Have you decided to start recruiting via Facebook, but you’re not entirely sure how to reach that ideal candidate? Not to worry, thanks to Facebook’s targeting possibilities, it’ll be a piece of cake! 🍰 We’ll explain the different possibilities and how to get the most out of them.
When you publish an advertisement on Facebook, you will always be prompted to choose the audience that will get to see it. These audiences can be created when you design your ad on the adset level or by using the audience manager tool.
When your targeting is on fleek, you increase your chances to find competent candidates and reduce your costs. 💅🏼 Needless to say, it’s imperative to define the right target audience for successful recruitment via Facebook.
Facebook presents you with 3 options:
Saved Audiences
Custom Audiences
Lookalike Audiences
If you are a newbie in the world of Facebook advertising, and you haven’t collected enough data yet, saved audiences are the way to go. With saved audiences, it’s up to you to determine which cocktail of characteristics and qualities your ideal candidate possesses. You can select and save that collection of criteria as an audience so that you always have your different target audiences on standby.
The first step is to choose the location 📍 with which you determine the region that will see your ad. If you just want to show your ad in London, you can simply set your location as – surprise, surprise– London only.
The next targeting step requires you to specify the interests and behaviours of your ideal candidate. This way, you will only target candidates that meet particular interests. We’re not on about motorcycles or soccer, but more interests like sales, communication, technology… You can even specify which pages, persons, or events your ideal candidate follows or likes.
Have you collected a range of data about your ideal candidate? The custom audiences option may be better for your strategy in this case! You will show our ads to candidates who have already connected to the organisation or vacancy. Think of people who have already visited your website or left their details to be notified about future vacancies.
The first interesting data source can come from mailing lists, which could be your audience, to begin with. Hold up! ✋🏻 You can’t just decide to use data from a list spontaneously. To use lists for marketing purposes, you need the approval of the people on those lists. It’s never a free pass to upload the data of your candidates; consent is key!
It can also be very effective to show your ads to people who have already paid a visit to your website. To track this data, you will need to install the ingenious Facebook pixel first, of course. Again, make sure you respect the privacy of your website visitors by asking for their approval first.
A final custom option is to create an audience out of people who have interacted with your Facebook posts, liked your page, or watched one of your videos.
A lookalike audience consists of candidates that have the same characteristics as your custom audience. In other words, you can consider lookalike audiences as social twins 👯♀️ of your custom audience. To create a good lookalike, you’ll need at least 200 people in your custom audience. Have you gathered 300 people who looked at your vacancy page? If so, you’ll be able to create a lookalike audience from that custom audience. Facebook will search for people with similarities to the people that visited your vacancy page, resulting in a much larger potential reach to find your ideal candidate.
Besides choosing the right targeting options, there are several other best practices to help recruiters get the most out of Facebook advertising. Do you measure all the results of your ads, for example? And do you use A/B-testing to find out which ad harvests the most applications? By throwing yourself and your approach more and more into the (un)deep end, you’ll find that Facebook comes with its challenges, but also with valuable way pointers towards your ideal candidate. 🙏🏼
Are you ready to become a targeting master?
