How are Facebook and Google taking over the recruiting industry?

Social media is seemingly everywhere in modern society – could it be making a play into job recruitment as well? Last year, Facebook launched its jobs feature in over 40 countries in order to take advantage of the endless horde of job seekers that make up its ranks. Facebook may be a titan of social media, but can it take on the established leaders of the recruitment marketing industry?

When it comes to online recruitment marketing, most recruiters have traditionally tended to focus on recruiting sites like LinkedIn and Monster in order to reach potential recruits. However, they are not having the success that they had in the past and are starting to use alternative means.

Companies are spending much more money on recruitment marketing, but are getting inconsistent results on investments for two primary reasons: First, it’s a very competitive marketplace with too few qualified candidates and too many open jobs; and secondly, there are a lot of online services that offer to find candidates but do not provide good returns. With more confusion and less quality candidates, companies are becoming frustrated. 

Facebook, as well as the Google, offer a new paradigm in the recruitment marketing industry. By leveraging Facebook and Google’s new organic offerings, companies are able to capture more candidates that are qualified and engaged at a significantly lower cost and greater scale. 

Lower cost

One of the main negatives of the traditional recruiting sites is the cost required in order to access their resources. LinkedIn Recruiter, with access to the most popular professional social network, starts at $8,999 per year with the Lite version priced at $2,499. Add in the predominant pay-per-click model for job postings – where companies are charged for the number of views of their job-posting – and the cost of recruitment can skyrocket. 

Facebook and Google, stocked with massive organic consumer bases, aim to disrupt traditional recruitment methods by offering companies the means to obtain skilled candidates without paying for them. The question for companies becomes just how to leverage the offerings provided by Facebook and Google at scale in an automated fashion. 

IQor, an outsourcing company, recently found that paid campaigns through Facebook Lead Ads cost them on average $1-3 – a massive improvement from traditional recruitment sites. Organic leads gathered using Facebook offer an even cheaper option: completely free. With 2 billion active daily users on Facebook, the talent pool available to companies is endless. It’s just up to the recruiter to make sure that their job postings are reaching the right people. It may be more work, but when taking into account the savings, the time is well worth it.

Greater candidate reach

Perhaps the best advantage of using Google and Facebook is the flexibility it allows in finding quality people to apply to your company. A problem with traditional recruitment sites is that they typically focus on active job seekers – that is, those who actively seek employment. These candidates are easier to access but many times have low engagement rates with the job they apply to.

On the other hand, passive jobseekers, or those who are currently holding jobs, are a much harder group to access. But if they can be reached, they are often much more engaged in the job than other candidates. No other website can compete with the user base of Facebook, and with well-placed marketing, Facebook can reach passive job seekers better than anywhere else. 

Compared with Facebook, Google is much better suited to find active job seekers in the job market. As many job seekers use Google to initiate their job search, it’s important to use search engine optimization (SEO) and other tricks to find job seekers more efficiently than other sites. It’s easy to see how a page one listing on Google gives a company a massive advantage when it comes to finding candidates.

While much of the marketing space on Facebook and Google is organic, both sites allow companies to sponsor content using their current marketing products. Ads on Facebook can be targeted towards the exact candidate profile you desire, allowing you to easily reach worthy candidates. On Google, companies are able to boost their posting to the top page by paying a fee. Furthermore, both Google and Facebook are working on products specifically designed to advertise jobs which, when released, will be game-changing for the recruitment marketing industry. 

Facebook and Google seem to have a foothold in every industry around the world. While they are not yet household names when it comes to recruitment marketing, it just doesn’t make sense to bet against them as they will almost certainly dominate the recruitment industry as well. Using the resources provided by these tech giants, companies are able to optimize their recruiting campaigns for the 21st century.