A Simple Guide to Running Recruitment Ads on Your Socials

Social media … The one place you understand for sure that your ideal candidate invests some time every day. Knowing how to utilize social media to source prospects has now become a core skill for recruiters. Running recruitment advertisements on these platforms can be an extremely reliable way of finding great candidates for your open jobs. But how do you start? How do you even run campaigns on various social channels? We understand that without a background in marketing this can all be overwhelming. No concerns though, we’ve got you covered!

What we’ll cover in this short article:

Building a candidate personality
Running paid ads on Facebook and Instagram
Paid promotion on Twitter
Ads on Quora
How to evaluate various channels

Where to begin your social recruitment advertising campaigns?

Recruitment marketing is more than simply launching advertisements and hoping for the very best (while you might still simply do that, we highly encourage you not to). In order to take advantage of your paid efforts, you require to begin by doing some research. A great beginning point is to first produce your prospect persona. A candidate persona is the recruitment variation of a buyer persona (often used in marketing). It refers to your ideal target prospect for the task. The objective is to make the persona as realistic and in-depth as possible. In order to make an excellent persona you will need to think about demographics, personality, social circles, and interests. The goal is to make the personality as near to a genuine person as possible.

So how do you develop a candidate persona?

How to construct your prospect persona.

1. Collect information

Your prospect personalities should not be based upon gut sensation alone. In order to get a precise prospect persona, you will need to collect some data. The very best method to collect information is to involve existing employees and significant stakeholders in the hiring procedure. By sending some studies or doing short interviews with them, you can get a better concept on your ideal prospect. After all, the workers are the ones that will need to work with the brand-new hire. Their input is important. Major stakeholders can consist of people like the department manager or group lead. They typically know what they require in regards to abilities and experience and can provide you some important input into the perfect prospect.

Another way of gathering valuable information is to examine your hires in the past for similar jobs. This information can assist you to discover patterns among your previous successes which can be used to predict future effective hires. Some data points that you ought to try to find in the examination of your previous hires are:

– Demographic information; age, area, current job etc.
– Educational and professional background
– Personal attributes; strengths, weak points, pastimes, interests and so on- Qualifications; skills, certifications etc- Goals; where do they wish to go in their profession?

Any other info that you can quickly gather could be able to assist you draw up your candidate persona. Beware of overwhelming yourself with information though. Use your judgment regarding what pertains to understand and what is not.

2. Search for patterns and commonalities

With all your data collected and in one location it is time to examine it. In this stage, you will see that your personas really begin to take shape. So how do you evaluate all your information?

You desire to begin by opening your spreadsheet and job put in all your difficult data first. This primarily includes demographic information. Make sure that all your data is formatted in the same way to help you acknowledge patterns quicker and more precisely. Data that you gathered through interviews should also be consisted of in the spreadsheet. The very best way to do this is to create categories for the answers to each concern you asked. In this manner you turn the disorganized interview data into structured and quantifiable data.

When all your information is perfectly structured into your spreadsheet, you can check the stats on it. What was the average age of your perfect prospects from the past? What educational backgrounds did they have? What skills did they possess? How experienced were they? These questions can be addressed by examining the data.

3. Map your personas

With all the data organized nicely you can start making your personas. Ideally, you’ll be able to create upto three personalities per job opening as there’s typically more than one ideal prospect for the job. Your personas need to not simply be a job description. It is necessary that you make them as realistically human and as dynamic as possible. Don’t be reluctant to get creative; comprise a name for your personality, put a photo next to it, come up with a life story etc. The more in-depth your personas, the much better you’ll be able to target them and discover your perfect prospect.

An important thing to consist of in your persona are the psychographics. If you collected the right information, you must be able to derive these from your spreadsheet. Psychographic information differs from market data as they are about a person’s worths, beliefs, job and interests. It is extremely individual information and can be tough to obtain. The following image reveals the difference in between psychographics and demographics well.

How to run recruitment ads on social

Now that you have your personas, you can begin working on your pay-per-click (PPC) ads. There are various social recruiting platforms you can use for your social ads and one is not always better than the other. The efficiency of the platform depends on the job you’re attempting to fill and the prospect personalities. When picking a channel it is essential to first do your research on who the users are of that specific channel. Taking a look at the demographics of each channel can currently help you a lot. The primary social networks channels to look at are:

1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. Twitter
4. Quora

Linkedin is not included in this list as it is a recruitment platform with lots of sourcing functionalities.

Aside from Instagram, each of the social networks channels pointed out above has its own advertisements platform. They are all rather similar in usage and frequently have similar functionalities. The main differences are the ad formats and requirements for the images/videos. All channels provide you a lot of options to target extremely particularly. This is why your prospect personalities are so essential. They assist you to choose who to focus your social advertisements on, which will make your ads more effective and cheaper.

We’ll stroll you through each channel below.

Facebook & Instagram

Instagram and Facebook are by far the most popular social media networks today. Facebook alone has more than 1 bilion active users a day. Both networks share the exact same advertisements platform. Facebook’s ads platform has one of the most comprehensive targeting options of all social ads channels. This makes it simple for you to target your personas with your ads. Facebook also has a dedicated “Facebook for Jobs” function that you can use to publish task advertisements on. Paid ad must belong of any serious facebook recruiting method.

Additional reading: How to build your employer brand name on Instagram

1. Creating your first Facebook & Instagram recruitment ads

Once you have your account set up and your payment details got in, you can start producing your very first project. Head over to the projects tab in your Facebook Business Manager and click the green button on the left side of the screen.

In the next screen you can select your project objectives. For task ads, I highly suggest to select “Traffic” as your campaign objective. The traffic goal enables you to lead people to a specific landing page and you can pay per click instead of impression. Also, most of the other objectives do not enable the suitable formats for task ads.

Don’t forget to provide your project the suitable name for simple acknowledgment in the projects control panel. At the bottom of the screen, you can likewise pick whether you want to do an A/B test within the project. A/B tests are experiments that enable you to test various advertisement texts, images, and even audiences to see what performs finest.

2. Creating your audience

The most vital part to focus on is the audience you desire to target and the advertisement that you are targeting them with. Aside from all the group targeting choices, Facebook likewise allows you to target extremely specifically on psychographic variables. You can target people based on their interests, activities, pages they like, habits, and interactions they had with your company or job website. You can even define a particular audience (for example; people that have actually visited your professions page) and then target individuals that have similarities to that particular audience as identified by the Facebook algorithm.

Knowing what and how to market to your specific target audience is just as important as picking the ideal audience for your job opening. When you’re targeting individuals with a certain amount of experience, for example, you’ll want to make sure that your ad copy and image reflect that.

Once you have actually reached the advertisement set part, you can begin specifying your audience. You can pick to utilize a previously conserved audience or a custom-made audience.

Custom audiences are typically people that have visited your website or look alikes of people that have actually visited your website before.
Saved audiences are built in Facebook Business Manager and are based on the data Facebook has on their users.

In order to target more specifically, you can narrow your audience. Narrowing your audience ads an extra layer of interests, demographics, or habits that should likewise be matched in order to be targeted. By doing this, job when you target a particular interest that is rather popular, you will not end up with a big audience of unimportant individuals.

Getting your audience right

So how do you understand that the audience you created is the best one for the job that you’re advertising? Well the response to that is, you don’t. At least, not right from the start. That’s why you require to have a speculative mindset and be ready to test things out. Only by constantly trying different audiences and advertisement images/texts will you have the ability to discover great candidates for your openings. It is very uncommon to hit the mark right from the start in social marketing.

A fantastic way to evaluate various audiences for your advertisement is to do an A/B test. An A/B test in advertising implies that you produce 2 various versions of the exact same ad and test which one carries out much better. As you can see at the bottom of the very first screenshot, Facebook enables you to do A/B tests in your campaigns. With this functionality you can check two different audiences for the same advertisement or more different ads for the exact same audience. This can then help you to select the most efficient variation and scale this up.

Another way to test different audiences is to just launch an advertisement and see how it carries out. If the most essential metrics aren’t as excellent as you desire them to be, you can make some changes to the ad or audience and see how it goes from there. You could also keep an eye on remarks as an additional metric- the more remarks you have on your Facebook ad, the more engaging your content is to prospective candidates.

3. Ad metrics

Knowing how to translate your ad metrics is important to comprehending whether your advertisements work or not Facebook has extensive reporting on your campaigns that can really assist you to understand how your advertisements carry out and whether they are worth the cash invested on them.

The most essential metrics for Facebook advertisements for recruiting are:

– Click-through-rate (CTR).
– Conversions.
– Cost/conversion.
– Frequency.

CTR and conversions

The CTR and conversions are the most important metrics there is for social advertisements. The CTR reveals the importance and quality of your ad and likewise tells you whether you have actually picked the ideal audience for what you’re selling. Your conversions demonstrate how many individuals in fact applied for the job after clicking or seeing the ad. Important to note is that you can only track conversions if you have setup the Facebook tracking pixel effectively. So ensure to contact your marketing or development team to setup the pixel properly on your professions site.

Cost per conversion

The cost per conversion is also crucial to take a look at obviously. You don’t wish to be investing too much per candidate. The cost per conversion also states something about the quality of the landing page. A high cost/conversion normally suggests that lots of people click your advertisement but don’t complete the application kind on your landing page. If this holds true you ought to consider making some modifications to the landing page.

Frequency

Frequency is a metric you may not have heard of however is vital to take a look at. The metric describes how frequently the exact same individuals see your advertisement. Typically, you would not desire individuals to see your ad more than 3 times as it may become bothersome for them to constantly see the same advertisement (which then affects the quality rating of your advertisement). You can affect the frequency by increasing the size of your audience.

Important note on marketing through the Facebook Business Manager: Ads for Instagram are likewise done through Business Manager. By default, the advertisements you create for Facebook will likewise run on Instagram. When you are picking your targeting choices in your ad set, you can change whether you want your ad to show up on Instagram also or whether you just want to reveal your advertisements on Instagram.

Twitter

Similar to Facebook and Instagram, Twitter also enables you to specify your target market very particularly. You can target people based on their demographics, behavior, events they’ve engaged with, interests, keywords they’ve looked for job on Twitter, and how they have actually communicated with your site in the past. This makes it easy for you to target your prospect personalities on the social network and get the right individuals to click on your advertisements.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter’s advertisement formats are rather different from Facebook. The primary formats on Twitter are:

Promoted tweets: similar to Facebook’s advertisement formats. Here you develop a tweet and boost it to be revealed to your specified target audience.
Promoted accounts: gain followers by promoting your account to specific Twitter users.
Promoted patterns: promote a hashtag to appear on the trending topics list. When someone clicks the promoted pattern they will see your promoted tweet on top. This ad format is extremely pricey and certainly not fit for job promos.

Similar to on Facebook, it is vital to watch on the project metrics in order to understand whether you’re getting the results that you desire. For Twitter, you’ll likewise need to set up a tracking pixel as well in order to do remarketing and track conversions.

Quora is rather different from the channels described above in the sense that it is simply a concern and response based social media platform. The platform is not used to link with friends and family but rather to discover a response to a problem. It also looks more like an online forum rather than a social networks platform.

The quora ads interface is rather simple and clean. The ads are fairly inexpensive and targeting can be done based upon topics, previous interactions with your website, questions, and interests. This makes it reasonably simple to discover and target relevant people with your ads. When you’re searching for a front end designer, for example, you can target your ads on questions about front end advancement.

Like the other channels, Quora likewise has a tracking pixel that can assist you to track conversions and page views. One thing to bear in mind when setting up tracking pixels is to make sure that your personal privacy policy and cookie statement are updated accordingly. For this, I encourage you to include your legal department.

Testing your channels

Marketing is a various ballgame than recruitment. This indicates that you will need to alter your frame of mind in order to get your recruitment marketing efforts right. The most crucial thing is to have a speculative state of mind. This indicates that you approach your ads as if they’re a clinical experiment;

1. You establish a hypothesis.
2. You think of how you’re going to test this hypothesis.
3. Test your hypothesis.
4. Evaluate your outcomes.

In your social PPC efforts this might appear like this:

Hypothesis: “Using a company branding video in our advertisement will provide us at 300 clicks in one week with a CTR of 2.5%”.
Map test: We will test this hypothesis by producing an employer brand name video and launch the ad on Facebook with audience X as our target market.
Test: Launch the advertisement.
Report: Let the ad run for one week, then examine outcomes. If CTR and amount of clicks are excellent, scale the advertisement by putting in more budget. If results are lower than expected, make adjustments and redo or mark this as a failed experiment- optimizing your paid channels.

By working according to the growth marketing principles, you perform much faster while minimizing your advertisement invest on projects that do not work. Knowing how to read and translate data within the advertisement interfaces is essential though. The very best thing about internet marketing channels is that whatever is quantifiable. Unlike the traditional offline channels such as TV ads and job paper advertisements, you can in fact determine advertisement success directly. This makes it simple to rapidly adjust your advertisements in order to enhance the performance.

The most crucial advertisement metrics to take a look at are:

– Click-through rate (CTR); the portion of people that click your ad.
– Impressions; understanding the number of really see your ad is essential to know whether your ad is being shown to individuals.
– Clicks; the variety of clicks is very important to see how much traffic you get to your site from the particular ad and.
– Number of conversions; this is most likely the most interesting number for you to look at. The number of people that really use after seeing or clicking the ad, reveals how effective the advertisement truly was. In order to track conversions, you’ll need the tracking pixel established properly and preferably a URL that at after sending their application.

The quantity of conversions isn’t enough to judge the effectiveness of an ad. The quality matters too and should be watched on. You can measure the quality by examining the source of your applicants (most ATS have this feature). If you see that a number of the applicants that come in from your Facebook advertisements are of poor quality, you may want to consider another channel (even when the quantity of candidates coming in is high).