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Social recruiting on non-career platforms: How to gain suitable employees with Facebook and Instagram

Social recruiting on non-career platforms: How to gain suitable employees with Facebook and Instagram

Sissy Scheible
Sissy Scheible
published on March 29, 2023   

Social recruiting - the most important facts in a nutshell

  • Social recruiting is the quest for employees in social media channels.

  • Push and pull marketing should both be part of the social recruiting strategy.

  • Organic content should be complemented by ads.

  • Hyperlocal social recruiting campaigns with LocalUp help companies with multiple locations and branches to significantly reduce their efforts.

We only know it from movies: People marking ads in newspapers and then carrying their application folders to the post office. Today, companies rarely fill their vacancies in exceptional cases by a simple newspaper ad, if only because fewer and fewer people subscribe to newspapers. Instead, news and other interesting information is obtained from the Internet. German users use the Internet 5 hours and 22 minutes a day , according to the Digital 2022 Report from Hootsuite and We Are Social. Of that, they spend 1 hour and 29 minutes on social networks. Around 87 percent of the total population in Germany is on social media. Anyone looking for new staff should take advantage of this enormous potential and engage in social recruiting. On platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you can play out your ads to people who are not currently looking for a job.

 

What is social recruiting?

Social recruiting (or: social media recruiting) includes all measures to recruit employees via career portals such as Xing or LinkedIn and non-career-oriented platforms such as Facebook or Instagram. Through the former, you primarily reach people who are actively looking for a job or are willing to change jobs. Facebook and Instagram also give you the opportunity to reach users who are not specifically looking for a job, but who might still be attracted to your company. The right combination of push and pull marketing helps you successfully attract employees via Facebook and Instagram.

 

What is push and pull marketing?

1. Push marketing

In recruitment, push marketing addresses people who are actively looking for a job. They receive a specific job offer, for example in the form of job ads. It is important to create a precise target group.

If you are looking for employees with certain qualifications, such as experience in social media, you can include them in the targeting in Meta Business Manager by restricting the target group. For example, you can narrow by interests such as “social media marketing” or even by parameters such as “Behavior: Facebook page administrators”. When targeting by age, however, keep in mind that there are certain limits for under-18s to protect teenagers. Among other things, they can’t be selected for ads based on their gender, interests, or website activity.

If your new hires don’t need any particular skills, it’s still worth targeting them, for example, with the parameters “looking for work.” Local delimitation is useful in both cases if the job is one that needs to be performed in a specific location. For example, if your company is based in Munich, you can have the ad played out only to people who live in Munich and within a radius of it that you define yourself. If you’re looking for employees in different locations, LocalUp’s marketing automation can help you save a lot of time and money by eliminating the need to create individual ads for each location. Learn more about LocalUp below.

Social recruiting on non-career platforms: How to gain suitable employees with Facebook and Instagram
Here you can find our blog post about targeting.

2. Pull marketing

In pull marketing, a company presents its advantages, such as employee benefits, great office space or special team events. For this purpose, image ads can be placed or organic posts can be made, for example with photos from everyday work. This content is also played out to people who are not actively looking for a job, in order to generate interest in working at this company. Because these measures are used to attract employees to the company, this communication is known as “pull marketing”.

Making the company channels on Facebook and Instagram as attractive as possible is also important for push marketing. Employees who see a job ad on social media will certainly try to find out more about the company there. If the profile looks boring, purely profit-oriented or has not been updated for ages, it is unlikely that an application will happen.

Social recruiting on non-career platforms: How to gain suitable employees with Facebook and Instagram

A good social recruiting strategy includes both directions – push and pull. Potential employees ideally learn about a company before they actually start their search (pull) and receive an offer quickly as soon as things get serious (push).

 

Social recruiting strategy: How do I achieve reach?

There are two ways to get as much reach as possible, through organic content or paid ads. When it comes to social media recruiting on Facebook and Instagram, we recommend a combination of both.

Organic social recruiting: Engage your employees

As already mentioned, it is of prime importance for a company to make the company pages on Facebook and Instagram as attractive as possible. Ideally, you build your own community, which comments, likes or shares your posts, through appropriate community management. You can also get your own employees on the train. Especially when it comes to recruiting topics, they are the best envoys. They have good reasons why they like working for your company. Identify them and encourage your team to share their enthusiasm with the world via their own social media channels.

Paid social recruiting: Ads on Facebook and Instagram.

As you can only reach people through organic content who already have touchpoints with your company and its employees or who come across your company through a search query, it is definitely worth supporting a social recruitment campaign with ads. You can promote not only your job ads, but also your organic posts. A small budget is often sufficient to increase your reach many times over compared to purely organic content.

 

Facebook, Instagram or both? Which platform is suitable for your social recruitment?

“You’re still on Facebook? Facebook is dead after all.” A sentence that active Facebook users often hear. It is also often assumed that only older users can still be found on Facebook. However, these assumptions are fundamentally wrong. In 2022, Facebook was the most popular social media platform worldwide, even ahead of TikTok, and all age groups are represented there. According to statista.com, 39 percent of 16- to 19-year-olds reported using Facebook in 2021/2022. Trainees can therefore not only be found on TikTok. Due to the wide spread of users up to an age group of over 60 years, employees of all experience levels, from trainees to specialists, can be found through social recruitment on Facebook.

Instagram ranks third in the social media platform rankings. Although TikTok has more users, there are 31.6 million users in Germany you can reach with your content on Instagram. 38 percent of the population have their own Instagram account. 31 percent of them are users between the ages of 25 and 34. The group of 18- to 24-year-olds accounts for 26.9 percent. The platform is therefore particularly suitable for recruiting working students, young professionals and trainees. But older target groups are also using Instagram increasingly, which is why employees with professional experience can also be found here.

Overall, it is advisable to conduct social recruitment on both platforms in order to obtain the greatest possible target group coverage. It is advisable to adapt the ads to the respective platform, its users and formats. For example, the story format is a much more important component on Instagram, aIs on Facebook. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to run the same ad on both Facebook and Instagram. If you prefer one of the two channels, you can adjust the budget in Meta Business Manager accordingly so that your ad is played more often on your preferred platform than on the other. In general, we recommend a split test with the same budget in each case to find out in the evaluation whether your ad is better received on Facebook or Instagram.

 

Hyperlocal job ads: This is how LocalUp helps you fill vacancies in different locations with minimal effort.

If your company only has one position to fill, it’s easy to present it on your own website and create an ad for it in Meta Business Manager. But what if you have jobs at several locations and perhaps even in different areas of responsibility? Create a separate ad for each job and each location with a new creative for each manually and adjust the corresponding target groups? With LocalUp’s hyperlocal marketing solution, you can easily save time, effort and money. We illustrated how this works using the example of DPD’s successful recruiting campaign with LocalUp, on Facebook and Instagram.

DPD is constantly on the lookout for new parcel delivery staff. With around 80 depots in Germany alone, this would correspond to 80 ads, for which not only the creatives, but also the respective location parameters in the targeting have to be adjusted, since the parcel deliverers should live as close to the depot as possible. The company decided to prominently include the location in the job ad. It should therefore be displayed in large letters on the creative.

With LocalUp’s automation, this is no problem: DPD sends us all the desired content for the ad once, such as the texts and the creative, the respective target groups, the URL of the landing pages and the desired keywords. Added to this is the information about which position is currently available at which location, which they also can update at any time after the campaign has started. Our software then plays out the ad in the uniform campaign design hyperlocally, i.e. at the respective location of the corresponding target group. The result is impressive.

Social recruiting on non-career platforms: How to gain suitable employees with Facebook and Instagram

DPD Service GmbH social recruiting campaign

Social recruiting on non-career platforms: How to gain suitable employees with Facebook and Instagram
Read in our case studies how the locally individualized recruitment campaign for DPD was played out on Facebook, Instagram and Google.

With LocalUp it is possible to individualize texts, images and also videos, per location. Your manual effort is reduced to a minimum and the desired location is advertised exactly according to your specifications. You can decide for yourself whether you want to advertise with LocalUp via Facebook, Instagram, Google Search or a combination thereof. Of course, the different formats, such as Feed or Story, are also taken into account. The ads can be played within 24 hours after the reservation or at a desired time. The booking can be done easily via Google Forms or by mail.

Did we spark your interest? Please contact us. We are looking forward to your request!

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