Want to break through the digital noise and get in front of your ideal job candidates? You need to meet your candidates where they already are: online. And with nearly three billion monthly active users, there’s a good chance your top candidates are scrolling through Facebook, just waiting for an irresistible job opportunity to land on their newsfeed.
It’s not just the incredible volume of active users that makes Facebook an amazing marketing opportunity for recruiters. It’s their advertising platform—and all of the advanced options it provides for optimizing ads. When it comes to recruitment ads, Facebook offers extremely granular targeting, so you can serve laser-targeted ads to potential candidates based on particular skills and interests.
To find qualified skilled workers in the post-COVID world, you need to adapt your strategy to keep up with the latest recruitment trends—and that means differentiating your employer brand with an effective Facebook ad strategy. Here’s everything you need to know to captivate job candidates with scroll-stopping Facebook ads.
Why Use Facebook Ads to Recruit Blue-Collar Workers?
When most recruiters think of social media advertising, they think about LinkedIn. But when it comes to finding qualified blue-collar candidates, LinkedIn usually isn’t the best platform to run recruitment ads.
Why? Well, most people use LinkedIn when they’re out of work and searching for a new job, so your search for job candidates on LinkedIn will probably exclude passive job seekers (see: job candidates who are currently employed and not actively seeking new employment but are open to the right opportunity). According to LinkedIn statistics, 70 percent of the global workforce is made up of passive talent, while the remaining 30 percent are active job seekers. That means you need a strategy that reaches both active and passive job seekers to fuel your company with quality talent.
Not only that, but LinkedIn usually isn’t a major recruitment platform for blue-collar talent.Of course, having an account on LinkedIn is a no-brainer for most white-collar candidates, but you need to treat blue-collar candidates differently. Your main goal is to find the best matches for your company, so you need to skip the cookie-cutter recruitment approach and advertise job opportunities where your target audience is already spending time online.
That’s where Facebook ads can amplify your recruitment strategy. According to Glassdoor, 79 percent of job seekers use social media during their job search—and this number is only going to keep growing. At the same time, 84 percent of organizations are recruiting with social media. Chances are, your competitors are already using Facebook to capture their top picks for candidates. So, what are you waiting for?
Types of Facebook Recruitment Ads
Unlike your average job board, Facebook is all about the visuals. In addition to providing smart targeting features, Facebook offers multiple visual-based ad formats, including:
- Image ads
- Video ads
- Carousel ads
- Slideshow ads
- Canvas ads
No matter what format you choose, the overarching goal remains the same: Your ad creatives should complement your copy and highlight your brand image. Each ad format gives you different options for telling your company story through visual content, so you’ll want to consider your brand before diving straight into your ad campaign.
To capture your candidates’ attention, we recommend using high-quality pictures and videos that are relevant to your brand (think: pictures of team members, fun office spaces, staff events, and so on). In other words, you’ll want to skip the overused stock photos and give potential job candidates an inside glimpse into your company. At the end of the day, Facebook users will be able to tell when your ads actually reflect your company culture—and when you’re hiding behind less-than-authentic stock pictures to mask your work environment.
How to Launch a Successful Recruitment Ad Campaign
Now that you know why Facebook is so important for recruitment, how can you launch your new ad campaign? First, you’ll need to log into your Facebook Ad account. From there, choose Create Campaign, pick your main objective, and name your campaign. If you’re launching your first Facebook ad campaign, we recommend choosing Conversions as your campaign goal.
In the Choose a Campaign Setup window, choose Manual Conversions campaign to customize your ad campaign. Since recruitment ads have their own special category on Facebook, you’ll need to declare it as an Employment campaign. Keep in mind that employment ads come with slightly different targeting options, and you won’t be able to target by gender or postal code. In addition, your radius targeting will be set to a minimum of 15 miles around your targeted city, address, or pin-drop location.
Once you’ve set your budget, head to the next step to build your target audience. Here, you need to know exactly who you’re looking to hire so you can serve ads to the right people. Take some time to review your candidate personas and figure out what kind of candidates are using Facebook to create the most effective audiences for your campaign.
When you’re building your audience, you’ll notice some additional restrictions: You can only add a limited number of interests, and you won’t be able to set behavior and demographics targeting as in traditional ad campaigns. That said, you can still narrow down your audience with detailed targeting or by excluding specific interests.
For example, if you’re looking to hire new members for your sales team, you might choose different broad interests like Sales, Sales management, and Marketing. From there, you can choose more specific interests based on your industry and any other relevant interests. You’ll also be able to narrow down your audience targeting based on the desired education level for the position you’re hiring for.
Key Recruitment Marketing Metrics for Facebook Ads
Congratulations! You’ve kicked off your first Facebook recruitment campaign, but your hard work isn’t over just yet. To make the most of your advertising budget, you’ll need to track your ad performance and optimize your campaign accordingly. Here are some key marketing metrics to measure your campaign’s success.
- Cost per lead: Your cost per lead (CPL) is the most important metric when it comes to Facebook advertising. Basically, a low CPL indicates that you’re doing a good job with your ad targeting and creatives. On the other hand, a higher CPL shows you that there’s room for improvement.
- Clickthrough rate: Clickthrough rate (CPR) is the percentage of times a person saw your ad and clicked through. The higher the CTR, the more Facebook users are engaging with your ad copy and visuals.
- Ad frequency: It might be tempting to ignore this metric, but it’s more important than you might think. If you’re a local company, you’re probably advertising to a small target audience—and there’s a good chance you’ll be serving ads to people in that audience multiple times. When your frequency rises above 2, it’s a good idea to create a new audience. Meanwhile, if your current audience still has a low CPL, you can keep serving ads until you notice an increase.
Attract Blue-Collar Workers With Facebook Ads
When you’re ready to turn your marketing strategy up a notch, Facebook can be one of the most valuable assets in your recruitment toolbox. It’s the tool you need to grow your employer brand, drive awareness of your available job opportunities, and reach the right people for your organization.
Of course, Facebook advertising isn’t a one-and-done strategy. To build the right team of employees, you’ll need a comprehensive, long-term Facebook strategy—complete with compelling copy and attention-grabbing visuals—to stand out from the crowd. Download our recruitment audit checklist and schedule a discovery call with our team to take a different approach to Facebook ads.
