I’m amazed by the number of people I know who still say, “LinkedIn is for business and Facebook is personal.” This includes quite a few people in the recruiting sphere, who seem reluctant at best to toe-dip into using Facebook for recruiting. Considering the engagement level of Facebook’s enormous user base, it seems to me like there should be a whole lot more recruiting activity taking place there.
Consider the following:
- Facebook boasts more than 1.65 billion monthly active users. Yes, that’s billion, with a B. More than a billion of those users log in EVERY DAY. Compared to the 106 million monthly log-ins on LinkedIn, recruiters are missing a vast potential audience.
- Facebook users have a degree of separation of 3.57. What does that mean? Every Facebook user is just 3.57 connections away from every other Facebook user. Why does that matter? Think about compelling content that users can share, vastly increasing your reach.
- 86% of LinkedIn users are also on Facebook, and some 70% of Facebook users log in daily.
Recently, I became aware of Facebook’s Friends “List” feature. For those of you who still want separate worlds, this is a solution that can help. By clicking on Friends, you’ll see an option to Create List. Once you have a list created and friends added to it, you can share future posts with specific lists of people. This means you can share recruitment-related posts and information with employers or jobseekers, while keeping personal posts limited to just family members, for example.
Facebook Groups are also worth investigating. I am in several recruitment-related groups on Facebook and the amount of discussion is sometimes overwhelming. By contrast, I belong to groups on LinkedIn where there hasn’t been a new post in six months or more. There are a ton of career-related groups on Facebook, and it’s also easy to start one of your own. And again, because there are so many users, and so many of those users are actively engaged, it’s a good place to share job postings or other career information.
It should be clear by now that there is a huge pool of potential candidates on Facebook. It’s not always easy to figure out how to find them, but it certainly seems like a worthwhile effort. You might check out Social Talent for training (disclosure: Social Talent is an NPAworldwide Endorsed Program), or search for other options. I’m curious to know if you are using Facebook for recruiting. How’s it going for you? If not, why not? Please share in the comments below!
