Social media ... The one location you know for sure that your ideal candidate spends some time on a day-to-day basis. Knowing how to use social media to source candidates has now become a core ability for recruiters. Running recruitment ads on these platforms can be a really effective way of discovering excellent candidates for your open jobs. But how do you begin? How do you even run campaigns on various social channels? We understand that without a background in marketing this can all be frustrating. No worries though, we have actually 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 check various channels
Where to start your social recruitment advertising campaigns?

Recruitment marketing is more than simply launching advertisements and hoping for the finest (while you could still just do that, we strongly encourage you not to). In order to maximize your paid efforts, you require to start out by doing some research study. A great beginning point is to very first produce your candidate personality. A prospect persona is the recruitment variation of a purchaser persona (often utilized in marketing). It describes your ideal target prospect for the job. The goal is to make the personality as practical and in-depth as possible. In order to make a great persona you will require to think about demographics, character, 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 personality?

How to build your candidate persona.

1. Collect data

Your candidate personalities must not be based on gut sensation alone. In order to get a precise candidate persona, you will require to gather some data. The best method to gather information is to include existing employees and major stakeholders in the employing process. By sending out some surveys or doing brief interviews with them, you can get a better concept on your perfect prospect. After all, the employees are the ones that will need to deal with the new hire. Their input is essential. Major stakeholders can include people like the department manager or group lead. They typically understand what they need in regards to abilities and experience and can offer you some important input into the perfect prospect.

Another method of collecting valuable information is to examine your hires in the past for similar tasks. This information can help you to find patterns amongst your past successes which can be used to anticipate future successful hires. Some information points that you must search for in the assessment of your previous hires are:

- Demographic info; age, location, present task etc.

• Educational and expert background
• Personal qualities; strengths, employment weaknesses, hobbies, interests etc- Qualifications; skills, accreditations etc- Goals; where do they intend to enter their profession?

Any other info that you can easily collect might be able to assist you write out your prospect personality. Beware of straining yourself with information though. Use your judgment as to what pertains to know and what is not.

2. Search for patterns and commonalities

With all your information collected and in one place it is time to evaluate it. In this phase, you will see that your personas really start to take shape. So how do you analyze all your data?

You wish to start by opening up your spreadsheet and put in all your hard data initially. This mainly consists of market information. Ensure that all your information is formatted in the exact same method to help you acknowledge patterns quicker and more properly. Data that you gathered through interviews need to likewise be included in the spreadsheet. The finest way to do this is to create classifications for the answers to each concern you asked. In this manner you turn the unstructured interview data into structured and measurable data.

When all your information is perfectly structured into your spreadsheet, you can check the stats on it. What was the typical age of your ideal prospects from the past? What instructional backgrounds did they have? What abilities did they have? How skilled were they? These questions can be addressed by inspecting the stats.

3. Map your personalities

With all the information organized neatly you can begin making your personas. Ideally, you'll be able to develop upto 3 personas per task opening as there's typically more than one ideal candidate for the job. Your personalities need to not simply be a job description. It is essential that you make them as realistically human and as lively as possible. Don't be to get innovative; comprise a name for your persona, put a picture beside it, develop a life story etc. The more detailed your personas, the better you'll be able to target them and discover your ideal candidate.

An essential thing to include in your persona are the psychographics. If you collected the right information, you ought to have the ability to obtain these from your spreadsheet. Psychographic data differs from market data as they are about an individual's worths, beliefs, and interests. It is extremely personal details and can be tough to obtain. The following image reveals the difference in between psychographics and demographics well.

How to run recruitment advertisements on social

Now that you have your personalities, you can begin working on your pay-per-click (PPC) ads. There are various social recruiting platforms you can use for your social advertisements and one is not necessarily much better than the other. The efficiency of the platform is dependent on the job you're trying to fill and the prospect personalities. When selecting a channel it is necessary 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 main social networks channels to look at are:

1. Facebook 2. Instagram 3. Twitter 4. Quora
Linkedin is not consisted of in this list as it is a recruitment platform with lots of sourcing performances.

Aside from Instagram, each of the social networks channels pointed out above has its own ads platform. They are all quite similar in usage and frequently have similar functionalities. The primary distinctions are the advertisement formats and requirements for the images/videos. All channels offer you a great deal of options to target very particularly. This is why your prospect personalities are so essential. They help you to decide who to focus your social ads on, which will make your advertisements more reliable and cheaper.

We'll walk you through each channel listed below.

Facebook & Instagram

Instagram and Facebook are without a doubt the most popular socials media today. Facebook alone has more than 1 bilion active users a day. Both networks share the same advertisements platform. Facebook's ads platform has among the most comprehensive targeting alternatives of all social advertisements channels. This makes it easy for you to target your personalities with your ads. Facebook likewise has a devoted "Facebook for Jobs" function that you can utilize to publish job ads on. Paid advertisement should be a part of any serious facebook recruiting strategy.

Additional reading: How to develop your company brand on Instagram

1. Creating your first Facebook & Instagram recruitment ads

Once you have your account established and your payment information went into, you can start developing your 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 campaign objectives. For job advertisements, I extremely recommend to pick "Traffic" as your project objective. The traffic goal enables you to lead individuals to a particular landing page and you can pay per click instead of impression. Also, the majority of the other goals do not permit the suitable formats for task advertisements.

Don't forget to give your project the appropriate name for easy acknowledgment in the campaigns control panel. At the bottom of the screen, you can also select whether you wish to do an A/B test within the campaign. A/B tests are experiments that enable you to test various ad texts, images, and even audiences to see what carries out finest.

2. Creating your audience

The most essential part to concentrate on is the audience you wish to target and the ad that you are targeting them with. Aside from all the group targeting choices, Facebook likewise permits you to target very particularly on psychographic variables. You can target people based upon their interests, activities, pages they like, habits, and interactions they had with your service or site. You can even specify a particular audience (for example; people that have actually visited your careers page) and then target people that have resemblances to that specific audience as figured out by the Facebook algorithm.

Knowing what and how to promote to your specific target audience is just as important as choosing the ideal audience for your job opening. When you're targeting individuals with a specific amount of experience, for instance, you'll wish to make sure that your advertisement copy and image reflect that.

Once you have actually reached the advertisement set part, you can start defining your audience. You can pick to utilize a previously saved audience or a custom audience.

Custom audiences are typically people that have visited your website or look alikes of people that have actually visited your site before. Saved audiences are integrated in Facebook Business Manager and are based on the information Facebook has on their users.
In order to target more particularly, you can narrow your audience. Narrowing your audience ads an extra layer of interests, demographics, or habits that must likewise be matched in order to be targeted. This method, when you target a specific interest that is quite popular, you won't wind up with a big audience of unimportant individuals.

Getting your audience right

So how do you know that the audience you produced is the right one for the job that you're promoting? Well the answer to that is, you don't. At least, not right from the start. That's why you need to have a speculative frame of mind and want to test things out. Only by continuously trying out various audiences and ad images/texts will you have the ability to find great prospects for your openings. It is very uncommon to strike the mark right from the start in social marketing.

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

Another way to evaluate various audiences is to simply launch an advertisement and see how it carries out. If the most vital metrics aren't as good as you want them to be, you can make some modifications to the ad or audience and see how it goes from there. You might also keep an eye on remarks as an additional metric- the more remarks you have on your Facebook ad, the more appealing your content is to potential candidates.

3. Ad metrics

Knowing how to analyze your advertisement metrics is essential to comprehending whether your advertisements are effective or not Facebook has comprehensive reporting on your projects that can truly help you to understand how your ads carry out and whether they deserve the cash spent on them.

The most crucial 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 crucial metrics there is for social advertisements. The CTR shows the importance and quality of your ad and likewise tells you whether you have actually picked the best audience for what you're offering. Your conversions show how lots of people actually gotten the job after clicking or seeing the advertisement. Important to note is that you can just track conversions if you have setup the Facebook tracking pixel correctly. So make certain to contact your marketing or advancement team to setup the pixel properly on your careers site.

Cost per conversion

The expense per conversion is also important to take a look at obviously. You don't wish to be spending too much per candidate. The expense per conversion likewise says something about the quality of the landing page. A high cost/conversion generally indicates that lots of people click on your advertisement however do not complete the application on your landing page. If this is the case you ought to consider making some modifications to the landing page.

Frequency

Frequency is a metric you might not have actually heard of but is crucial to take a look at. The metric refers to how often the very same individuals see your advertisement. Typically, you wouldn't desire individuals to see your advertisement more than 3 times as it might end up being frustrating for them to continuously see the very same advertisement (which then impacts the quality rating of your advertisement). You can impact the frequency by increasing the size of your audience.

Important note on marketing through the Facebook Business Manager: Ads for Instagram are also done through Business Manager. By default, the advertisements you produce for Facebook will likewise work on Instagram. When you are picking your targeting options in your advertisement set, employment you can alter whether you want your advertisement to appear on Instagram also or whether you just want to reveal your advertisements on Instagram.

Twitter

Much like Facebook and Instagram, Twitter likewise allows you to specify your target market extremely particularly. You can target people based on their demographics, behavior, events they have actually engaged with, interests, keywords they have actually looked for on Twitter, and how they have actually connected with your website in the past. This makes it easy for you to target your candidate personas on the social network and get the ideal people to click on your advertisements.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter's advertisement formats are quite different from Facebook. The main formats on Twitter are:

Promoted tweets: comparable to Facebook's ad formats. Here you create a tweet and increase it to be revealed to your defined target market. Promoted accounts: gain followers by promoting your account to particular Twitter users. Promoted trends: 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 advertisement format is extremely costly and certainly not fit for task promos.
Just like on Facebook, it is crucial to watch on the project metrics in order to know whether you're getting the results that you want. For Twitter, you'll likewise need to set up a tracking pixel too in order to do remarketing and track conversions.

Quora is rather various from the channels described above in the sense that it is purely a concern and answer based social networks platform. The platform is not used to link with household and good friends however rather to find a response to a problem. It also looks more like an online forum instead of a social networks platform.

The quora ads user interface is quite easy and tidy. The ads are relatively inexpensive and targeting can be done based on subjects, previous interactions with your site, questions, and interests. This makes it fairly easy to find and target relevant individuals with your ads. When you're trying to find a front end designer, for example, you can target your ads on questions about front end development.

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

Testing your channels

Marketing is a different ballgame than recruitment. This indicates that you will need to change your frame of mind in order to get your recruitment marketing efforts right. The most essential thing is to have an experimental mindset. This implies that you approach your ads as if they're a scientific experiment;

1. You develop a hypothesis. 2. You believe about how you're going to evaluate this hypothesis. 3. Test your hypothesis. 4. Evaluate your outcomes.
In your social PPC efforts this might look like this:

Hypothesis: "Using an employer branding video in our advertisement will give us at 300 clicks in one week with a CTR of 2.5%". Map test: We will check this hypothesis by producing an employer brand name video and introduce the advertisement on Facebook with audience X as our target audience. Test: Launch the advertisement. Report: Let the ad run for one week, then examine outcomes. If CTR and quantity of clicks are excellent, scale the ad by putting in more spending plan. If outcomes are lower than expected, make modifications and redo or mark this as a failed experiment- enhancing your paid channels.
By working according to the growth marketing principles, you perform much faster while decreasing your ad invest in projects that don't work. Knowing how to read and translate information within the ad interfaces is important though. The very best aspect of online marketing channels is that everything is measurable. Unlike the conventional offline channels such as TV ads and paper ads, you can in fact determine ad success straight. This makes it easy to rapidly change your ads in order to improve the performance.

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

- Click-through rate (CTR); the percentage of individuals that click your advertisement. - Impressions; understanding how many actually see your ad is very important to know whether your ad is being revealed to individuals. - Clicks; the variety of clicks is very important to see how much traffic you get to your website from the particular advertisement and. - Variety of conversions; this is most likely the most intriguing number for you to take a look at. The number of people that really use after seeing or clicking the ad, demonstrates how efficient the advertisement really was. In order to track conversions, you'll need the tracking pixel established correctly and ideally a URL that visitors arrive on after sending their application.
The quantity of conversions isn't adequate to judge the efficiency of an advertisement. The quality matters too and should be watched on. You can determine the quality by inspecting the source of your candidates (most ATS have this function). If you see that a number of the applicants that come in from your Facebook ads are of poor quality, you might wish to consider another channel (even when the quantity of candidates being available in is high).