Being the largest social network in the world with over 1 billion users (!!!), Facebook can be a perfect place for finding and reaching out to true talents, interesting to employers from the professional perspective. Indeed, on FB, as opposed to LinkedIn, for example, people aren’t limited with the focus on sharing professional achievements. They post photos from their everyday life, share their interests, present their friends, family, and partners.
Quite a logical conclusion is in place: Facebook makes recruiters’ job significantly painless, allowing to indicate what really motivates a certain person, define their level of knowledge in the niche and some personal qualities principally important for holding a particular vacant position. In this feature, you will find out how to find candidates for the required position on Facebook and learn some nuances of formulating work offers in personal messages.
5 tips to become the best recruiter
So, these are the 5 best ever recommendations on social media recruiting in our opinion, which will help you find truly talented candidates among millions of profiles on Facebook.
Use ‘smart’ searching tools
Searching for candidates among more than a billion of Facebook users is a difficult task from the get-go. In order to facilitate the procedure, you can employ the following tools.
- Graph search. Graph search is a ‘smart’ Facebook search for English-speaking users that can effortlessly find you people fitting your most narrowly-focused requests. Thus, you can enter something like:
People who graduated Harvard University and work at Microsoft
and – voila, you get a worked out list of fitting candidates. You can additionally use graph.tips to become more confident in working with this tool.
- Xray search with Boolean technique. X-Ray search is a no less popular, but more complex way to look for candidates’ profiles, which is being implemented with the help of Boolean operators. For instance, if you enter ‘.NET developer New York’, you will probably get a bunch of useless results. There are special operators for more precise search by custom parameters in Google:
- AND — will help you view only the pages with all required keywords;
- OR — allows covering categories that are identical in nature, but are called differently;
- «-» — helps to exclude unwanted words or phrases from the search;
- () — allows grouping parts of a request and prioritizing it;
- «» — used for searching exact phrases;
- site: — for search on a certain website;
- intitle: — for search only in titles and headings для поиска только в заголовках;
- filetype: — for search by files of a certain format.
In such a manner, if you are looking for .NET developers’ from New York profiles in Facebook, you just need to define a number competencies your candidate should possess, define their location (optionally), and enter the right request in the Google search. For example, if you are looking for a .NET developer with SQL knowledge in New York, the proper request would look the following way:
site:facebook.com (“dotnet developer” OR “.net developer”)(“SQL”)(“new york” OR “NY”)
That’s it, you get links to FB profiles of all the fitting candidates!
Stay socially active in your own profile
Stay socially active in your own profileYour own profile should stay active and viewed by at least a hundred people daily. For that, we recommend taking part in discussions, subscribing to public pages with topics interesting to your TA, and regularly post new stuff on your page.
In particular, the key to your social media success can be regular viral content posts – the content, which users distribute online themselves. According to Jonah Berger, it can be posts that are unique in some way, have a certain practical value (from a cheering-up nature to the demonstration of useful tips), and are directly associated with most people from your TA.
Following this strategy, you will attract many new visitors to your page, among which there might be great candidates for your opening (make it visible, by the way, e.g., attach the announcement post at the top of your newsfeed).
Publish the opening description in Facebook Careers
Facebook Careers is a relatively new tool (released at the beginning of 2017) that helps to post and promote opening description announcements. There is a ‘Jobs’ tab on the page of your company (if it has a ‘Business Page’ status). This allows candidates to see the opening in their newsfeed (or in the newsfeed of the Facebook Careers community). An attracted social network user can simply push ‘Apply now’ and provide their feedback. The messages of candidates are available to read in your messenger.
Use Facebook Ads
According to the experience of many other recruiting specialists, job boards (including FB) are replenished with thousands of new announcements each day. To keep your announcement in the top, you can employ Facebook ads. This approach will, among other things, help attract the attention of inactive Facebook users that will see your offer in their newsfeed, being covered by your TA requirements. To increase the efficiency of your work, we’d recommend considering targeting via such tools as lookalike audience and custom audience.
Prepare to interview
To describe your opening as vividly and profitably as possible is usually a responsibility of copywriters. If it’s your task to compose a letter for a potential candidate, however, here are some tips:
- Create an individual approach. People from one niche communicate with each other. So an identical engagement method used on two people that might know each other means risking to leave a negative impression of your company;
- Stay concise. Until a candidate answers ‘yes’ and gets interested in your offer, there’s no use in providing any technical references or detailed history of your business;
- Don’t complain about past workers. First of all, it’s simply unethical. Secondly, you may risk forming an impression that you blame your employees in all your problems, which will put off anyone regarding your opening;
- Write simply. Special phrases that you wouldn’t really use in real life are unnecessary. A concise, but utterly informative text – that’s the thing you need!
Summary
We hope our tips will help you become more productive in your searches for talents in the social environment of Facebook. If you want to dedicate the procedure of search to real professionals and, thus, save your time and efforts, you can do it together with the passionate brains from the DNA325 recruitment agency. Our experts will gather the most impressive CVs of candidates from Ukraine. All that’s left for you to do is make a final decision whether to employ the found candidates.
