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Let me start with a question I get asked more than almost any other when it comes to marketing channels. Should I be using Facebook for my recruitment business?
It usually comes with a follow-up. Is it not just for personal stuff now? Has everyone not moved on to LinkedIn or Instagram? Is it worth my time?
Here is the honest answer. Facebook can be genuinely useful for recruitment, but only for a particular kind of hiring, and only if you use it in a particular way. A lot of the owners I work with get this wrong on both counts. Some write it off completely and miss a real opportunity. Others pour hours into it expecting it to bring them clients, then feel let down when it does not, because winning clients was never what Facebook was for.
So let me clear it up. Here is what Facebook is good for, what it is not, and how to decide whether it deserves a place in your marketing for the rest of the year.
Facebook is bigger than you think
First, let us deal with the myth that everyone has left.
Globally, Facebook has more than three billion people using it every month. It is still the biggest social network in the world.
Closer to home, in the markets most of you work in:
- Around 56% of the UK population have a Facebook account, roughly 55 to 56 million people.
- In the US, around seven in ten adults use Facebook.
- In Australia, around 65% of the population are on it.
In our markets, the audience is broadly stable rather than growing fast, but it is enormous, and it is not going anywhere. So no, Facebook is not dead. Not even close.
But scale is not the same as relevance
Here is the thing to hold onto. A huge audience only matters if the right people are on it and you can reach them. So the real question is not how big Facebook is. It is who is on there for you, and whether you can get in front of them.
What Facebook is really for in recruitment
When it comes to recruitment, Facebook has one clear job. Candidate attraction, and specifically for volume and local hiring.
It is not a client channel, at least not organically. It is not where you win business development or reach senior hiring managers. And this is not just my opinion, it is built into how the platform works.
On LinkedIn, people show up as professionals. They tell the platform their job title, their company, their seniority. That is why you can target a hiring manager or a head of talent so precisely. On Facebook, people are not there as professionals. They are there as people, catching up with friends, sitting in local groups, watching video. So the targeting recruiters rely on, by job title, by seniority, by company, either is not available or is not reliable.
That single difference tells you almost everything. Facebook is brilliant at reaching a broad, local, personal-life audience. It is weak at reaching a specific professional one.
One exception, and it is paid
There is one important caveat. Everything above is about organic Facebook, the free posting side. Paid is a different lever.
When you put budget behind Meta ads, you can build brand awareness with a far wider audience than your own followers, and that can include potential clients, not only candidates. It will not replace LinkedIn for winning business, but it can keep your name in front of the right people. There is a fair bit to running Meta ads well, and we will cover that properly in a dedicated episode later in this series.
The reach problem nobody tells you about
Now for the single most useful thing I can tell you about Facebook.
If your Facebook strategy is a company Page that you post to now and again, I am sorry to say, almost nobody is seeing it.
Organic reach on a Facebook Page, the number of your followers who see a post without you paying, has collapsed. The benchmarks now sit at around 2% of your followers per post. So a thousand followers might mean twenty people see a post. Ten years ago that figure was closer to 16%. It has fallen off a cliff, and it is not coming back, because Meta makes its money selling reach through ads.
So where is the life on Facebook? Groups.
Facebook Groups reach 15 to 40% of their members per post, five to fifteen times more than a Page. The algorithm favours Groups because people opt in and engage there. A niche local jobseeker group, or a sector-specific community, will do far more for you organically than your company Page ever will.
That flips the usual advice on its head. The instinct is to build your Page and post your jobs. The reality is that your Page is the weakest tool Facebook gives you, and Groups are the strongest. If you take one thing from this, let it be that.
Where it works, and where it does not
Let us make it practical.
Facebook works well when your hiring depends on candidate volume in a specific area. Retail, trades, hospitality, industrial, warehouse, driving, admin. Roles where you need a steady flow of local applicants, and where those candidates are living their everyday lives on the platform and in local groups. For that kind of hiring, Facebook’s local reach and low cost are hard to beat.
Where does it fall down? Executive search. Specialist technology roles. Professional services placements. Anything where the candidates and clients are senior, specific and few. Those people are far easier to reach on LinkedIn or through niche channels, and Facebook’s lack of professional targeting works against you.
So the question is not whether Facebook is good or bad. It is whether the hiring you do matches what Facebook is good at. For some of you that is a strong yes. For others it is a clear no. Both are fine, as long as you are honest about which one you are.
A real example
Here is what this looks like done well.
A technical staffing company wanted more applications for the roles it was filling. Rather than relying on its Page, it ran a tightly targeted local campaign, focused on people of working age within about a fifty-mile radius, using job-related search terms, backed by consistent content.
Over the year, job applications rose by 82%. They nearly doubled. Follower numbers climbed sharply, and website traffic rose too.
Notice the pattern. Local. Targeted. Consistent. A little paid spend to earn reach, rather than hoping the Page would deliver it. That is the Facebook playbook for recruitment in a nutshell.
If you use it, here is what works
If you have decided the hiring you do fits, here is what works, based on the data rather than guesswork.
- Lead with Groups, not your Page. Get active in niche and local groups where your candidates already are, or build one if the right group does not exist. That is where your organic reach lives now.
- Use video, and caption it. Native and live video get the highest reach by a distance, and most people watch with the sound off on their phone. Captions are the difference between being watched and being scrolled past.
- Do not treat Facebook as free. Pair organic activity with a small, consistent paid budget. Even ten to twenty pounds or dollars a day, run properly and given time to settle, will do more than occasional bigger bursts.
- Go hyper-local for volume roles. Target by area and by interest, exactly as in the example above.
And the mistakes to avoid: relying on your Page as your main channel, posting rarely and expecting reach, using Facebook to chase senior decision-makers it was never built to target, and running paid campaigns on too small a budget for the platform to learn anything.
How to decide if Facebook is right for you
Three questions to consider
- Does my hiring depend more on candidate volume in a specific area than on reaching senior client decision-makers? If yes, Facebook is worth a proper look.
- Do I have even a small budget, say ten to fifty a day, and a few hours a week for content and a group presence? If not, organic-only effort at today’s reach levels probably will not repay the time.
- Is my priority reaching hiring managers or senior clients in professional services or technology? If so, Facebook is a secondary channel at best, and LinkedIn is where your energy should go.
Answer those honestly and you will know. That is the whole point of this series. Not to be on everything, but to choose the channels that fit how you win, and give those your full attention.
How we can help you this year
Working out which channels are right for your business, and then producing the content consistently, is exactly what we help recruitment and search companies with inside Superfast Circle.
Our members get done-for-you content, monthly coaching and a clear plan, so marketing stops being the thing that slips when you get busy.
If that is the kind of support you have been looking for, book a call and let us show you how it works.
www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call
Thanks
Denise
