For more than a decade, the job market has gone through major changes. Today, 30% of job seekers turn to social media to find career opportunities. Figuring out how to find the best candidates on these channels is taking up a bigger and bigger part of modern recruitment. So how do you stand out on these platforms and make your recruitment 2.0 work better? Here are 4 of the ad formats our specialist Florian Bonnet likes best for finding qualified resumes!
Before we start, there are many formats you can use to promote your hiring needs through social advertising. Today we’ll focus on two social platforms. We can’t skip Facebook, used by nearly two out of three companies, which offers an almost endless pool of potential candidates thanks to its huge audience. And of course we have to talk about LinkedIn, still the top professional social network today.
1. Facebook Lead Ads
Signing up, filling out an endless form, uploading a cover letter in the right format… the usual path to applying through a website’s careers page is often long and tedious, and can discourage plenty of people along the way. While this weeds out the less motivated candidates, it might also cost you THE hire who would have stood out from the rest. The solution? Make it easier for candidates.
Facebook offers a simplified form builder within its ads. Your job postings show up directly in the news feed of potential candidates. If they’re interested in the posting, all they need to do is fill in the form fields, which open up without leaving the platform, making the whole information-gathering step much simpler. It’s up to you which information you want to collect, whether through multiple-choice questions or short answers. One of the big perks of this format is that Facebook automatically fills in the person’s contact details, which keeps a lot more potential candidates from dropping out, since half the work is already done!
2. Facebook Event Ads
Say you’d rather meet candidates face to face and want to bring as many of them as possible to an event. Why not promote your hiring event directly on Facebook? Setting up this kind of format is easy and can be done right from your company page. Date, location, topics… include everything people need to understand what the event is about, and start spreading the word organically through your page.
The real work with this kind of event is reaching people outside your own community who might be interested. That’s where Facebook Event Ads come in! Using the ads manager, you can build a campaign made specifically for this format to show it to a wider audience and boost interest with a call-to-action button. Getting people to respond leads to something else too: updating the event’s feed from time to time with reminders or news gives attendees extra reasons to actually show up.
3. LinkedIn Spotlight Ads
LinkedIn is a must for hiring skilled workers. On Facebook, your options for building interest-based audiences shrink quite a bit once you’re in the job category, but LinkedIn ads don’t run into that problem. You have full freedom to define your audience however you like.
If you want to run a recruitment campaign while keeping your spending low, Spotlight Ads seem like the best fit. The first thing that stands out about this format is how easy it is to set up. No visuals needed. The ad automatically pulls in your company logo and the profile photo of the person you’re targeting. You’re free to add a short line of text to give the ad some context.
Where the ad appears is another plus. It only shows up on desktop, in the right-hand column. This is a great fit for driving high-quality traffic, since it’s much easier to fill out an application that requires a resume and cover letter from a computer. We tend to use this format for multi-position hiring campaigns aimed at a fairly broad audience.
4. LinkedIn Direct Application
On LinkedIn, you can post a job listing on your company page. The main upside is being able to include as much detail as you want, which helps bring in candidates who are a good fit. Ease of applying is another plus. You can turn on a feature that lets candidates apply just by clicking a button on your ad, without needing to upload a resume. Their LinkedIn profile gets attached to their application automatically. This cuts down the chances of a promising candidate giving up partway through, and leaves a good impression on job seekers, who will likely appreciate saving time!
This job posting can also tap into the strength of a social campaign. You’ll be able to show this content to the audiences you’ve chosen, reaching far more people than you would organically. Conversions get optimized automatically around getting more applications, right on the organic post. A pretty simple way to bring in qualified leads!
A final word
Which ad format you choose will depend largely on how you want to collect your data. It’s worth striking a good balance between how easy it is to apply and the quality of the applications you end up receiving.
One last tip: 80% of LinkedIn members hold at least a manager-level position. Facebook works best for hiring campaigns for unskilled or low-skill roles. Otherwise, LinkedIn’s freedom and depth of targeting will be your best tools for finding that rare gem for a skilled position.
Feel free to reach out to our team to hand off your online recruitment! Depending on your goals, your industry, and the profiles you’re targeting, our specialists will build a plan tailored to you to boost your appeal and bring in more qualified resumes!
