In today's challenging labor market, it isn't enough to post a job on Indeed, ZipRecruiter or Craigslist and then sit back and hope for enough applicants.

Hiring is becoming more and more like sales and marketing—you have to find the people who are great fits, then win them over by showing them what's great about your job. Online ads let you do this by getting in front of the thousands of people who might be good fits for your job but aren't spending their time on job boards. 

Using Facebook and Instagram for Recruiting

While you used to be able to post jobs to Facebook and promote them on the social network (a lot like boosting a job on Indeed), you can longer post jobs to Facebook and therefore cannot promote native job posts on Facebook.

You can, however, use Facebook and Instagram to run advertisements about jobs. This is kind of like your own little Super Bowl commercial for your open jobs. Your advertisement appears in front of people who may not be job seekers or actively looking for a job, but might be interested in your job...and who are similar to all the people who've shown interest for similar jobs. 

According to the 2017 Mind the Workplace report, 71% of people are willing to switch jobs, but most of those people aren't actively looking at job posts or on job boards. Social media ads get you in front of people while they're going about other things. Furthermore, the great advantage of Facebook and Instagram is that you can get in front of the right people—just people in your geographic area and just people who might be good fits.  Finally, it's also an inexpensive way of getting in front of thousands of people quickly. 

In the guide below, we'll talk through the basics of getting started with running ads on Facebook and Instagram for your job. While this overview walks through all the details in running your ads manually, you can also use a tool like Team Engine to automatically run ads, or you can hire a digital marketing firm to do the work for you.  

The Basics of Facebook & Instagram Ads for Hiring

When you run an ad on Facebook or Instagram, people are going to see it in their newsfeed. It'll look something like this: 

The whole process of running ads can be confusing and somewhat intimidating, and there are people who have entire careers setting up these ads. We'll walk you through the basics to demystify the process.  

There are a few basic concepts within Facebook and Instagram ads that are worth understanding:

• Campaign: This is the overall set of ads you'll be running. We recommend that you create one campaign per job that you are hiring for. This setup keeps keeps creating ads simple, and as you get more sophisticated it makes trying new things easier.  One key thing to note is that because your advertisement is for a job, you'll need to mark it as a special ad category here.  This special ad category involves a few other restrictions: the types of audiences you can show the ad to, the locations you can show it to, and more. 

• Ad Set: This is where you setup who sees the job ad and where they see it. For ads run through Team Engine, we'll automatically show the ad to people similar to those we've seen get hired and do well in jobs like your job and within a certain radius of your office.  If you're doing it manually, you can limit this based on interests or current jobs. For example, for driving jobs you can indicate that the ad should only be shown to people interested in cars and trucks. Finally, you get to choose whether these ads are shown on Facebook, on Instagram, or around the internet with their partners. 
• Ad: This is the advertisement that people actually see for your job.  It needs to include an image or video, text describing the job and pitching the opportunity, and a link so that when someone clicks on it they can apply.  (see examples here)
• Placement: Everything we've discussed so far has been specific to Facebook, so where and how do you start running Instagram ads? Because Facebook owns Instagram, they've made it easy to set up advertisements on both platforms at the same time. During ad creation, you'll come across a section called "Placements," which gives you the option to advertise on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.

Deciding which platform to run ads on can be a complicated process. We recommend starting with a small budget and running ads on all platforms initially, then narrowing your focus and increasing budget as you learn which channel performs best for your business.

Pro-tip: Don't forget to preview your ad on all channels before submitting your ad. Sometimes images get cropped or text cuts off as ads are automatically generated for different platforms.

Once ads are running, billing is complicated and technically an auction. The upshot is, from what we've seen, you'll end up paying 1-3 cents per person who sees the ad.  Your cost per application is going to vary significantly based on two key factors:

1. How competitive the job market is in your area. In some areas, it's just harder to find people to apply. 
2. How many people there are with the skills to do your job.  For very highly skilled jobs, there may just be a limited number of people in your area who could do the job—meaning it'll be more expensive to find those that could do it. Alternatively, if your job is much less desirable than other jobs (for example, lower paying or physically challenging jobs like moving), we'll see that it's more expensive to get good applicants (since the best people go for other jobs).  

⮕ Related Reading: Which types of job ads perform the best on social media & Craigslist?

Building the Ads for your Job

To begin, make sure you've created an ads account for your business page on Facebook, then head to Facebook Ads Manager to start building ads.

Within the ad, you'll need a picture or video, a short pitch for what the job is and why people want it, and a link to an online application for the job.  

• For the picture or video, you can either use something you already have, or you can use a website like Pexels for stock pictures that are free to use. We've found that the best pictures either show someone doing the actual job (or a similar job) or highlight something unique about your company (your equipment, etc). We've seen that videos often do even better than images. The key thing is that people respond best when they get a sense of what they'll actually be doing each day.  
• For the short pitch, again, we've seen that the clearer you are about what the job is and why people should want it, the more likely they are to click on your ad. Your goal isn't to make everyone click on your ad who sees it—it's to make sure that the people who really want your job click on it. 
• For the link to the application, the key thing is making sure the link goes to an application that looks good on a phone and is easy to use. Applications that are really long or involve a ton of typing often mean that people on phones give up before finishing the application.  

Next Steps

Now that you have some of the basics down, to get started with Facebook and Instagram ads, you have a few options: 

1. Set them up manually. As you do this, you can leverage Facebook's guides to get started. These aren't tailored around recruiting, but give you a good sense of actually getting all this setup.  
2. Hire a digital marketing agency. As the job market has gotten more competitive, many of the companies that used to run ads helping you find customers are now offering to run ads helping you get more applicants. These agencies tend to provide a full service offering and to be fairly expensive.  
3. Use software. Team Engine fully automates running online ads for jobs. You just say how much you want to spend and everything is setup automatically, then shown to the exact right set of people based on the thousands of people we've helped hire for similar jobs. 

Want to learn more about how we automate Facebook ads for recruiting? Sign up for a commitment-free demo to see it in action.