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How Facebook Is Changing the Way Staffing Firms Source Candidates

Staffing Stream

How Facebook Is Changing the Way Staffing Firms Source Candidates

October 21, 2013

Main Article

Staffing can sometimes seem like an active candidate waiting game. Sure, you can try to connect with passive candidates through professional social networks, but not everyone for whom you’re looking has a professional profile or visits those networks on a regular basis—especially if they’re not actively looking for a new job.

While your active candidates may apply in droves, sourcing passive talent with specific qualifications, skills, or work/education history is bound to pay you a much higher return in terms of quality and retention.

Of course, with quality you have to sacrifice time and money, since sourcing requires a much higher investment on both fronts - or does it?

Enter Facebook: the world’s largest social network, where users no longer simply connect with college friends or family members, but with companies, brands, and, yes, recruiters.

Facebook has already proven itself a robust platform for building a talent pool and attracting new candidates though recruitment ads.  A successful Facebook recruiting strategy starts with attracting a large community of interested, quality candidates and engaging them with your agency so that they continue to return to your Page to search for open positions or to share jobs with friends.

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But how can you narrow down your talent pool when you have a specific position to fill or seek passive talent outside of those already engaged with your Facebook Page?

This is where Facebook’s new search tool comes in to make your sourcing simple: Graph Search, which you can access by typing any query into the search bar at the top of the screen, returns results based on the most relevant people, places, and content in and around your network. While Graph Search was not designed specifically with recruiting in mind, it opens up a world of opportunity for finding the right people to match your ideal candidate description.

For example, if you’re sourcing local talent in New York City, and you primarily source graduates with business degrees, you can head to Facebook and type, “Graduates of New York University in 2013 who majored in business.” If any potential candidates are in your network, they’ll show up as your first results. After that, you will see any Facebook users who have made their profile information public. Depending on your results, you can even refine the search further with filters like “employer,” “hometown” or “former school” if you want to get more specific. (To better target, contact, and track candidates, you can use a solution like Graph Search Recruiter, which leverages Graph Search specifically for recruiting by giving you tools for connecting your current applicant tracking technology and jobs list to Facebook. This type of solution allows you to build searches in a single click, as well as track the connections you make with talent on Facebook, including messages sent and responses.

Facebook is one of the most engaged social networks in the world, and users have given Facebook vast amounts of information related to everything from work and education history to skill sets, interests, locations, and more, so you have an increasingly accurate picture of your potential best-fit candidates every time you use Graph Search to scout talent. And with the ability to contact most Facebook users in your network for free (and users outside your network for as little as $1), you’ll find sourcing on Facebook to be a very cost-effective way to reach quality candidates.

With new tools for narrowing down the talent even while extending your reach on Facebook, you no longer have to play the active candidate waiting game while staffing much needed positions or filling your talent pool.

For more information on harnessing the power of Facebook Graph Search for your recruiting efforts, read: “The Joy of Facebook Recruiting: Sourcing the Best Candidates with Graph Search.”

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