Does Facebook Recruitment Advertising work?

I've just been reading a rather startling account of how many advertisements on Facebook are run by advertising networks simply looking to scam facebook users. The article is written by an insider who designed many of these scams, and shows a fairly lax approach to facebook policing this. You can read this article here.

We've presented our online recruitment training sessions to almost 300 direct recruiters so far this year, and not one of them has reported using Facebook advertising as a means of recruiting staff. Is anyone out there using it for recruitment? If not, why not? Is it simply a matter of major brands not wanting to have their adverts run along side the slightly seedier adverts, or do recruitment adverts simply not work on Facebook? Google seems to have a reasonable number of direct recruiters placing google adword adverts. I am yet to see any direct recruiters looking for staff on Facebook.

Other Options

There are still other ways to recruit staff via Facebook. The most productive being to build a group or profile page to promote your vacancies and let everyone know what it is like to work in your organisation.

The Future

In the article I mentioned earlier, Dennis Yu does paint a somewhat rosier picture for Facebook advertising in the future. He explains that once the major brands start to heavily advertise on the facebook network (and many of them are there already), then the spammers and con artists will be squeezed out by the rise in advertising prices. Personally, I think it is a little lame for Facebook to wait for market forces to resolve this issue, but the future for Facebook advertising could be bright. So make sure you stay up to date on this issue.

Choosing the right title for your job board advert

As part of our next wave of Online Recruitment Training Workshops we're going to be releasing a series of videos showing some of the content we go over in the half day sessions. Here's a sneak preview in the form of Part 1 - Choosing The Right Job Title for Your Advert...

How important is the Candidate Experience to your organisation?

We've been nominated for an award for the service we deliver to candidates, so it’s easy for me to sit here and say how great we are (that was yesterday’s post). However, I am a little concerned with the candidate experience delivered by the rest of the flat fee recruitment industry. As you would expect, I am a huge fan of the flat fee recruitment model, I think it delivers real value for the customer and is far more efficient than the prehistoric traditional agency model.

But most providers don't deliver a great service to candidates. It's no secret that most flat fee recruitment providers view the candidate as a commodity, something to be passed around to clients with no feedback and no candidate care.

I was interested in seeing the level of candidate care that was delivered by one of the more well known flat fee recruitment agencies, they were early adopters of this flat fee model, so should have had enough time to get this right by now. I decided to "mystery shop" them to see what the candidate experience was like. It was, as I suspected, dismal. The conversation went something along these lines:

Me: Hi, I am enquiring about the Payroll Manager role in Woking (I've changed the details of the role to protect the guilty).
Flat Fee Receptionist: Yes, have you seen the advert online.
Me: Yes, I have
Flat Fee Receptionist: Ok, well if you are interested then you need to apply online for the position.
Me: Ok, but I just had a couple of quick questions that I was hoping someone could answer?
Flat Fee Receptionist: All the information we have is on the advert.
Me: Ok, but I just need to know if the role is in walking distance of Woking train station as I don't drive?
Flat Fee Receptionist: All the information we have is on the advert.
Me: But I don't want to apply for a role then get an interview only to realise I have wasted everyone's time if I cannot commute to their office.
Flat Fee Receptionist: All the information we have is on the advert.

This went on for a bit longer, but I finished the call understanding one of the reasons why this provider is able to offer their service at a cheaper rate than EasyWebRecruitment. Because there is far less service provided than we presently offer. We encourage all our clients to "mystery shop" us, and many do. If you phone our office about a vacancy you will in almost all occasions get your call transferred to the person managing that vacancy, who will be able to intelligently answer all of your questions about the vacancy and the client.

There are two competing models emerging within our industry. The scenario above is a good example one inefficiency in the "automated flat fee recruitment model". There are many more. This model attempts to replace each process that might have involved a well trained recruiter with a robot or a not so clever piece of software. Our organisation and a few others understand that if you take the human beings out of the process what you end up with is a one-size-fits-all service that does not flex to the needs of the client, does not deliver real candidate care and, ultimately, does not reduce costs for your clients (as more roles go unfilled).

You get what you pay for, but flat fee does not have to mean a service delivered by robots.

In tomorrow's post I will highlight the real differences between these two competing models.

Candidate Feedback sees EasyWebRecruitment nominated for RecruitRank Award

It’s almost 4 years since the start of EasyWebRecruitment as a flat fee recruitment agency. When we set out our aims and objectives it was to surpass the service delivered to both candidates and clients whilst dramatically lowering their costs. We have seen lots of happy clients come back to us with positive feedback on our service but we have never tried to precisely measure the experience the candidates using our service find.

We have always worked to a principle of updating every single candidate on the eventual outcome of every single application they make to us we also make sure we reply to every email and return every phone call. It is this approach that has seen candidates using jobsite recruit rank service rate us as one of the best performing agencies in the UK for candidate experience.

Whilst we don’t expect to win on our first outing to the Awards, it feels great to be nominated and free champagne is my favourite champagne.

For more information on all the finalists, see: http://www.recruitrank.co.uk/finalists.html