Truth, is dismissing Facebook from your recruitment strategy, based on your personal feelings about the site, the best thing for your company?
A few stats to consider:
- There are 1.35 billion Facebook users, whereas LinkedIn has just 332 million.
- 864 million Facebook users check in daily, which is 6.5 times the number of active LinkedIn users.
- There are 703 million daily Facebook mobile app users.
- 50 million companies have created Facebook business pages
- Of all the people in the world who choose only one social network, 84 percent choose Facebook.
The three myths explained:
“It’s a personal space”
I have an eclectic mix of 337 Facebook friends dotted around the globe. In my news feed amongst the birthdays and usual personal goings on, you’ll find people sharing pictures of their day at work, asking for advice, talking about their job search, and sharing their latest blogs and speaking gigs.
You would also see posts from the 40 company pages I like and six recruitment and 1 alumni group I have joined.
So a question to consider, why are 50 million businesses investing energy in creating, updating and building company pages if it’s a personal space?
“It’s creepy”
You can use Facebook for recruiting without adding anyone as a friend!
Just like LinkedIn, people have created profiles that can be seen – to a certain extent – by the public and it’s their responsibility to lock down their profile. Facebook provides plenty of help to show you how to do this too so why is it creepy?
And what if information you gained on a person’s hobbies or interests could be used to obtain the attention of scarce resources?
“It’s too hard!”
True you’re not spoon fed like you are on LinkedIn but when you remember that not everybody is on LinkedIn and those that are, aren’t anywhere near as active as those on Facebook, it’s worth the effort.
It’s easy to tap into potential recruits by:
- Using Facebook Graph search, to search directly by job title, find people in groups or find people liking relevant company pages.
- Using Chrome extensions to increase employee referrals, the best quality of hire.
- Adding a Jobs application to your Company page.
Plus you can directly email nearly all of the 1.35 billion users for free.
Convinced?
If you want to learn how to use Facebook for social recruiting with ease, come along to Katrina Collier’s popular Social Media and Recruitment workshop on the 29th January 2015.
Katrina Collier has been an independent voice on social recruiting since 2009, showing companies how to add social media to their recruitment mix. Using over a decade of recruitment and 8 years of social recruiting expertise, she advises clients how to use a wide range of social networking sites so that they find the right people for their roles.
When not training or consulting, Katrina regularly speaks at industry events, including at TMA’s Social Recruiting conference in New York, and she can be heard interviewed on HR Trends Coffee Break with Game Changers by SAP Radio.
Katrina has been named as a thought leader by Facebook recruiting solution Work4, invited to contribute to Identified’s Social Recruiting Predictions for 2014, and named in the top 10 Recruitment Gurus to follow on Twitter by Firefish for UK Recruiter. She also writes avidly about social recruiting for her own blog, Work4, Computer Weekly, TIRA, and Social Hire.
