Social recruitment: Using Facebook to find the best job talent online

This article originally appeared in Inside Facebook

When thinking of a typical recruiter, an image of a person sitting at a desk mining the Internet for talent might come to mind.

But Work4, a human resources software company, has begun to change the way companies recruit job applicants online. It provides social and mobile recruiting applications to help organizations extend employer brands, drive referrals organically and target specific profiles, transforming social networks into a source of top quality talent.

Matthew Brown, co-founder and VP of product at Work4, told Inside Facebook:

With pages, you really saw Facebook trying to bring brands into the conversation. We saw that small businesses were using Facebook as their main web presence versus creating a business website. The first thing we say to anyone who wants to start recruiting online, is that they have to get their jobs on Facebook. It has to be hosted there somewhere.

The initial marketing push with pages was to let people connect with brands and businesses that they liked, Brown said. A lot of business built their Page around distributing daily deals and figuring out how they could sell things on their pages.

Work4’s software works like a tab on a brand or company’s Facebook page. Applicants can easily apply to jobs directly through that tab on Facebook, or have jobs that pique their interest emailed to them.

Brown continued:

You can view and search jobs directly through Facebook. It’s the full job seeking experience right inside of Facebook. You can complete the entire application process within Facebook without leaving the company’s page.

The company can also automatically create job ads within Facebook and target them to potential job applicants based on education and age, for example.

According to the company, 70 percent of online adults use social media, with 1 in 7 minutes spent on Facebook.

It’s important for employers to list every job opening on their Facebook page and optimize their application process for mobile. Facebook acts like a “window” into what it is like to work at a particular company, Brown said. “This is why it’s a great platform to post jobs and content related to work life at the company.”

And, unlike LinkedIn that has predominantly white collar job candidates, Facebook has more active members at all job levels.

Hard Rock Café Success

Hard Rock Café successfully converted Facebook fans into hires when opening a new location in Florence, Italy.

Creating a Facebook Page from scratch, Brown said the company knew it wanted to source people within a certain geographical location and who would be representative of the brand. They achieved this by launching a targeted ad campaign and their Facebook Page to people in the area who liked certain kinds of music and also allowed people to submit applications directly through Facebook.

In the end, page fans for the Florence location went from 0 to 1,000 fans in 24 hours, and 6,100 fans in four days. They received 4,000 applicants in four weeks and hired 120 people.