Social media ... The one location you understand for sure that your ideal candidate spends some time every day. Knowing how to use social networks to source prospects has now end up being a core skill for employers. Running recruitment ads on these platforms can be a really reliable way of discovering good prospects for your open tasks. But how do you start? How do you even run projects on various social channels? We understand that without a background in marketing this can all be frustrating. No worries though, we've got you covered!

What we'll cover in this post:

Building a prospect persona Running paid ads on Facebook and Instagram Paid promo on Twitter Ads on Quora How to test different channels
Where to start your social recruitment advertising campaigns?

Recruitment marketing is more than just introducing ads and wishing for the finest (while you could still simply do that, we highly encourage you not to). In order to maximize your paid efforts, you need to start out by doing some research study. A great beginning point is to first develop your candidate persona. A candidate persona is the recruitment version of a buyer personality (frequently utilized in marketing). It describes your perfect target candidate for the job. The objective is to make the persona as realistic and employment comprehensive as possible. In order to make a good persona you will require to believe about demographics, personality, social circles, and interests. The goal is to make the personality as near a genuine person as possible.

So how do you build a candidate persona?

How to build your candidate persona.

1. Collect information

Your candidate personalities need to not be based upon gut sensation alone. In order to get an accurate candidate personality, you will require to gather some information. The very best method to collect information is to include present workers and significant stakeholders in the hiring process. By sending some studies or doing brief interviews with them, you can get a much better idea on your perfect prospect. After all, the staff members are the ones that will have to work with the brand-new hire. Their input is important. Major stakeholders can consist of people like the department supervisor or team lead. They frequently know what they need in regards to abilities and experience and can provide you some important input into the perfect prospect.

Another method of collecting important data is to examine your hires in the past for comparable jobs. This information can assist you to find patterns among your previous successes which can be utilized to forecast future successful hires. Some data points that you ought to look for in the examination of your previous hires are:

- Demographic info; age, area, current task etc.

• Educational and professional background
• Personal qualities; strengths, weak points, hobbies, interests etc- Qualifications; skills, certifications and so on- Goals; where do they hope to enter their career?

Any other info that you can easily gather might be able to help you draw up your prospect 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 information gathered and in one place it is time to examine it. In this phase, you will see that your personas actually start to take shape. So how do you analyze all your information?

You want to begin by opening up your spreadsheet and put in all your hard information first. This mainly includes demographic data. Ensure that all your data is formatted in the same method to help you recognize patterns quicker and more precisely. Data that you gathered through interviews need to also be included in the spreadsheet. The very best way to do this is to produce categories for the responses to each concern you asked. This way you turn the unstructured interview data into structured and measurable information.

When all your data is nicely structured into your spreadsheet, you can check the data on it. What was the typical age of your ideal candidates from the past? What academic backgrounds did they have? What abilities did they have? How experienced were they? These concerns can be responded to by inspecting the statistics.

3. Map your personas

With all the data organized nicely you can start making your personas. Ideally, you'll be able to develop upto 3 personalities per job opening as there's usually more than one perfect prospect for the job. Your personalities ought to not just be a job description. It is essential that you make them as reasonably human and as lively as possible. Don't think twice to get imaginative; comprise a name for your persona, put an image beside it, create a life story etc. The more in-depth your personalities, the better you'll have the ability to target them and find your ideal candidate.

A crucial thing to include in your persona are the psychographics. If you collected the best information, you need to be able to obtain these from your spreadsheet. Psychographic information differs from market information as they have to do with an individual's worths, beliefs, and interests. It is extremely personal information and can be tough to obtain. The following image shows the distinction 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) advertisements. There are several social recruiting platforms you can use for your social ads and one is not always better than the other. The effectiveness of the platform is reliant on the task you're attempting to fill and the prospect personas. When choosing a channel it is very important to initially do your research on who the users are of that particular channel. Taking a look at the demographics of each channel can currently assist 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 mentioned above has its own ads platform. They are all quite comparable in use and frequently have similar functionalities. The primary distinctions are the advertisement formats and requirements for the images/videos. All channels provide you a great deal of options to target really particularly. This is why your candidate personas are so crucial. They help you to choose who to focus your social advertisements on, which will make your ads more effective and less expensive.

We'll walk you through each channel below.

Facebook & Instagram

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

Additional reading: How to develop your employer brand on Instagram

1. Creating your first Facebook & Instagram recruitment advertisements

Once you have your account set up and your payment information entered, you can begin creating your first project. Head over to the campaigns tab in your Facebook Business Manager and click the green button on the left side of the screen.

In the next screen you can pick your campaign objectives. For task advertisements, I extremely recommend to choose "Traffic" as your project goal. The traffic objective enables you to lead individuals to a particular landing page and you can pay per click rather than impression. Also, many of the other objectives do not enable the proper formats for task advertisements.

Don't forget to give your campaign the suitable name for easy recognition in the projects dashboard. At the bottom of the screen, you can also select whether you want 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 performs best.

2. Creating your audience

The most essential part to concentrate on is the audience you want to target and the ad that you are targeting them with. Aside from all the market targeting choices, Facebook also enables you to target very particularly on psychographic variables. You can target people based on their interests, activities, pages they like, behavior, and interactions they had with your business or website. You can even define a specific audience (for instance; individuals that have visited your professions page) and after that target people that have similarities to that specific audience as identified by the Facebook algorithm.

Knowing what and how to advertise to your particular target audience is just as crucial as picking the ideal audience for your job opening. When you're targeting people with a particular quantity of experience, for example, you'll want to make certain that your ad copy and image show that.

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

Custom audiences are typically individuals 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 upon the data Facebook has on their users.
In order to target more specifically, you can narrow your audience. Narrowing your audience advertisements an extra layer of interests, demographics, or behaviors that must likewise be matched in order to be targeted. This way, when you target a specific interest that is rather popular, you will not end up with a substantial audience of unimportant people.

Getting your audience right

So how do you know that the audience you produced is the best one for the task that you're advertising? Well the response to that is, you don't. A minimum of, not right from the start. That's why you need to have a speculative mindset and want to check things out. Only by constantly trying different audiences and advertisement images/texts will you be able to discover excellent prospects for your openings. It is really uncommon to hit the mark right from the start in social marketing.

An excellent way to test various audiences for your advertisement is to do an A/B test. An A/B test in advertising indicates that you create 2 various variations of the same ad and test which one performs better. As you can see at the bottom of the first screenshot, Facebook allows you to do A/B tests in your projects. With this functionality you can test two various audiences for the same advertisement or 2 various ads for the exact same audience. This can then help you to pick the most reliable variation and scale this up.

Another way to evaluate various audiences is to just release an ad and see how it performs. If the most vital metrics aren't as good as you desire them to be, you can make some modifications to the ad or audience and see how it goes from there. You might likewise keep an eye on comments as an additional metric- the more comments you have on your Facebook advertisement, the more appealing your material is to possible applicants.

3. Ad metrics

Knowing how to translate your ad metrics is essential to understanding whether your ads are reliable or not Facebook has comprehensive reporting on your campaigns that can really assist you to comprehend how your advertisements perform and whether they are worth the cash invested in them.

The most crucial metrics for Facebook ads 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 ads. The CTR shows the relevance and quality of your advertisement and likewise informs you whether you have picked the right audience for what you're offering. Your conversions reveal how many individuals really looked for the job after clicking or seeing the ad. Important to note is that you can just track conversions if you have setup the Facebook tracking pixel effectively. So make sure to contact your marketing or advancement 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 naturally. You don't want to be investing excessive per candidate. The cost per conversion also says something about the quality of the landing page. A high cost/conversion usually means that many individuals click on your ad however don't finish the application on your landing page. If this holds true you ought to consider making some changes to the landing page.

Frequency

Frequency is a metric you may not have actually become aware of however is crucial to take a look at. The metric refers to how frequently the exact same people see your ad. Typically, you wouldn't want individuals to see your advertisement more than 3 times as it might end up being frustrating for them to continuously see the very same ad (which then impacts the quality rating of your ad). You can affect the frequency by increasing the size of your audience.

Important note on advertising through the Facebook Business Manager: Ads for Instagram are likewise done through Business Manager. By default, the ads you create for Facebook will likewise operate on Instagram. When you are selecting your targeting alternatives in your advertisement set, you can alter whether you desire your advertisement to appear on Instagram too or whether you only want to show your advertisements on Instagram.

Twitter

Similar to Facebook and Instagram, Twitter also permits you to specify your target market really particularly. You can target individuals based upon their demographics, habits, events they've engaged with, interests, keywords they've looked for on Twitter, and how they've communicated with your website in the past. This makes it simple for you to target your candidate personas on the social media and get the right individuals to click on your advertisements.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter's ad formats are rather different from Facebook. The primary formats on Twitter are:

Promoted tweets: similar to Facebook's advertisement formats. Here you produce a tweet and boost it to be shown to your defined target audience. 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 ad format is extremely expensive and absolutely not fit for task promotions.
Similar to on Facebook, it is important to watch on the campaign metrics in order to know whether you're getting the outcomes that you want. For Twitter, you'll also need to set up a tracking pixel as well in order to do remarketing and track conversions.

Quora is rather different from the channels explained above in the sense that it is simply a question and response based social networks platform. The platform is not utilized to link with friends and family however rather to find a response to a problem. It likewise looks more like an online forum instead of a social networks platform.

The quora advertisements user interface is rather simple and clean. The ads are fairly cheap and targeting can be done based upon topics, previous interactions with your website, questions, and interests. This makes it fairly simple to discover and target appropriate people with your advertisements. When you're looking for a front end developer, for instance, you can target your advertisements on concerns about front end development.

Like the other channels, Quora also has a tracking pixel that can assist you to track conversions and page views. Something to keep in mind when installing tracking pixels is to ensure that your privacy policy and cookie declaration are updated accordingly. For this, I encourage you to include your legal department.

Testing your channels

Marketing is a different ballgame than recruitment. This means that you will have to alter your frame of mind in order to get your recruitment marketing efforts right. The most important thing is to have a speculative state of mind. This means that you approach your ads as if they're a scientific experiment;

1. You develop a hypothesis. 2. You consider how you're going to check this hypothesis. 3. Test your hypothesis. 4. Evaluate your results.
In your social PPC efforts this might look like this:

Hypothesis: "Using an employer branding video in our ad will offer us at 300 clicks in one week with a CTR of 2.5%". Map test: We will evaluate this hypothesis by developing an employer brand name video and introduce 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 quantity of clicks are great, scale the advertisement by putting in more spending plan. If results are lower than anticipated, make modifications and renovate or mark this as a stopped working experiment- optimizing your paid channels.
By working according to the growth marketing concepts, you execute much faster while lessening your ad invest on campaigns that do not work. Knowing how to read and analyze information within the advertisement user interfaces is important though. The very best feature of internet marketing channels is that whatever is quantifiable. Unlike the traditional offline channels such as TV advertisements and newspaper advertisements, you can in fact measure advertisement success directly. This makes it easy to rapidly adjust your ads in order to enhance the performance.

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

- Click-through rate (CTR); the portion of people that click on your advertisement. - Impressions; understanding the number of in fact see your advertisement is very important to know whether your advertisement is being shown to people. - Clicks; the variety of clicks is essential to see just how much traffic you get to your site from the particular advertisement and. - Variety of conversions; this is most likely the most interesting number for you to take a look at. The variety of individuals that really use after seeing or clicking the advertisement, demonstrates how effective the ad genuinely was. In order to track conversions, you'll require the tracking pixel set up properly and preferably a URL that visitors arrive at after sending their application.
The amount of conversions isn't adequate to judge the effectiveness of an advertisement. The quality matters too and should be watched on. You can determine the quality by inspecting the source of your applicants (most ATS have this function). If you see that numerous of the applicants that come in from your Facebook ads are of low quality, you may wish to think about another channel (even when the quantity of candidates coming in is high).