Recently, social media giant Facebook announced the release of a new feature designed to connect its users with employers seeking new talent.
Facebook began hinting at the service late last year, and finally started rolling it out in North America in the middle of February.
In the words of Facebook Business:
“We’re focused on building new ways to help make it easier for businesses to interact with the over 1 billion people visiting Pages every month. Businesses and people already use Facebook to fill and find jobs, so we’re rolling out new features that allow job posting and application directly on Facebook.”
The features manifests as a tab on an organization’s Page.
While this new tab may have seemingly little relevance to marketing and community management, digital marketers and social media specialists shouldn’t overlook the Jobs feature. It has more implications for your business than you might realize, and there are some considerations you should start making in order to take full advantage of it.
What You Need to Know
I’ve had a couple of weeks to experiment with the feature, with mixed results. Though I expect the Jobs tabs and posting options to evolve over time, there are some things you should know about what’s going on at your Facebook Page right now.
To see what jobs are available, users can go to https://www.facebook.com/jobs to search for opportunities by keyword, location, industry and job type. Alternatively, you can see the jobs available at any given business using the service by going to that organization’s page and clicking on the new “Jobs” tab.
If your business has a Facebook page, then it probably also currently has a Jobs tab that visitors can see by now. If you have no intention of posting jobs on Facebook in the foreseeable future, than you may want to hide the tab through the “Edit Page” function in your Page Settings to avoid confusing visitors:
You can post a job very similarly to how you might post any other update to your business’s page, through Publishing Tools.:
To my knowledge, there is currently no third-party social media post scheduler or management tool that accommodates this specific kind of post, though that may be in the works. In the meantime, it means that jobs will have to be manually posted through the Facebook dashboard.
Job posts can appear right on your Page alongside status updates and multimedia that you post. That means they can also crop up among your followers’ feeds. They appear very similar in format to other posts you make, and retain the ability for users to Like, Comment, or Share as they would any other content. The main difference is the addition of an Apply Now button that enables users to apply to the job directly through Facebook without leaving the site.
Supporting Uncommon Teammates
It’s not extremely common for Human Resources and marketing to partner up. But in this case you’ll definitely want to make sure your social and recruitment teams are on the same page.
Facebook stands to be an extremely powerful resource for new talent of all kinds to your business. It has a much larger user base than LinkedIn, the recruiter’s current go-to social network for finding professionals. Furthermore, users are far more active on Facebook than on LinkedIn.
Perhaps most importantly, Facebook offers far more sophisticated audience targeting and advertising capabilities than almost anyone on the web (again, beating LinkedIn by a mile). That means that businesses seeking a very specific kind of person and skill set now have unprecedented ability to promote job opportunities directly to the right eyeballs in a favorable environment.
That’s too good of an opportunity to pass up. But that opportunity comes with some challenges.
Traditionally, matters of job posts and recruitment have been left to the HR team. But I can assure you that your average HR professional doesn’t have the social media aptitude and digital fluency needed to effectively make use of Facebook’s Jobs feature in its current state.
This is hugely important for digital marketers to understand, because if your HR team does a poor job implementing the new feature then it will impact your social media presence.
Remember, “jobs” posts appear right on your Facebook page—alongside all of your other brand messaging, community engagement efforts, product promotions and more.
An ugly job post weakens your Page overall. And it’s astonishingly easy to make an ugly job post.
Navigating Facebook’s UX
You see, Facebook’s job posting interface and UX is, so far, pretty terrible. See what I mean:
There’s no practical method to format the job description in a more coherent manner. Notice that in the preview, all the copy runs together into an intelligible wall of text. Line breaks don’t work don’t even show up. For the general user (HR folks, in this case), the presentation is extremely unwieldy and frustrating.
Worse yet, once your new job posting is published, there’s no way to edit information about the job itself, only the accompanying “Introductory Copy.” If you make a mistake, you have to delete the post and start again from scratch (or live with a jumbled mess on your wall).
In order to attract quality talent—and not compromise the quality of one of your most important digital properties—marketing and social media experts who are familiar with Facebook’s sometimes unwieldy backend need to step up and help bridge the gap.
Delivering a Stellar Candidate Experience
Marketing – HR coordination can’t end with the job post.
Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t yet offer any direct integration with corporate Applicant Tracking Systems. That means any applications submitted go to your business’s Messages mailbox.
If you currently have an automatic responder set up for Facebook messages, then it will get served to job applicants in the same way it is to questions, customer service requests, business inquiries, and more. You may want to update it to acknowledge possible job applicants.
From there, you’ll need to coordinate with your HR team to establish a system to process applications that end up in your business’s Facebook inbox. You don’t want to leave a long period where candidates don’t get a response and lose interest. You’ll likely also have to find a way to request they complete a formal application on your site or submit a resume, since the current jobs feature does not accommodate those functions.
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