Facebook’s rolled out a new feature this week allowing companies to create and promote job postings on their business page. Paying to promote these new job postings is drastically cheaper than LinkedIn job slots and ideal for an audience that is not on that platform, such as nurses or retail workers.

Step 1: Choose which job to post

If you have over 100 open positions as we do, you may need to be selective about which jobs to post. This is manual process and each posting takes a few minutes. Facebook has suggested that hourly or entry level jobs are most suitable.

Step 2: Click on “Create a Job Post”

They are rolling the job tabs out in batches. If you don’t see it yet, you should soon.

Step 3: Add your job information

This process is quick and easy. Best practice is to use a photo with employees, avoiding stock imagery if possible. I am hoping Facebook will allow the use of video in the near future as my Facebook ads with video always outperform ads with images only.

Step 4: Boost the posting

This step is crucial to the success of your posting. Facebook tabs have been notoriously unsuccessful in the past as they require the user to navigate to the company page and then click on the tab. Both are unlikely as only 2% of your Fans will ever come back to your Page after liking it. Viewers see most posts in their newsfeed. The job postings will only be seen if you promote them or pay to push them to the newsfeed of your target audience, instead of relying on seekers navigating to your page. A few things to consider:

• Budget – Facebook advertising is very cost effective, especially when you consider the absorbent cost of many recruitment platforms. At this year’s marketing conference Inbound, the keynote speaker Gary Vaynerchuk said it’s the best bang for your buck in 2017. Just ten dollars can get your job in the newsfeed of over 1000 people in most locations.

• Location – This feature is the same as for paid advertisements and works well. Chose one or multiple locations and a distance range.

• Targeting – This option is where Facebook nails it and gets your postings in front of the right people. You can target people by interest, field of study, job title, employer (if the company is large enough) and more. I recommend getting creative and targeting non-job related things such as the sport they like and then choose an image that would appeal to that audience. These paid job postings will perform better for sure.

The options are limited compared to the many options for regular Facebook ads. I am really missing a feature called “saved audiences” that allows you to save the options you choose and reuse them for a future advertisements. Many of our jobs require similar skill sets and choosing each for every posting is very time consuming. Hopefully Facebook brings this option to job postings soon.

Due to many concerns around discriminatory hiring practices, Facebook has disabled the ability to target candidate groups by age, gender or other protected classes.

Step: Review your applications

The applications come through your messages tab and the value of the information provided really varies. The upside is that it’s easy to communicate and engage with the applicant. If you receive many applicants, keeping track of them can be challenging. Facebook tried to alleviate this by allowing the option of labels and notes.

NEW Facebook Job Postings: Boosting them to get seen!

If boosted correctly, these postings will be great for smaller companies without an applicant tracking system or compliance standards. For larger companies, I recommend regular Facebook ads that take the seeker to a landing page sharing your culture such as this. These landing pages can direct the seeker to apply through the ATS which is better for tracking and compliance purposes. Whether it’s formal job postings or advanced advertisements, Facebook marketing should be part of every recruitment strategy in 2017.