It’s been a busy year over at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park. Over the past several months, we’ve seen article after article from the major technology publications about important updates to the Facebook platform:
- In January, Facebook announced Graph Search.
- In April, Facebook completely redesigned the News Feed to prioritize visual content and maximize engagement with your company’s updates.
- In July, Facebook rolled out it’s revolutionary Graph Search to all of its US users, changing the language of search to fit the user’s needs based on the user’s network—and making it easier for recruiters to source new talent.
- In August, Facebook rolled out “embedded posts,” so you could take your best posts and put them on your blog or company site.
- In November, Facebook changed the look of the “Like” and “Share” buttons to encourage people to…you guessed it: like and share more.
- In December, Facebook updated and expanded its Facebook for Business internationally to make it easier for advertisers to discover best practices.
- Just last week, Facebook rolled out a test of video ads in the News Feed, which may soon revolutionize how you attract candidates to your talent pool.
And as a result of so many of these changes, link clicks—to articles, websites, resources, and, yes, jobs, are up 169%.
Facebook is, as we’ve stated over and over again for the past several years, an ideal platform for developing the relationships you need to successfully recruit new candidates, and 2013 has gone on to prove that it’s also a useful tool for sourcing and recruiting candidates as well.
On the relationship side, more and more people feel comfortable logging into other applications—including your ATS!—by sharing Facebook profile information in 1-Click. On the sourcing and recruiting side, Facebook is now giving people the option to display whether or not they are currently employed (and, by extension, potentially looking for work).
On the relationship side, people are interacting with your company career pages by watching career videos, clicking on relevant visual job descriptions to learn more, and actively commenting and sharing as a part of your growing talent community. On the sourcing and recruiting side, more of the right people are learning about your jobs from highly targeted ads that show up on their mobile devices and lead right to jobs that they can apply for without putting down their iPhones.
In 2014, companies need to focus on building relationships while sourcing and recruiting new candidates on Facebook. By staying on top of all of these amazing innovations—and striving, day in and day out to find a way to optimize them for recruiting—Work4’s resolution is to continue to carve out a space for recruiters and employers like you to experiment with and explore this recruiting platform that has finally begun to come into its own.
Facebook is no longer untamed or untested for recruiting. Not only do companies see real, measurable results, but they are being given new gifts to make their recruiting and sourcing better with every update to the platform.
As the New Year bears down upon us, I want to encourage you to start this new year with a strategy for your social media recruitment with Facebook in mind. With all of the incredible changes that have rolled out over the past year (and all of those that are still to come), I encourage you to pick one or two that you can resolve to really use this coming year.
Even it’s as simple as turning your embedded posts into content on your career blog or rolling out a mobile recruiting ad, make a resolution to put yourself—and your jobs—where your candidates are.
I wish you a very happy and healthy New Year, and I look forward to hearing your Facebook recruiting resolution in the comments below!
Stéphane