In today’s labor market, job boards aren’t enough. You can’t rely only on people proactively looking for a job because so many of the great people are currently in jobs (even if they don’t love them). By using Facebook advertising for hiring hourly workers, you have a chance to go after people who may have other jobs but who would be excited by your job.
Facebook Jobs vs Facebooks Ads for Hiring
There are two key ways you can use Facebook to get applicants:
- Facebook Jobs: You can post a job directly to your Facebook page and then optionally choose to promote it. These jobs are easy to add and people can apply right in Facebook.
- Facebooks Ads: These are targeted ads you can run that appear in someone’s Facebook feed, in their Instagram account, etc.
Many of the companies we talk to have tried posting Facebook Jobs, as they’re quick and easy to post. The key challenge is that they aren’t targeted, so you typically aren’t able to get the set of candidates you want. We have seen that Facebook job ads can be good if you have no skill requirements on your jobs and can take almost any one. They do require that you have setup a Facebook page for your company.
Facebook ads on the other hand are very targeted – you can specific exactly where the ads run (which cities, neighborhoods, etc), the types of people that see them, the skills they have, etc. Once you do that, you build an advertisement with an image and with text and set it running. Facebooks ads take a ton more time and knowledge to setup, but their targeted nature means you can get right to the candidates you want.
Facebook Jobs will typically generate lots of candidates (but often times none that fit), while Facebook ads will produce fewer candidates but they will be drawn from the exact pool of people you were looking for.
Getting started with Facebook Advertising for Hiring Hourly Workers
If you are going to run Facebook advertising for hiring hourly workers, there are three main things you’ll setup.
Campaigns (What job are you advertising)
First, we recommend setting up a campaign for each job. This makes it easy to decide how much you want to spend per job.
Audiences / Adsets (Who is seeing your ads)
Within each campaign, you can setup different audiences (also known as an adset in Facebook terminology). An audience / ad set is the group of people who are going to see your ads. For example, this could be everyone who’s currently a driver within a 5 mile radius of your office, everyone who’s a high school graduate, or everyone who’s similar to the last 30 people you hired. You can setup multiple audiences to show ads to at once, and then test to see which group responds best to your ads.
Ads (the headline and picture that you use to send someone to the job application)
The next layer down is to setup the ads that potential applicants will see. You need to specify three things:
- A picture. We recommend using pictures you already have of your business, people working there, your equipment or, failing that, using stock photos from a site like Pexels.
- Text. You need to be clear about which job you are hiring for, and that this is a job ad. We recommend something like “Hiring House Cleaners”. Second, we recommend you use this text to put forward your best argument for why someone would want to apply for this job.
- The link to the application. Since the goal of your ads is for people to apply, you’ll want to send them directly to the application.
Where to start
If you want to get started using Facebook advertising for hiring hourly workers, you have three options:
- Do it yourself. If you have digital marketing experience or a strong marketing department, you can test using Facebook for hiring initially. If you’re already running Facebook ads to find customers, you can use that expertise to get a test up and running quickly.
- Hire a marketing agency. You can hire a marketing agency that focuses on using Facebook advertising for hiring hourly workers to set everything up for you. The main downside to agencies are that they are expensive (because they’re using people for everything) and not as effective as software. Running Facebook ads is still an area where computers do a better job of making it simple by doing things for you and running all the analysis.
- Use hiring software like Team Engine. We’re biased, but in our experience setting up Facebook ads is super confusing and involves a bunch of expertise. At Team Engine, we take advantage of our huge dataset of past job applicants who’ve applied to similar jobs to target the ads to exactly the right people. By doing this with software, the cost ends up being much less than an agency (and with better results) – all while saving your team hours and hours of time.
Have questions on the best practices of using Facebook for hiring hourly workers? Set up an appointment with one of our software specialists.
