How to Find Employees Using Facebook

How to use Facebook as an individual differs from how to find employees on Facebook as a company. Over the years, Facebook has become a strong tool for small and large companies to promote themselves. While many businesses are taking advantage of this, they're, however, missing out on something big, which is recruiting.

One of the largest demographics on Facebook is young professionals and job seekers; they're easy to target. So, knowing how to use Facebook to achieve this goal is important. Although recruitment is LinkedIn's biggest strength, small businesses and smart recruiters use several tactics and tools to get the brightest talents, including Facebook.

Facebook job board page to find employees

Many recruiters don't know how to find an employee on Facebook. If you're looking for new talents on Facebook, then you have to make the job board page a standard tab on the company's Facebook page.

You can do this in many ways, such as building pages and maintaining them, or using other apps, like Job Magic and Work for Us, that help with job postings and connecting on Facebook. You can also use the SocialBios app to post and maintain job listings on the job board page. It also ensures that job seekers can connect with your company and see people with common interests.

Suppose you know how to use Facebook well. In that case, you'll capitalize on the different Facebook fields like philosophy, education, arts, etc., that allow job seekers to learn more about your company's employees (without breaching the privacy setting) and find people in your organization to champion their job search.

With Facebook, you can also reach out to people that are a match for what you want without the pressure of responding. A connection can find a match and send an inquiry, but this process doesn't reveal the recipient. So, they either ignore the request or refer the applicant without worrying about the repercussions.

This element of referral is likely to draw the attention of more people.

Targeting with Facebook ads to find employees

Another element of recruitment on Facebook is the possibility of narrowly targeting your prospects on this platform. Using filters like work experience, educational background, interests, and geographical location, you can use Facebook ads to target a particular audience. The targeting is precise to the point that you can create an ad to target your competitors' employees specifically.

With this specificity, you can focus on seeking the most qualified candidates. It also ensures you can significantly reduce your marketing budget for open advertising roles.

However, before recruiting candidates from Facebook, you must first polish your profile. This means you must post relevant content on Facebook regularly, engage your followers, and promote your company's work culture, for example, by showcasing welcome kits for new joiners. It's only when you've done this that it becomes easier for you to create the most effective recruitment strategies for Facebook.

Steps for creating an effective Facebook recruitment strategy

Locate the prospects

The first thing you must do on Facebook is to find your prospective hires. You need to know the type of applicants that you're looking for first. After identifying their professional and personal criteria, you must find out the Facebook groups you're likely to find employees from your target audience. You must join Facebook groups and participate actively as well. You should be known for offering advice and useful information that may or may not be related to recruitment. For instance, you can provide resume help or advice for young professionals to create a compelling resume. Build your reputation, and recruitment becomes easier. It also becomes easier to ask your contacts to recommend people for a job role you're trying to fill.

Paid ads also help you to target your prospective employees. You'll have control over the intended audiences and ad reach. It's a simple process that gives you the time to work on things that bring additional candidates.

Reach out

Although Facebook allows you to send a message to everyone and anyone, there are three places where your message can end up:

The inbox: This is what you want ideally, that your message goes into the primary message folder where they'll be informed of it. Achieving this can mean a world of difference to your recruitment process.

The "other" folder: This folder is reserved for messages that come from people not on your friend list. Users will not be notified of messages that land in this folder. Many users don't even know this folder exists.

Facebook filter: If your message is adjudged to look like spam, it'll be caught up in the Facebook filter. These messages will not be read. This is also the same for the email-to-facebook message method.

So, how do you find your way around these?

Facebook may give you the option of paying $1 so that your message can get into the user's primary inbox folder. This is a relatively reasonable price compared to other social networks. So, ensure that you're not discounting the idea completely. Instead, you should factor it into your recruitment budget. However, this $1 option will no longer be available if you've exceeded your messaging quota.

Using the "basic filtering" option can be effective because many users have probably not switched to the stricter filtering option. So, your messages may get through to the "filtered requests" subfolder of the user's inbox. This will happen if there's a reason to believe you may know the person you want to reach out to. One of the reasons can be that you're both members of a Facebook group.

Craft your message

It may be a little awkward for you to reach a prospective employee on a platform that isn't branded primarily as a professional platform. However, this shouldn't deter you.

Many changes are ongoing on LinkedIn, and Facebook may soon be the preferred platform for recruitment. At some point, users will not be upset when you approach them. Some Facebook users will even feel flattered, but there are a few things you must keep in mind when you're crafting your message:

• Start with an apologetic tone that recognizes that this may not be the ideal method of communication. You can then ask them for their preferred communication method if they don't wish to continue conversing with you on this platform.
• Ensure you're genuine and polite in your message, the way you would be if you introduced yourself in person.
• Ensure your message doesn't have any red flags in them, such as unusual syntax errors, spelling errors or others that may make it appear like a spam message.

Conclusion

For several reasons, mastering how to find an employee on Facebook may take a while. It'll require that you build your reputation and profile first, but it'll pay off in the end. As more companies understand that the combination of sharing functionality, social networking, and targeted ads is potent for recruitment, Facebook will become more dominant in social media recruitment.

If you have the capacity, you can be broader with this hiring strategy by not limiting yourself to one social platform alone. You should also not overlook other methods like email announcements and job boards.

Author Bio:

Dennis Lodge is a freelance journalist, blogger, and copywriter. Dennis writes unique and research-based content about education, employment, and social media. He also enjoys traveling and long-distance running.