Facebook

Employer branding involves the development and communication of the organization culture in order to be perceived by external target group as desirable employer. One of the possible channels for employer brand communication is to use social media. Companies can use their social media sites by posting company related information to present its identity to desired target audience, in our case, to potential candidates.

In 2013 Institute for Employment Studies run a survey for Acas. In this survey they studied HR decision makers whose organizations had used social media in recruitment. They were asked why they use social media in recruitment process. Three most commonly-cited reasons were: (1) access to wider range of candidates than with traditional recruitment methods, (2) easy to use, and (3) lower costs.

There are a lot of different social media sites available, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Today I’ll focus only on usage of Facebook.

Probably not all of HR responsibles will agree with me, but in my opinion Facebook as a recruitment channel is clearly underestimated and underused in Estonia. There are about 1.15 billion Facebook users worldwide; according to Facebook data, it has about 540 thousand users in Estonia. Facebook itself is one of the most visited internet site in a world. And still it is poorly used by HR.

  



Last week I noticed that couple of my friends in Facebook shared ADM Interactive job ad where the company was looking for employees for several positions. I am glad to notice that even without Facebook competition game that company has got a likes and shares for the advertisement.

I’d like to point out that the same job ads is also available in Estonian internet recruitment site CVKeskus. In afore mentioned advertisement there are couple of things that I must mention: firstly, they do point out different awards that company has won (such as being in TOP 25 in Employer of the Choice competition in Estonia, winner of e-Marketing agencies by Äripäev, Estonian Business Newspaper, in two years).  Secondly, they also have hyperlinks in their job ad where employees of the company tell why it is fun to work there  and how their work environment looks in Rotermann quarters (last one is the reference to their blog, which is in Estonian, but there are some pictures of their office, so I do recommend to take a look to that since it’s quite attractive).

Did you know?

1. Facebook posts with pictures get 39% more attention (clicks, likes and comments) than posts without pics.
2. Weekday, when you post your information in your Facebook site, also mattes – best days to post are Thursdays and Fridays.

Takeaways:

-         You can also use Facebook to create and communicate your employer brand image – post regularly information about company activities. This way you keep our social profile “alive” and create a strong social profile for your company.

-         Post also your job advertisements on your Facebook site – this way you can reach different users and might target passive candidates or candidates that usually are not in your target group.

-         In Facebook there is also possibility to target candidates with certain characteristics or qualifications; you need to pay for that service, but you only pay by clicks.  You can choose your targeted candidates by gender, age, education, language skills, previous job experience etc.