ALC - CareerArc blog

How to navigate Facebook’s new “Special Ad Category”

In August Facebook announced it would begin requiring all U.S. based housing, employment and credit advertisers to select the “Special Ad Category” option in Ads Manager when creating ads. Selecting this option restricts ad targeting options. Employment advertisers can no longer target by age, gender, zip code, multicultural affinity or options describing protected characteristics. Unfortunately, this includes targeting by company, job title or education.

Having a solid social media strategy is a crucial component to any company’s recruiting efforts. A brand can create posts that reflect their goals, company culture, and overall mission to help attract top talent to their page. With an average of 1.56 billion daily active users, Facebook is an ideal place to start. However, the effectiveness of your Facebook posts will only go so far if you are not also monitoring performance and using those insights to inform the content you’ll produce in the future. Essentially, what your brand posts on its social channels is only as important as how much engagement it gets. It’s like that old saying goes, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Social media channels have an impressive range of benefits as part of a complete talent acquisition and recruitment strategy. From the low-cost advertising options to the ability to build connections, online networks offer a unique opportunity to reach new talent. This opportunity is the reason that 92% of organizations include social networks in their hiring process in some way, including one of the most popular social networks, Facebook.

By Katie Gechijian
Lead Consultant, Proactive Talent Strategies
World’s Greatest Sourcer 2016 Competition, #2 of 1235

The recruitment and talent acquisition field has transformed dramatically in just the past decade, with most of the disruptive changes resulting from the rise of social media and review sites that have turned the hiring landscape into a more transparent, always-on, and increasingly mobile environment.

Facebook, the largest social networking platform, has made its repository of over 2 trillion posts and real-time content searchable. How can this impact how job seekers find jobs on social media? And what could this mean for recruiters and sourcers who use Facebook as a social recruiting tool?

Last week Facebook announced Search FYI, its significant upgrade to Facebook’s search capabilities that effectively made all public posts in the Facebook index searchable.  Prior to the update, Facebook users were primarily limited to seeing and searching posts of friends, family, liked groups, friends of friends, and other affiliations. Now, public Facebook posts–be they from individual users or brands–can be found with the right combination of keywords entered in the Facebook search bar.
Here are three things recruiters and employers need to know about Facebook’s new Search FYI:

With 1.28 billion monthly active users, Facebook has become the central hub for social exchange today. Second only to Google as the most visited site, Facebook has effectively weaved its platform into day-to-day life and culture one friend request at a time.
But with Facebook housing the largest database of online profiles and personal information on the planet, the network promises more possibilities than mere social exchange. For employers, recruiters, and talent acquisition professionals, Facebook presents potentially the most powerful online directory of talent on the planet.