Using Facebook for Recruiting

In a recent presentation that I gave, I looked back at what the Internet was like 13 years ago, when zu.com first opened our doors.

At that time, many IT people thought that email was going to be a fad. Three years later, in 1997, most companies did not see any value in having a website. In 2000, people were scared to use their credit cards online. Content Management Systems were dream concepts in 2002. There was no uptake of RSS in 2004. And who had a mobile site in 2006?

My point in looking back at all of this is that many web trends that were initially considered a fad are now mainstream. Today’s “fad” is Facebook and it is time that businesses start using this tool.

Before I give you a few pointers, I must point out that I am not a Facebook fanatic. I use it occasionally to keep up-to-date with friends. However, I do realize that 30 million people use the site everyday and half of them spend more than 20 minutes a day on Facebook. These numbers can not be ignored.

While there are many ways that businesses can use Facebook to enhance their operations, I am going to focus on a few, as zu.com clients will likely find these most applicable.

Facebook has become a recruiting tool. With today’s tight labour market, companies need to be where the job seekers are. And the demographics show that they are on Facebook. Facebook has a Marketplace (similar to a newspaper classifieds section) where you can post your jobs for free. You can also create a Facebook profile for your company that allows followers to be part of your group. When you post a job, the followers will see the posting in their news feeds. It takes about two minutes to post each job. Setting up a profile page could take an hour or so, but you only need to do it once.

Another way to use Facebook is to promote your events. If you have anything that you want the public to attend (press conferences, fundraisers, parties or whatever), your company should list the event on Facebook. Again, this is free and it only takes a few minutes. As your company’s friends sign-up to attend the event, your event shows up in their mini-feed. From there, dozens or hundreds or thousands of other people will learn about it.

It is getting harder and harder to get media attention as budgets for local newsrooms decline. A new way to get your message out is to post your press releases in Facebook. There are a few ways to do this, but one of the most effective is to post it on your company’s Facebook page so that the press release shows up in your followers news feed.

While some of the Facebook lingo may be foreign, the implementation of the above ideas are simple. Essentially, you tell a few people, they all tell a few people, those few people tell a few more people and so on. The wonderful thing is that this is all automatic, so your workload is minimal.