Stop! Don’t recruit on Facebook!
…but why? What makes it such a bad tool for recruitment? How can reaching out to 2 billion+ Facebook users be a bad thing? Is there such a thing as bad recruitment advertisement practices?

First, let’s look at the typical style of recruitment advertisement on Facebook. Your company offers a bonus scheme for successful new referrals, but you don’t allow people to refer anyone except people they know personally. Yet, for some reason, that Spanish guy working on the support team just so happens to know a great IT developer from Italy who doesn’t even live here, yet he was able to forward his CV to you. Isn’t the world getting smaller? Isn’t it great that he has so many contacts to people? Or is it more likely that in fact, he was carrying out unauthorised recruitment on Facebook?

Of course, it’s the latter. Facebook is full of advertisements along the lines of „English + French speakers wanted for IT job in exciting international corporation, e-mail me at my private e-mail address!”. Do you really want your company to be associated at the first step with shady recruitment practices such as this? Even if you don’t care (and let’s be honest, you probably don’t), think about the type of people attracted by such advertisements. Do you want to work with them? Are they likely to improve your work atmosphere, or make it worse?

Bonus hunters

With the GDPR (RODO as our readers might know it) now coming into force, such „bonus hunters” should become an extinct breed. It is a dreadful idea to allow your employees to collect personal data of potential candidates on behalf of the company, not least because of the potential implications surrounding GDPR deletion requests. Can you be sure that the data won’t find its way into the wrong hands as a result of your bonus scheme? Data protection concerns are particularly close to people’s hearts at the moment, and by allowing data to be handled in an uncontrolled way, you along with your company can be potentially liable for considerable fines.

Secondly, you might try using Facebook Ads. Sure, it can be one way to reach people, especially if you want to highlight how your company differs from others. The problem is that everyone is doing it, and so your advertisement is likely to be lost among all the noise. Yes, you offer free coffee, private health insurance and a fitness card, but so does everybody else. Do you think anyone worthwhile is reading, or have they already found a way to block Facebook Ads, particularly if you’re looking for young, internet-savvy professionals who know how to use sophisticated online tools to optimise their internet experience?

Low quality content – not a good thing!

Thirdly, do you really want your company to be associated with low-quality Facebook content? While it might be an effective way to reach a large number of people, have you considered that the quality of candidate on Facebook may, in fact, be significantly lower than on other social media channels? The famed signal-to-noise ratio is particularly high on Facebook, and even if your recruitment advert reaches an audience, are you sure that the audience is the correct one?

Finally, image is everything. Do you want to be seen as on an exciting, dynamic place to work – or as a place where clumsy attempts are made at everything, beginning with the initial recruitment process? Facebook is no longer associated with „cutting edge” and „cool”, but rather as a monolith in which all aspects of our life is tracked, monitored and processed.

So, how can you use social media to help you recruit new talent? That is a question awaiting an answer…