Johnny Oshika

Earlier this year, Facebook started experimenting with a new website design. Pages became wider and design elements became larger. The reviews were mixed but Facebook proceeded with their plan to completely switch to their new web interface by September 2020, and switch they did! When you now visit facebook.com, you will be greeted with the new Facebook!

Around the May timeframe when Facebook was rolling out the new design to some users, Facebook App Developers (including Jobcast Engineers) noticed that their Facebook apps were getting cropped at 800px height. That was a problem for many Facebook apps that needed to display a lot of content on a single page. Jobcast experienced this problem as well, and our Page Tabs looked something like this:

Notice that the list of jobs above are cut off at the bottom. This problem was reported to Facebook Engineers and at first it looked like Facebook was going to fix the problem. App Developers (including Jobcast) were anxiously waiting for this fix. Fast forward to November 2020 and there still isn't a fix by Facebook with no indication that there ever will be. So Jobcast decided to do something about it. We can't change the 800px height limitation, as that's in Facebook's control, but we decided to add a vertical scroll bar (when necessary) to the Jobcast app so that users can at least access the full content on your Careers Tab. We also removed anything that increased the height of the page that we didn't deem absolutely necessary. We did this to minimize the amount of scrolling that users would need to do. The items that were removed are:

• Top banner image

• Bottom banner image

• Admin controls near the top of the page

• "Powered by Jobcast" note at the bottom of the page

This fix isn't ideal (we would much rather have Facebook Engineers fix the vertical height problem), but your users will at least now be able to see and read your jobs in their entirety.

This is how your jobs now appear in your Facebook Tab. Most of the content should now appear within the 800px height:

If the content on the page extends beyond the 800px height that Facebook has allowed us, then a vertical scroll bar will appear that will allow users to scroll down to the bottom of the content:

Note: These changes only apply to Desktop web users of Facebook, as Facebook still doesn't allows 3rd party apps to appear on Facebook Mobile.

A couple of months ago, we introduced Job Sync, an incredibly easy way to automatically synchronize your jobs between your existing career site and your Facebook Page. But what about those of you that don't have a career page on your corporate website? We've found that many of you are using Jobcast as your exclusive ATS, and as a result, you want a way to embed jobs on your company website. In other words, you want to use Jobcast to manage all of your recruitment efforts.

Introducing the Job Widget

Our Job Widget is easy to set up: just copy and paste one line of code and a career site will appear instantly. Your visitors will be able to search jobs and apply to them directly from inside of your website.  And for those clients who have upgraded their account to a Premium plan, you will be able to brand your career site just as easily as branding your 'Careers' tab on your Facebook Page. How to get started....

1) Retrieve the Job Widget code from the Jobcast app on Facebook. This code can be found under Customize -- Pages -- Job Widget:

2) Copy and paste the Job Widget code into any web page (or pages) where you want your jobs to appear. Here is how that would look if you're using WordPress:

3) Your jobs will instantly appear on your website:

If you upgrade to Premium, you can strengthen your brand by customizing the Job Widget just like you can for your Facebook Page:

We hope that our Job Widget will make it extremely easy for you to embed your jobs on your company website and provide an excellent job application experience for your candidates.

We hope your company is growing and you have open positions to fuel this growth. However, we realize that there are times when you don't have any open positions to advertise. In those situations, you can still use Jobcast to communicate your values, culture, and what it's like to work at your company to prospective hires. Up until recently, we didn't provide much flexibility in how this message was presented until a few weeks ago with the introduction of a rich text editor. So instead of just plain text, you can now style and highlight your message, and most importantly, add links to external sources.

Simple Rich Text Editor

Customized "No Jobs" message on your Facebook Page

So the next time you don't have any open positions to advertise on your Facebook Page, we hope that this update will provide you with better tools to present a more effective message to your visitors.

A couple of weeks ago, we replaced the “Send” button with the “Share” button on your posted jobs on your Facebook Page.  We blogged about why here:

http://blog.bcjobs.ca/jobcast/share-button-meets-the-like-send-button/

Over the last couple of weeks, we been experimenting with a new way to share your jobs on Facebook. The goal of this experiment was to have the “Share” button appear alongside the “Comment” and “Like” buttons on any message you shared using the Jobcast app. These messages appear on your Page Timeline, as well as the News Feed of your fans.

The feedback from our clients has been overwhelmingly positive, so these changes are here to stay.

You will now notice that your shared messages includes a “Share” button for improved distribution.

Sharing Messages with Jobcast

Your Shared Message as it Appears on News Feed

We hope that with this change, your shared messages reach more candidates on Facebook.

Happy sharing!

Jobcast’s Facebook recruitment app makes social sharing of your job postings easy. As a Facebook Page administrator, you can share your jobs to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn at any time through Jobcast’s administrative tools.

Your public job detail page included Facebook ‘Like’ and ‘Send’ buttons. These buttons have become ubiquitous on the web because of their powerful sharing capabilities. Visitors express their interest in a job by ‘liking’ it, and when they do, the job gets broadcasted to their friends on Facebook. The ‘Send’ button on the other hand allows visitors to selectively send a job posting to friends.

While both the ‘Like’ and ‘Send’ buttons have served their purpose well, neither of these buttons allow you the flexibility to choose specifically where to share a job. To fill in this gap, we have introduced the ‘Share’ button.

The ‘Share’ button allows your visitors to choose from the following options when sharing a job:

• Share to personal timeline

• Share to a friend’s timeline

• Share to a Facebook Group

• Share to a Facebook Page

• Share in a private message to friend

Since the Share button offers most of what the ‘Send’ button does, we removed the ‘Send’ button to keep the visual complexity of the page to a minimum.

We hope that the addition of the ‘Share’ button will increase the reach of your job postings on Facebook.

As always, we welcome your feedback on this new Jobcast development!

We recently added more search engines to our list:

• Jobrapido

• Yakaz

• JustJobs

• Wowjobs

By simply enabling the Include Jobs in Search Engines option, your jobs on your Facebook Page will automatically distribute to these new search engines, which we hope will greatly increase the exposure to your job openings.

Just like sharing your jobs to your Social Network, you will be able to measure the success of these search engines through our reporting tools:

We will monitor the quality of candidates referred from these search engines and add and remove from the list to continue improving the exposure to your job openings. Happy recruiting!

When you install the Jobcast Facebook app, it comes pre-configured with a list of 20 generic job categories, such as Accounting, Sales and Marketing, and Software and Programming. When you post a job, we ask you to select up to 3 categories from this list. This allows your candidates to better filter and find the job that they’re interested in. This would have served you well if you had job openings that fall nicely into these categories, but what if you wanted to hire a Chef, an Architect, or a Pilot?  We didn’t have categories that matched these job openings, so you were left to select Other as a category, which was a problem for a lot of our clients. To solve this problem, we are introducing a way to add your own custom categories that are specific to your company. We wanted to do this in a way that won’t interrupt your job posting workflow, so here is what we came up with. When you post a new job or edit an existing one, you will see this familiar category drop-down.

Notice the new Add Custom Category button. Clicking it will reveal a new input box.

Enter a new category, then click Submit to add it. You’ll then see it appear as a selected category.

Editing the category is just as easy. When you open the category drop-down list, you will notice an edit icon next to your custom categories.

Tip: You can only edit categories that are listed in the drop-down. Currently selected categories don’t appear there, so you will need to deselect it first before you can edit it.

Click the edit icon and you will be prompted to change it. Hit Enter to save or Esc to cancel.

You’re welcome to add as many custom categories as you’d like, but we recommend that you keep this to a minimum and categorize your job openings appropriately.

I hope you find this new feature convenient and intuitive to use.

Happy recruiting!

With the recent switch to Timeline for Facebook Pages, tabs on your Pages are now represented by large images:

Did you know that you can customize these images? For example, the Jobcast tab image by default looks like this:

You can change both the image and the name by editing the tab settings.  To do this, first expand your list of tabs by clicking the arrow on the right of the images:

Now when you hover over the tab image, a pencil will appear. Clicking on it will reveal the Edit Settings option.

Note: It’s important to first expand the list of tabs even if the tab that you want to edit is already visible. If you don’t do this, the tabs won’t become editable.

Clicking Edit Settings will pop open a dialog, and from here you can customize the tab image and tab name.

The maximum supported image size is 111 x 74 pixels, and here is an example of a Facebook Page with a customized Jobcast tab:

If you want to revert the image back to its original, you can repeat the steps you took to get to the change image dialog, and from there select Delete Image.

The new Timeline for Facebook Pages brings a lot of options for Page administrators, and customizing tab images is one of them. I hope you have a chance to customize these images to better represent your brand on your Facebook Page.

Last Friday, all Facebook Pages were upgraded to Timeline. In anticipation of this upgrade, we've been working hard on an updated version of our Facebook app to better showcase your job postings.  I'm excited to announce that the update to our app is now complete. Here are some of the highlights:

More Real Estate for Your Jobs One of the biggest benefits of the new Timeline design is that apps installed on your Facebook Page get a lot more real estate.  This allowed us to rethink how jobs should be listed and displayed. We hope that this new design will make it easier for your candidates to filter and apply to jobs that are most suited to them.

Improved Job Application Experience

One of the use cases that we wanted to support was the ability for a candidate to review a job description while applying to a job. We often recommend to candidates that they should customize their application to reflect the requirements in the job description, so to make this easier, we've added a "Show Job Details" button on the application form. When clicked, this button will reveal the job description beside the application form.

Direct Link to Job

We previously supported Facebook's native ability to share job postings by "Liking" or "Sending" jobs to friends, but it was never easy for users to share jobs on their own.  To address this problem, each job posting now comes with a "Link to this Job" button. When clicked, a shortened URL will be revealed. This URL will direct desktop users back to the job posting on your Facebook Page, while mobile and tablet users will be directed to a mobile optimized version of your job posting.

Back Button Support

During our many usability tests over the last few months, we often saw our users click the browser back button only for it not to work as expected. I'm pleased to say that we now fully support the browser back button inside of our Facebook Page app.  In modern browsers, you will even see the panels slide in and out of the page when you click the back button, just as it does when you navigate from job to job. We hope that these changes improve the job application experience for your potential candidates. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave a comment here or post on our Facebook Page.

One of the most requested features of Jobcast.net's Facebook App has been the addition of a Facebook "Like" button on job postings.  I'm excited to announce that it's finally here! Your jobs on your Facebook Page will now show the ubiquitous Facebook "Like" and "Send" buttons:

When a user clicks the "Like" button, your job will appear on the user's Wall and will be published on his/her friends' news feed...letting them all know about it. When "liking" a job, the user will also have the opportunity to add a comment so that s/he can add some context around the "Like". This is an effective way for your visitors to promote your jobs on a large scale.  However, often times it doesn't make sense to promote jobs to everyone in ones friends list.  For those times, the "Send" button is an effective way to selective notify friends about a particular job. Messages sent through the "Send" button will appear in the recipient's personal Messages list and can provide a more personalized experience:

I hope this drives more relevant traffic to your job postings. As always, we value your feedback, so please let me know how we're doing by sending us a message or reviewing our App on our Facebook Page. Please note that there's currently a bug in Facebook's "Send" button API that prevents the "Send" button from showing unless the "Like" button has been clicked. This bug has been submitted to Facebook, so I hope they fix it soon.