The big months for hiring are January and February and so we thought it a good idea to discuss the benefits of using Facebook to promote your job offerings.

Social Recruiting – What Are The Benefits?

Your Facebook business page is just as a good a place as any career portal for attracting, selecting and appointing suitable candidates for jobs within your organisation. There are a number of benefits to setting up a careers tab on Facebook – benefits that other talent-hunting tactics may not be able to offer.

Firstly, recruiting on Facebook enables you to tap into the networks of your fan page visitors. It also enables you to reach the network of current employees. You can take advantage of this audience and turn fans into hires for minimal costs to your HR department.

Employee-seeking this way lessens the dependency of your business on recruitment agencies and career portals. It makes your HR department more agile and self-sufficient and consequently brings down costs of hiring.

By posting your job openings as your business page’s Facebook status, you will be able to recruit from your entire network of friends and subscribers (and your co-workers) without having to work the phones, do lunch, or send emails to long lost connections.

Lastly, it is another tactic for growing your current audience.

How Should It Function?

How we approach our Facebook app development projects is by starting with what it is the app must achieve, and how it will achieve this. The functionality of career tabs is generally as follows.

It must:

1. Display available jobs.
2. Allow Facebook users to like and share available jobs.
3. Allow users, which will most likely be company employees in this instance, to refer potential candidates.
4. Sync with the job listings on your website in order to avoid costly duplication of work for the hiring team.
5. Users must be able to apply for jobs via the Facebook career tab without having to leave the Facebook environment. To get really tech-savvy, create pre-filled application forms that retrieve information from their Facebook page.
6. Have a search mechanism that allows prospects to search for careers.
7. Allow users to see any people they know at the company via their Facebook network.

The Design

We’ve chosen the current Starbucks Facebook careers tab to discuss as a design example because it is just awesome, particularly by way of functionality.

1. Welcome Page / Job Listings

When you arrive on the app the welcome page is a lengthy list of available jobs at Starbucks. On this tab it is possible to see which of your friends are connected to the company. Conveniently, it is possible to copy/paste the app link so that users can easily share the jobs being advertised with their network.

2. Jobs Map

On the left hand side we have an easy to use navigation bar. Beneath the job listings tab there is a Jobs Map. Clicking this opens up an interactive map that allows job seekers to easily locate job listings in their area.

3. Our Culture

Possibly our favourite section of this app is the company culture page. This introduces users to the company and gives potential candidates a taste for what it feels like to work for the company.

4. Job Alerts

Via the app job seekers can subscribe to receive notifications of new Starbucks jobs, which will be sent via email or to their mobile phone.

Does your business have a social edge for acquiring top talent? Do you use Facebook to find fresh, hot talent? We’d love to know, tell us about it in the comments.