Setting up recruitment ads on Facebook like a pro

Facebook advertising is a key part of a recruitment marketing strategy because it helps get your company in front of a wide pool of candidates. Especially quality candidates who aren’t actively using the standard job boards.

Social advertising is a powerful tool for recruitment. However, because most advertising systems are tailored to eCommerce, designing a great recruitment campaign can be challenging. This article walks through considerations and recommendations when using Facebook ads for recruitment marketing.

Set up Facebook Business Manager and ad account

You’ll need a Facebook Business Page and Facebook Business Manager account to run any ads on Facebook or Instagram. This great guide from Hootsuite walks through how to set up Facebook Business Manager.

Business Manager allows you to add multiple people to the account to help run campaigns, but be aware that people will need a personal Facebook account to be able to be added.

To purchase advertising campaigns, you’ll also need a Facebook Ad Account, which you will be prompted to create when setting up Facebook Business Manager.

You’ll also need to verify your website domain with Facebook, which is required to measure and track campaigns.

Choosing a campaign type

To create an advertising campaign, head to the “Ads Manager” section via the top left navigation of your Business Manager Dashboard.

When you click the green button to create a campaign, you’ll be given a list of 11 types of campaign objectives. We’ve found that 3 of these objectives are most useful for recruitment marketing: Brand Awareness, Traffic, and Conversion.

Brand Awareness

Just as people are more likely to buy products from a brand they know, people are more likely to apply for a job at a company they’ve heard of. Brand Awareness campaigns are optimized to be seen by a wide pool of people that are likely to be interested in your company.

These ads won’t directly drive traffic to your website, but they get candidates familiar with your business and ready to click when the perfect position comes along.

Awareness campaigns can be about nearly anything that shines a light on your company. Announcements about growth and awards, articles about company initiatives and culture, and videos about the organization’s achievements and mission can all be turned into eye-catching campaigns.

Traffic

In the Wonderkind platform, this is referred to as a “Clicks” campaign. These ads are targeted to reach an audience that is likely to click on the link in your advertisement.

This audience is narrower than in a Brand Awareness campaign, but still includes people interested but not ready to apply for a job.

These ads can focus on open positions to get people to explore more about the jobs and the company (great for high-volume recruiting). Or feature content that will drive people to your website, like industry hot topics or tips.

Conversion

Conversion campaigns are what people tend to think of when they think about advertising. These campaigns track and optimize towards someone performing an action on your site, such as submitting an application.

For a Conversion campaign to be successful, you first need to build up a solid audience of potential candidates that are familiar with your company. Without that, it’s kind of like running through a crowd and asking strangers to marry you.

Let your audience get to know you with Awareness and Clicks campaigns first, and move more budget to Conversion campaigns over time.

Great ads and brand awareness makes people click, but conversion happens on a landing page. So you need to make sure that your job pages load quickly, are easy to read on mobile devices, and clearly state the information job candidates care about most.

Be aware that Facebook conversion ads are going through some changes in response to Apple’s iOS 14 privacy updates - [update October 2023: please read the following for more on Apple's iOS 17 privacy updates]. Companies will need to prioritize 8 conversion actions per web domain.

If job listings are on the main company website, you’ll likely need to align with the marketing team on the priority list.

Facebook encourages businesses to use the Facebook Conversion API to connect your ads with conversion data from other sources, such as your server, content management system (CMS), or customer relationship management (CRM).

Campaign budget optimization

There are a couple of different choices when it comes to paying for ads. First, you can choose to pay based on clicks or impressions of your ads. Next, you decide how you want Facebook to place your ads:

• Daily Budget: Ads will be paced so, your spending lasts the full day.
• Lifetime Budget: You set the length of a campaign and ads will be placed so your spending lasts the full campaign. This option also allows you to set time windows such as running ads only in the evening or on weekends.

For the 3 main types of recruitment campaigns discussed above, a general recommendation is:

• Brand Awareness: Run as ongoing campaigns, payment on impressions, and either daily or lifetime budgeting.
• Traffic (Clicks): Short run times, payment on clicks, lifetime budget.
• Conversion: Short run time, payment on clicks, lifetime budget. These will likely be your most expensive campaigns.

Select an audience

Targeting job titles and industry is typically where you start with recruitment marketing, but you can reach a lot of hidden potential with unconventional audience traits. For some inspiration, we recently wrote about 5 creative ways to use targeting in recruitment ads.

Facebook also gives the option to target “lookalike audiences.” This is great once you’ve had good campaign results and good hires to confirm your existing audience is what a future one should “look like.”

Ad placement

After testing many of the ad placement options available, we’ve found the most successful ones for recruitment marketing are: Facebook News Feed, Facebook Stories, Instagram Feed, Instagram Stories.  

Here at Wonderkind, we’ve found that Facebook stories are rarely used. Therefore, we wouldn’t recommend using them. We’ve found that the news feed for both Instagram and Facebook have provided our partners with more clicks and conversations.

If you are looking to create more awareness, we would recommend Instagram. Not a lot of advertisers spend time on creating a good Instagram Story. So, if you make a strong recruitment ad on Instagram story, you will stand out.

Create the ad

Putting together a great ad can be tricky. If you’re not sure where to start, check out our guide on how to turn job descriptions into great social ads in 15 minutes.

It can be surprising what combination of copy and images work best for your audience. We recommend A/B testing multiple ad variants in each campaign.

For example, in a campaign about an open position, one ad version could focus on the salary and perks, another on the company culture, and a third on the job functionality.

Put recruitment marketing on autopilot with Wonderkind

If you need to ramp up recruitment quickly, manually creating the assets, audience, and budgets for each campaign will slow you down. Wonderkind helps you accelerate recruitment marketing by automating your social strategy across Facebook, Instagram, Google, and LinkedIn.

Our Talent Attraction Technology uses data from years of recruitment campaigns to build an audience that’s perfect for your industry, location, and open positions.

Our easy-to-use platform makes it simple to spin up creative ads in minutes with campaign templates, a library of stock photos, and instant image cropping. Once ads are running, keep track of performance and spend across all social channels in one overarching dashboard.

Ready to turbo-charge your talent sourcing? Check out how Wonderkind works or see it in action.

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