Will You Find the Ideal Candidate on Meta? Your Primer on Social Media Job Advertising

With users worldwide spending an average of 147 minutes per day on social media – nearly two and a half hours – places like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok should be ideal places to advertise jobs, right? Absolutely. In this post I’ll provide a quick overview of social media job advertising or social media sourcing, its pros and cons, and how Joveo helps its clients strategically use these channels as part of an effective recruitment advertising mix.

What is Social Media Job Advertising?

Many millions of people visit Facebook and Instagram daily. As they’re scrolling through their feeds, some of them will see job ads for package handlers, warehouse workers, servers at chain restaurants, nurses at hospital chains, truck drivers, and all manner of high-volume positions. And a lot will click. Many will apply. That’s because ad targeting on social platforms can deliver an extremely receptive audience for job ads, reaching passive job seekers in the online communities they frequent the most.

The results? Joveo’s data shows that click-to-apply (CTA) conversion rates on social media ads can be seven to eight times better than ads placed on job boards! But, before you drop everything to switch all your job advertising to social media, let’s take a look at the bigger picture.

Part of a Larger Advertising Mix

Say the words “recruitment advertising” and most people don’t think first of Facebook and Instagram; job boards like Monster and tens of thousands more are top of mind. Most companies use job boards as a cornerstone of their recruitment advertising, supplemented by organic sources liked LinkedIn and Indeed. These sites attract people actively looking for a job at that moment in time. From an employer’s perspective, competition for these candidates is high, and they’ll pay advertising dollars to get their jobs listed first on job boards, LinkedIn, and Indeed.

When the conversation shifts to Facebook and Instagram advertising, these sources are not organic in any way. As noted above, Facebook and Instagram ads are paid sources of traffic, targeted at audiences of passive job seekers. The extremely granular user profiling technologies that Facebook and Instagram use allow finely detailed demographic cohorts to be assembled, delivering passive job seekers who are nonetheless highly likely to be interested in the job you’re advertising.

Google Ads – both search and display – are another important paid source that is usually underutilized. People searching for jobs on Google are likely active seekers, and companies can employ a sizable portion of their budgets to push their ads toward the top of job search results.

Strategizing how to post jobs across this panoply of channels now starts to look a lot like media planning. Joveo’s search, social and display advertising service  offers a unique ability to assess, place, monitor, and continually optimize the total picture of our clients’ programmatic job advertising, in a holistic and fully integrated way.

Factoring in Pros and Cons

Joveo’s search, social and display advertising service, MOJO Gro, helps our clients sort through the pros and cons of social media job advertising, which can include:

• Depending on the nature of the job, Google display ads and Facebook social ads do not always perform as well as job boards because user intent is not as high.
• Google search ads can offer performance nearly comparable with job boards, because users here are actively looking for a job – interest is high.
• Long application processes are better suited to positions listed on job boards; CTA rates on social media ads plummet when it takes more than several minutes to fill out a job application.
• While CTA conversions can be seven to eight times better on social media ads and Google ads, cost per click (CPC) is higher because social media ads help reach a passive audience that may need an additional push to apply.

All of these variables (and many more!) factor into our analysis of clients’ advertising requirements, and developing programmatic ad placement strategies to meet them.

Joveo’s Search, Social and Display Advertising Handles it All

Joveo works with clients in a number of ways. From a channel perspective, we can function as a media agency, an extension to a marketing agency that typically runs social media ads. Larger companies may have an internal recruitment marketing team tasked with social media recruitment advertising, alongside other brand campaigns.

Many of our largest clients find it attractive to outsource all social media recruitment advertising to MOJO Gro, eliminating the headaches of having to dedicate internal resources to a non-core activity. Other clients simply don’t have the in-house staff and choose Joveo as their social media recruitment advertising partner from Day 1. Still others will pilot a specific program with us and compare performance.

When clients choose Joveo for search, social media and display advertising, we assess and evaluate social media channels just like any other publisher, offering a uniquely consolidated view of total recruitment ad spend, to boost ROI.

To find out more about how Joveo can help you meet (and exceed!) your paid search, paid social and display advertising needs, request a demo today and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.