3 Steps for Recruiting with Facebook Ads

3 Steps for Recruiting with Facebook Ads

Advertising on Facebook can be intimidating for those who have never given it a try. However, instead of looking at the site as a source of frustration, recruiters should be looking at it as a pool of more than 1 billion potential job candidates.

Facebook’s massive talent pool, coupled with its robust targeting capabilities, make it the ideal social network for recruiters and companies to find both passive and active job applicants. We’ll walk you through three steps to turning Facebook’s ad products into a recruitment gold mine.

We won’t dive into the specifics of setting up a Facebook advertising account on this post, so if you’re having trouble with that you can check out our Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Ads.

1. Create an Ad for Each Open Position

Creating a perfect ad for each open position can make the difference between a funnel full of great candidates and a post that will never be seen. There are three important things to keep in mind when creating an advertisement: picking the correct campaign objective, choosing the best image, and writing copy that will gain you clicks.

Choose An Objective

For recruiting purposes, we recommend that you choose the “Page Post Engagement” objective. When you choose this as your objective, Facebook optimizes your post to increase the overall engagement it receives, which is definitely something that you want when trying to put your job posting in front of a large audience.

Pick the Best Image

There are so many different ways to approach the image that you want to represent the position you’re trying to fill, and the correct image to use varies by company and position. The two most common choices seem to be an image that embodies your company’s culture, or an image that can easily convey the responsibilities of the position itself.

Here’s an example of a Facebook recruiting post with an image that gained a lot of social traction.

Post by Matt Moran.

You can see that the person in the photo is wearing his chef’s whites, which is fitting since the open position is for a chef.

Write a Great Description

On social sites like Facebook, asking questions tends to draw more engagement, and with that, an increase in your advertisement’s reach and a lower cost-per-click. Here’s an example of an ad we created using that method:

Post by Sprout Social.

This post describes the position with a few key words relating to the role while also asking a question to keep the audience engaged.

2. Target Your Ideal Candidates

Now that we’ve created a great advertisement, we can work on finding the best audience to show that ad to. Facebook empowers you to target all sorts of different people, but some of the fields that might be most interesting to recruiters are:

• Location


• Work Places


• Education Level


• Languages


• Interests


• Connection to your Facebook Page

Say that your company wanted to hire a new recruiter (since we all know you’re overworked). When you begin targeting, you could specify the city you’re located in to avoid pesky relocation costs, whether or not you want them to have a college degree, and whether they’ve worked as a recruiter before or have any interest in recruiting.

3. Decide Where to Send New Candidates

Once you’ve enticed a candidate to click on your advertisement, you need to send them to a place where they can continue the application process.

Send them to your Facebook Page 

Most of the time, people prefer not to leave the social network to complete a task. So sometimes it’s best to send them over to your Facebook Page, where they can learn more about your company. Then there are applications that you can add to your Facebook Page, such as Job Board by Sprout Social, that candidates can use to apply for positions at your company without having to leave the site.

Send them to your website 

If you decide to send your candidates off-site, you can add a link to the description of your post that sends them to your career page. From there they’ll ideally follow through and fill out an application for an open position, and you’ll be one step closer to finding a great candidate.

Include an email address

You could also look to Matt Moran’s post above as an example. Instead of including a link to a Facebook Page or website, he included an email address for sending in resumes. This could get a bit risky, since if your post ends up going viral you may be inundated with too many resumes to possibly sift through. But since it puts the responsibility for next steps on the candidate, you’re likely to get a higher number of genuinely interested applicants.

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