3 Essential Ingredients to Spice Up Your Sourcing and Recruiting with Facebook Graph Search

By Kirsten Smith

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Running a social recruitment campaign can be daunting--from filling hiring initiatives to engaging a talent pool on Facebook, recruiters often find themselves seeking out best practices to make the process easier. 

One of the biggest questions we hear from recruiters when it comes to using Facebook for sourcing is “How do I find candidates in the first place?” 

Fortunately, Facebook has just released a tool to its entire US user base that answers the question for them: Graph Search. 

Stéphane Le Viet, the CEO of Work4, recently discussed some basic tips for getting started with Graph Search (as well as answered the question, “What is Graph Search?”), but I’d like to take a moment to discuss some more in-depth strategies for using Graph Search as a talent acquisition tool: 


1. Lean on local: 

Unless you’re planning on paying for relocation, using local search will be your greatest advantage. Not only can you search within your employee and fan networks, but you can also narrow your search to people who live in specific towns, go to specific universities, or work for specific companies (or some very specific combination of all three). Going local helps you hone in on homegrown talent as quickly as you can say, “What time can you stop by for an interview?”  


2. Go all-organic: 

Did you know that while you’re busy sourcing your candidates on Facebook, your candidates can be sourcing you? If you have properly tagged your Facebook updates or input the right information in your organization's “About” section, when potential candidates search for terms related to your keywords--or even for companies, products, or services related to your industry--you may show up in their results! Make sure that your careers page and employer brand are optimized for an organic search, so that even passive talent will have the opportunity to stumble across your page. 


3. Pack on the #s: 

Using hashtags in your page updates makes your posts searchable. This works in your favor in two ways: 

One, you can search for hashtags/keywords related to the skills, interests, locations, jobs and more to discover people who are having a conversation that signals their potential as a future candidate. (You can also always look for people who #needanewjob or are on a #jobsearch. You never know who you’ll find!) 

Two, if your posts are properly tagged, your company updates become a draw for users who are searching for companies just like you. Moreover, if you let candidates know that you’ve got a great #newjob for them, you might find yourself a part of a conversation that users desperately need to have. 
 

If you’d like to tuck in to a full meal of recruitment strategies, you can check out Work4’s latest whitepaper, “The Joy of Facebook Recruiting: Sourcing the Best Candidates with Graph Search.” 

I’d love to hear more about how you incorporate Graph Search into your sourcing and recruiting going forward. Which of these strategies will you use? Have you found any other strategies that you will be employing in your social recruiting efforts going forward? 

Kirsten
 

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