Fewer Updates, More Engagement: That’s the Way the U.S. Recruits on Facebook

By Social Recruitment Monitor

Facebook brand pages are popular for marketing. Many employers also use them for recruitment. That’s what can be seen from a long overview of U.S. employers listed in the Social Recruitment Monitor. With so many employers using Facebook as part of their employer branding and recruitment communication, this raised an interesting question: What can we learn from all the activities? Let’s take a look back at what happened in 2014.

Top performing U.S. employers using Facebook for recruiting in 2014
In order to get an indication of which U.S. employers performed best last year, we carried out an analysis using the average weekly SRM INDEX scores by the Social Recruitment Monitor – a calculated metric that is defined by a series of weighted variables that determine an employer’s popularity, activity and interaction. Based on the average SRM INDEX in 2014, we can see that the U.S. Air Force leads the following top 10 list.

 

Facebook Popularity
Although there are signs of a small decline in popularity of using Facebook as a social networking tool, it still has the largest active user base worldwide. Many HR/recruitment departments acknowledge the importance of connecting, engaging and hiring via a dedicated careers channel or a career tab on a company’s corporate Facebook brand page.

In 2014, we asked HR professionals that recruited using social media about their use and perception of social media. Key insights from the 2014 Social Recruitment Benchmarking Survey are that many employers actively using social media see ‘social recruitment’ as serious business. 90% of the respondents answered they spend more than 8 hours a week on managing social recruitment and that Facebook is the most used channel to recruit.

 

Facebook Activity
Based on the top 10 performing employers in 2014, we can see an average of 10 updates posted on Facebook in 2014 compared to 12 in 2013. This decrease can be the cause of the composition of the top 10 in 2013, but it could also be sought by the growing interest of employers making use of sponsored updates.

The majority of the updates shared contain visual content in the form of photos. Also in 2014, this is the most popular way to grab ones attention and let them experience their employer branding.

 

Based on the content analysis on employer Facebook pages, we see more employers use special designed updates for Facebook. These are usually a translation of their overall corporate identity or EVP.

Generally, we see employers post: 

• Photos of their employees in average working situations
• Company or industry news
• Photos to experience a company culture
• Information on CSR activities
• Sharing facts or quiz questions
• Photos of career fairs
• Awards won
• Vacancies

 

Posting made by EY on their US Careers Facebook page (link: http://on.fb.me/1wz5fn7)

 

Facebook Engagement
How do all of these updates on the page result in engagement with fans? Based on the top 10 employers with the highest SRM INDEX, we analysed and found that the engagement based on updates posted is an average of 934 in 2014 compared to 719 in 2013. This growth in average engagement can again be explained from differences between the 2013 list, but can also be sought from the growth in page popularity.

The numbers presented in this article give you an overview of page performances over the year 2014 and compare them to those in 2013. If you’re interested to learn more about the performance rankings week by week of U.S. employers on other social channels such as Twitter and YouTube, or rankings of other regions worldwide, visit the monitor on www.socialrecruitmentmonitor.com.

We’re looking forward to another year of measuring employers’ activities on social media.

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