How To Use Facebook Ads For Social Recruiting

Social recruiting is all the rage right now when it comes to finding new employees to hire. Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti recently told me about a simple but effective way his company is using Facebook ads to hire people. Facebook ads are highly targetable. Citysearch puts up an ad with a picture of the hiring manager and shows those ads only to that manager’s Facebook friends. For instance, the image of the ad at right is the one seen by friends of Citysearch senior VP Kara Nortman, who is introducing social features such as business Tweets into Citysearch.

Since each ad can be “liked,” and thus shared across the social network via the news feed, the ads become implicit referrals. If you know Kara and you see the ad, whether or not you are looking for a job, you might feel inclined to like it and share it with your friends. Or maybe you are looking for a job and since you know Kara or at least are connected to her on Facebook, you feel like you’ve got an in. The ads seem to be working. Kara’s inbox was flooded after the ad ran.

Repeat that across all hiring managers, and companies can create their own homegrown social recruiting campaign. If you try it out, let us know the results.