continued engagement. The more you can deliver material that lets employees personify the values of the company, the more sticky your content will be. The idea here is to use the page to engage visitors once they arrive. The ideal is to build a growing group of qualified potential employees (your audience) who keep coming back to your page to get the latest round of insight about the company. By encouraging visitors to like your page, you build credibility. The higher the number of likes, the more that new visitors will see the page as useful. Making it engaging (fun) is a large part of the equation. Liking a page is how people bookmark and come back to visit again. Having a steady stream of engaging content is what converts visitors to fans. It makes visitors think Hey, this Page is interesting. I d like to hear more from them from time to time in the future Unlike the static information on your Web Career Page, a Facebook offering demands constant updates of entertaining material. You must maintain a relationship with your audience - and it needs to be authentic. Share This Whitepaper HRxAnalysts: Facebook Recruiting Basics // 7

8 POSTING YOUR JOBS Take a moment to go and read five or six pieces of content you send out as job ads. It s okay, we ll wait. The odds are high that what you found was a dreary and dry hunk of text devoted to describing jobs and the requirements for obtaining them. There are few stretches of contemporary literature that are more arduous to cross. It is safe to say that the only thing that is more boring to read is the tax code. In the Facebook ecosystem, every bit of content is a part of the relationship you are building with your audience. Making your job postings friendly and relevant is a critical to successful recruiting both on and off Facebook. The easier job information is to consume, the more likely you are to reach applicants who are actually qualified for the job. Boring job postings simply recreate the quality problems of older recruiting technologies. Here are some things you can do to improve the way that your job postings help you build your audience: Develop repeated themes as a feature of the page: hard to find jobs; featured jobs; specific job categories. Think of your page as a communications channel (like a TV Channel) with regularly scheduled programming Have hiring managers and employees like and share the jobs (this is the beginning of traffic development which we cover in the next section) Post on weekends as well as weekdays. Job hunters (active or passive) spend time in Facebook throughout the week. Be there when they are Place an image (picture) in every job posting. This makes it more likely to appear Use video (when possible) to supplement the job posting Always include a Call to Action (CTA) e.g. Like this job if you re interested in computer science Job postings are a critical part of developing your audience. They should be a dynamic form of content that brings visitors back to your page. Share This Whitepaper HRxAnalysts: Facebook Recruiting Basics // 8

9 BUILDING TRAFFIC While there are a half billion daily users, none of them know that you have a company page with jobs on it. Once you have put the first two dynamic components (the page and the job postings) in place, the real work of building an audience begins. Perhaps you are lucky enough to have a well known brand. In that case, your job will be to improve the targeting effectiveness of the traffic that is drawn to your brand. If you work for a lesser known company, you have to build your brand s traffic. There are six types of Facebook users who will see the jobs you post: Employees and friends of employees who visit the page to help it along by liking and sharing content People who come to your site actively looking for a job People who receive a referral through the FB messaging system People who come to your page looking for something else but end up seeing the job People who see the job on their newsfeed (because someone liked or shared a job) People who are responding to ads you placed to target them Making your Facebook recruiting efforts successful depends on paying attention to each category. Share This Whitepaper HRxAnalysts: Facebook Recruiting Basics // 9

10 EMPLOYEE INVOLVEMENT THE FOUNDATION TARGETED TRAFFIC Getting a company s Facebook recruiting efforts off the ground always begins with its employees. Their involvement can come from creating content, participating in conversations, or by liking and sharing jobs and content with their networks. What s most important in the early days is that employees show up and participate. Facebook pages earn credibility based on the number of likes they receive. About 300 likes are required to have a baseline of credibility. The best way to get there is with your employees help. Recruiting is becoming a matter to which every employee makes a contribution. Facebook is where that begins. Whatever traffic you generate with great content and involvement of the employee team will need to be supplemented with visitors purchased through advertising. Facebook offers extraordinary tools for reaching very specific types of individuals by age, gender, profession, geography, related interests, hobbies, and education (both type and school). Learning how to control and predict the quality of your traffic is part of the long term process. In the end, recruiting on Facebook is a dynamic balancing act in which you meet recruiting requirements by integrating the design and content of your page with engaging job postings while building an audience rooted in your employees networks and supplemented with targeted traffic. For each type of employee you are trying to recruit, you will be learning how to tighten and loosen the constraints you place on the ads you send through the Facebook network. It s a process of testing and retesting in search of what works. Recruiting is becoming a matter to which every employee makes a contribution. Facebook is where that begins. Share This Whitepaper HRxAnalysts: Facebook Recruiting Basics // 10

11 MEASURING YOUR EFFECTIVENESS The key to the continuous improvement of your Facebook recruiting endeavor is an analytic toolset. Success requires routine experimentation and improvement. By trying out different approaches and then examining the results stream, you get the feedback necessary to make your next move. Facebook provides analytics on: The very best way to get started on this journey is to find a partner, like Work4 Labs, who know how to help you up the learning curve. Impressions: the number of times a piece of content was displayed Views: the number of times a piece of content was seen Applicants: the number of viewers who clicked on the apply button Click Through Rate: views divided by impressions Conversion Rate: applicants divided by views Cost per Click: advertising spend divided by clicks Cost per Applicant: advertising spend divided by applicants Share This Whitepaper HRxAnalysts: Facebook Recruiting Basics // 11

12 12 STEPS TO START RECRUITING ON FACEBOOK 1. Identify your recruiting requirements 2. Decide on your approach to having a Facebook Page (one integrated company page, a separate careers page or multiple pages and approaches for multiple operating units) 3. Build and launch the page(s) with appropriate PR attention 4. Have employees visit the page, like it and share it with their friends 5. Deploy employees as brand advocates by enabling them to post about working at the company on the timeline 6. Create a package of standard recruiting material about your operation 7. Design a schedule for the deployment of interactive features on the page 8. Review your job posting and description process. Rewrite them as engaging pieces of content. 9. Post your jobs to the page 10. Have employees visit individual jobs from their departments, like them and share them with their friends 11. Purchase targeted advertising to make sure that you are getting the right traffic to the page 12. Identify the measures that describe your success. Monitor them weekly and help your leadership understand what you re doing Share This Whitepaper HRxAnalysts: Facebook Recruiting Basics // 12

13 ABOUT HRxANALYSTS FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION HRxAnalysts is a consulting firm based in Bodega Bay, CA. Led by industry provocateur John Sumser, the company focuses on discovering what works at the edges of innovation in HR and recruiting. Closely allied with the HRExaminer, the firm maintains deep connections with a network of about 30 seminal thinkers in the industry through its Editorial Advisory Board. HRxAnalysts works on a variety of projects for both vendors and their customers in the HR and recruiting industry. For HR Departments, HRxAnalysts help define and articulate talent strategy with an emphasis on the transformative power of great questions. For vendors, the company helps develop market strategy and product management. At the core of the value we create is unbridled curiosity coupled with an inability to think inside the box. Our offerings range from training programs and webinars to extensive research. Share This Whitepaper HRxAnalysts: Facebook Recruiting Basics // 13

14 ABOUT WORK4 LABS FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION +1 (877) CONNECT WITH US blog.work4labs.com Work4 Labs helps companies leverage social media to find, engage, and hire top candidates. Work4 Labs was founded on a simple idea: recruitment is an inherently social activity, and recruiters require new tools to take advantage of powerful networks. Our flagship product, Work for Us, allows companies of all sizes to create a customizable, social career site on Facebook. Other award-winning products include the first statistically-optimized Facebook job ads platform and a social referral system. Work4 Labs was founded in 2010 by a team that s passionate about making recruiters lives easier. Our team has over 75 years combined experience in building businesses and technologies in the online recruiting space. We serve thousands of happy clients in over 50 countries and of all sizes, from small business to Fortune 100 firms like Intel and UPS. Share This Whitepaper HRxAnalysts: Facebook Recruiting Basics // 14