Samara Parker

Personality tests fascinate me. 

I’m not talking the ever popular Buzzfeed what celebrity baby are you type quizzes here, although occasionally even those prove hard to resist! 

Nope, I am referring to those tests that claim to give you all of the information you need to choose your perfect career, make people like you, and just generally become more successful at life.

So I couldn’t help but click when Trish from HR Ringleader posted an article begging the question: How Valuable are Personality Tests?

Like Trish, I am also torn on the subject, and like Trish, I was curious enough to take the “Fascination Advantage” assessment that inspired her article.

You can get a free promo code to checkout the test (it’s pretty short) at Jennifer McClure’s awesome blog, Unbridled Talent. 

I don’t really see how the info I got from my assessment is going to help my career much… But there’s a new app out that looks like it could help me with that!

Good.Co has just released an iOS app also called GoodCo that claims to help you find out how to improve your work relationships, and determine if you are a good fit for a company’s culture through a series of fun quizzes.

So far so fun, but I don’t know that I would let an app, especially one with such hideous icons, dictate my future job choices!

One personality type I never seem to get, no matter what test I take is “Introvert,” even though I spend all day working all on my lonesome with only the voice of Ira Glass to keep me company!

If you, or someone you know does fall into the introvert category, then I highly recommend reading this lovely article for WorkAwesome by Diane Mottl: 5 Ways to Make Office Life Easier for Introverts.   

A personality trait shared by many entrepreneurs is, apparently, an extreme lack of enthusiasm for HR… Do they not understand that the HR field is best field? Jeez!

Well, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Startup Executives May Not Focus On HR, but It Plays Important Role. Both Kris Dunn and Laurie Ruettimann were interviewed for the piece so it is definitely worth a read.

In fact, this article is the source of Jobcast’s choice for best HR quote of the week. The quote is from Kris Dunn who warns that:

“The biggest mistake [startups] make is to hire someone who’s a cop and who thinks it’s enough to have an employee handbook and just enforce the rules.”

Infographic of the week goes to James clear with this little gem:

And video of the week is all about a trait I hope you all rank very high in: happiness!

Apparently employees happiness has less to do with whether or not they interact with unpleasant customers, and more to do with whether they have to fake a sunny disposition.   

TEDxCopenhagen – Mette Böll and The biology of authenticity:

TEDxCopenhagen - Mettre Böll and The biology of authenticity

What about you?!

Do you believe in personality assessments? Would you use an app to help determine cultural fit?

Let us know in the comments!

Happy Link Loving and stay quizzical 🙂

Historically, when humans began to collaborate and work together, a fundamental shift happened. A shift that prioritized intelligence over forceful competition. Cool huh?

Thank you Discovery Channel!

The importance of intelligence in today’s society is undeniable. We all strive to be more intelligent in all aspects of our lives. We want to work smart, live smart, and even exercise smart!

“Cooperation leads to intelligence.” – Click to Tweet Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

We also want to be smart with our use of social media. So, doesn’t it make sense to apply this idea, that cooperation leads to intelligence, to our social strategy?

Instead of arguing about which social network is the best, pitting Twitter against Facebook, yelling “Google Plus is dead, long live LinkedIn”, or choosing to abandon Pinterest in favour of Instagram, why not just accept that collaboration is the key to a great social strategy?

Besides providing bloggers with attention-grabbing headlines, setting one network against another really doesn’t do anyone a lot of good.

The Case for Collaborative Social Networking

More eyes on your content

If you want to get your content seen by a lot of people, social networks will do the trick: 

At 1.19 billion, Facebook has the most active users of any network – Click to Tweet

Which is great, but quantity isn’t everything!

A greater diversity of eyes on your content

You also need to consider the type of user you are trying to reach. What if, for example, you need to reach a “more mature” demographic?

Google Plus, and rather surprisingly, Twitter, tend to have a high percentage of users over the age of 35:

So, just because one network boasts more overall users than another, doesn’t necessarily mean that it has more of the users that you are trying to connect with.

Different mediums get different results

Then there’s the fact that different types of content serve different purposes.

Job postings that are accompanied by video receive a 36% higher rate of application – Click to Tweet

YouTube is, therefore, a valuable asset for recruiters, as it allows you to upload and share videos that express your employer brand. YouTube also ranks #2 when it comes to active users.

So, YouTube must be every recruiter’s top choice for social recruiting then right?

Wrong!

In fact, according to Jobvite, this couldn’t be further from the truth:  

Why don’t hiring pros simply put a recruiting video up on YouTube, and wait for the applications to come rolling in?

This brings us right back to the beginning…

Getting more eyes on your content

Recruiters want as many potential candidates to see their job posts as possible. YouTube alone won’t make this happen for them.

Unlike LinkedIn, YouTube isn’t geared towards job seekers, nor does it allow for candidate targeting, as Facebook does.

So, in order to get their recruitment videos seen by the most potential hires, it makes sense for them to share the videos they make on LinkedIn and Facebook as well.

Innovations in social tech

Social tech is evolving in a way which proves how the idea we opened with, “Cooperation leads to intelligence,” is true for media as well as humans. 

All of the latest social management Apps, like Buffer, Sprout Social and Swayy, allow us to manage multiple networks. 

Hootsuite, although not as new as the apps mentioned above, is one of the most used apps amongst social media pros, and its primary function is making social sharing across multiple networks easier. 

This is in response to all this evidence that the use of collaborative social media yields better results across the board.

This is especially valid when considering trends that show an increase in the amount of social media users that spread their activity and time across multiple networks:

The only real downside to using multiple networks is that it is more time-consuming than simply focusing your efforts on a single social platform.

This problem, though, is easily resolved for most types of content with the use of the tools mentioned above (Buffer, and Hootsuite.)

These tools make it incredibly easy and efficient to share most types of content across multiple platforms at a time.

Unfortunately for social recruiters, “most types” doesn’t include job posts.

That’s where a tool like the Jobcast social recruiting app comes in handy.

With Jobcast you can automatically share jobs from your Career Site to multiple social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You can even schedule posts so that they are shared multiple times throughout the day, at the most effective times for your user-base, and with the hashtags of your choice.

You can also set up social sharing for multiple team members, to harness the power of their social connections.

Learn more about how Jobcast can help you share your jobs to multiple social networks without have to post more than once…

Or shoot me an email (samara@jobcast.net), I’m always happy to help 😀

Have a collaborative day, and stay social!

We are halfway through the work week, well into summer, and, I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a reading break!

I know it’s time to kick my feet up, grab a coffee, and pull out ye old iPad whenever I start getting super excited by headlines like “How Flexible Work Culture Can Make Business More Social”… 

Not that it’s a boring headline, but it’s no “Bat Boy cheats on Lobster Girl with her reptilian sister,” if you know what I mean?!

But, without fail, come Wednesday morning I need to know all about how a talent hungry business wouldn’t consider an incredibly skilled and talented candidate, living in London – one of the world’s best cities in which to build a career because she needed a small degree of flexibility.

If you feel the same way give the article a read. It is actually quite fascinating, Bat Boy or no!

Flexible culture is not just a great way to attract candidates, it is also a great way to improve retention. Providing your staff with a little flexibility is well worth the improvements it provides in both engagement and productivity.

Not convinced?

“Disengagement and unproductivity is costing the US $4,621 per full time working employee.” – Click to Tweet

That number shocked the pants off of me! For more about how the cost of workplace disengagement is real and is much more of a priority than many of us ever thought, head over to Blogging4Jobs and read Jessica Miller-Merrells eye-opening new blog post.

Janine Truitt, another fantastic woman of HR, also shared a fascinating article this week called “Is Too Much Cross-Functional Work Killing Your Employees?” 

“Despite a society in love with doing the most, the truth is that we can do only one thing well at a time.” – Click to Tweet

We all know that trying to tackle too many projects at once is a recipe for disaster, but according to Janine many of today’s companies are witnessing this disaster first hand because they have condensed jobs to a point where employees simply cannot cope.

If you’re experiencing employee burnout at your company, you may want to check out Airtasker. 

Airtasker is like Odesk, but for employers looking to hire locally. Unlike similar sites such as TaskRabbit and Gigwalk, Airtasker is less curated. It’s founders describe it as more of an open market place approach to hiring temporary staff more like eBay and Airbnb.

So far Airtasker is only available in Australia, but they plan on expanding to the US in the near future. Australian or not, I highly recommend checking them out as the casualization of labour the company represents is a growing trend.

Let’s end on a fun note. This one’s an oldie, but a goodie… It’s probably the funniest HR related video I have EVER seen. Language has been beeped out, but the end is NSFW. You have been warned!

Dr. X fires Wolverine: 

Ex-Men: Wolverine

So, how about it, would you fire Wolverine? Would you use a service like Airtasker? Is you culture flexible?

Let us know in the comments!

Two heads are better than one!

This is even more true when it comes to social networking because those two heads will bring with them all of their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn connections… So it is actually more like hundreds and hundreds of heads floating along the series of tubes that is the internet, just a lot less creepy.

I’ve been working with a new Jobcaster who is extremely socially savvy. 

She has been building a social media strategy for her company. She reached out to me because she wanted to know if it was possible to automatically share the jobs she posts with Jobcast to more than one LinkedIn profile. I told her yes of course, showed her how, and she was off to the races. Easy peasy! 

But this transaction got me thinking about how many social recruiters out there may not know how simple it is to get their whole team on board with their social recruiting strategy.

Getting your team to help you recruit will make your efforts much more effective. This is because the main benefit of social recruiting is that it allows you to reach a huge amount of potential candidates and that amount increases exponentially with every team member you have sharing your content.

An easy way to get your whole team on board and harness the power of their social networks, is by giving them some degree of admin access to your company Facebook Page.

If you give your staff access to your company Page, then your Page and the job posts you share on it, are more likely to be seen by their connections. 

If you use the Jobcast app, then any team member you add as an admin (even with limited permissions), can set up automatic-sharing so that every time you post a job ad it will be automatically pushed out to their social networks including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Here’s a step by step tutorial that shows you how to add admins to your Facebook Page

1. Log in to your Facebook Page and click on the “Settings” tab in the top navigation bar.

2. Click on “Page Roles” located in the side navigation bar.

3. Type the email address or name of the team member you wish to add into the appropriate box. Note, you must enter the email address connected to your team member’s Facebook account.

4. Choose your team member’s level of authorization. Here is a link to a chart explaining each role , and the permissions associated with them.

5. You will have to re-enter your password before Facebook approves your request.

6. Once you’ve submitted your password, you will see a note that the transaction is pending.

After completing this process your team member will have to log in to Facebook and accept your request. Once they have  done this, then they can start sharing, commenting, and promoting your job posts right along with you. Here’s a tutorial that you can send your team members about setting up job post auto-sharing for their social networks!

Happy Monday, and stay social!

The internet is just bursting with fantastic content this week!

From slick new apps, to recruitment basics revisited, to triangular infographics: this link love’s got it all!

On Hiring, Recruitment, and HR

There’s a new report out from ADP’s Recruitment Quotient: Raising Your Talent IQ 

You do have to give them some of your personal info, but it’s worth it for graphs like this one:

How is your ATS effecting your candidate’s experience? According to Andrew O’Brien’s article: Are Recruiters Taking the Wrong Approach to Applicant Tracking, not so good! 

“Just 16% of candidates think existing applicant tracking processes ‘work well.’” – Click to Tweet

Maybe it’s time to try something new? Like an app. Perhaps even an app that let’s you recruit on all the major social networks from a single dashboard, automate the job posting process, and allows for collaboration, note taking, and applicant tracking… Just sayin’.

“Almost every US company (92%) is now hiring through social media.” – Click to Tweet

At least according to Ben Slater’s article: The Pre-Application Stage: Attracting the Best Talent, and honestly, that stat doesn’t surprise me.

Ben’s article, on the other hand, is brimming with new spins on some HR basics. He explains where a brand begins to be a part of the application process, and provides excellent advice on making the recruitment process welcoming.

Another recruitment related question you may have found yourself asking is: How Risky is That New Hire? 

Luckily for you, Andrea Sharfin answers that question in her recent article on Medium. She also quite confidently shares what, in her opinion, is The One Interview Question That Really Matters!

I don’t know if it’s really the single most important of all the interview questions in all the world, but it is incredibly smart and left me feeling  quite impressed by Andrea and her thought process.

Social Stuff

The Complete Guide to Transactional Email by Jimmy Daly is a MUST read. It is clear, chock full of valuable information, includes screen shots and excellent data points, and it’s a fun read.

You could easily apply what he is saying to your email transactions with potential hires, or if email marketing is completely outside of your wheelhouse, I highly encourage you to send it to anyone you know in marketing.

Bonu Link

New app alert!

Icebergs.

This app is sort of like Pinterest, but for hipster designer types. It allows you to create boards (Icebergs) from content you find on the web, files you upload, and notes that you can write in app.

You can use Icebergs to collaborate with team members, and use the information you gather their to work on projects, assist with content curation, and what ever else you have on the go.

So far I give Icebergs a 14 out of 20. For context’s sake: Trello is a 21 and the LinkedIn app is a 4.

Well, his week’s Link Love has me feeling inspired to revamp our content calendar, email campaigns, and newsletter… I hope it has provided you with some inspiration as well.

From all of us at Jobcast, have a lovely week…

And stay social!

I was planning on putting together a post explaining the basics of Facebook Insights, but realized, it’s already been done.

In fact it’s been done really well…

Here: How to Use the New Facebook Insights

Here: What You Need to Know About Facebook’s New Insights and Analytics

And here: The New Facebook Insights: What’s New, What’s Awesome and What Sucks

Instead we thought we’d share our strategy for effectively using Facebook Insights without falling asleep on your keyboard (especially important these days, due to the advent of treadmill desks). 

Facebook Insights: Totally essential to social recruiting and about as exciting as watching Dora the Explorer for the tenth time in one day!

That’s why our Facebook Insights philosophy is one of minimum effective dose.

Do as little as possible, to achieve the results you need.

No, we are not encouraging you to be lazy! We just understand that you have a lot on your plate, and the thought of spending hours trying to analyze Page after Page of data is enough to make you abandon Facebook Insights altogether. 

Abandoning Facebook Insights leads to frustration over declining reach, and poor ROI. At best, this will lead to the overconsumption of ice cream, sleepless nights, and a generally unpleasant attitude. At worst, this will lead to abandoning social recruiting completely, relegating your job posts to back alley job boards, and the dust covered career section of your local newspaper.

Plus:

• 49% of recruiters report improved quality of hire with social recruiting! – Click to Tweet

• 76% of job seekers report finding jobs through Facebook –Click to Tweet 

• 94% of recruiters use social to recruit – Click to Tweet 

(Stats curtesy of Jobvite, thanks guys!) 

So how do you spend as little time as possible analyzing the data Facebook Insights provides?

Focus on the essentials.

The 3 Essentials of Facebook Insights

1. Posts –  When Your Fans Are Online

You want the potential candidates following your Page to see your job posts. You are much more likely to get job seekers’ eyes on your content if you share it when they are online. 

You will also get more engagement if you time your posts to be shared when your fans are most likely to see them. Engagement in the form of re-sharing, Liking, and commenting, is one of the best ways to get your jobs seen by future employees.

Use the information you find in the Posts section of the Insights Page to determine when you schedule your job posts, and other promotionally content should be posted.

Hot Tip:

Jobcast let’s you auto-schedule job posts for more effective engagement.

2. Reach – Total Reach

Total Reach shows you the number of people that could have seen your posts. 

It is useful for maintaining a general understanding of your Page’s success. You want to make sure that, in general, your Total Reach is climbing. 

Your Reach will dip and climb from hour to hour, day to day, but if you notice a steady decline, it’s time to change things up!

(Check out this blog post for 3 ways to improve your social media content strategy)

You can also use the Total Reach section to get more insight into when your Page gets the most potential for candidate views, and what kind of posts perform the best. This data can help you improve your scheduling even further, and nail down what types of content to focus on.

3.  Reach – Likes, Comments, and Shares

The Likes, Comments, and Shares (LCS) section of your Reach Page gives you all the data you need to track fan engagement.

The visibility of your Career Page, job posts, and content depends on this engagement, because it is how Facebook determines to who, and how often they show users the content you share.

The more you can get people to engage with your posts, the better!

The LCS section is where you go to see records of the number of users your posts engaged, and how they engaged with those posts.

This data gives you everything you need to inform future content strategy because it shows you what content works best for you.

Example

I notice that I got a spike in engagement on June 10th so I click on the spikey part of the chart provided to figure out why:

Facebook will show me my posts that day, their total reach, their Click Through Rate (CTR), and their total Likes, Shares, and Comments:

Now I have a better understanding of why June 10th was a good day.

You can use this kind of info to determine which posts work best, then you can improve your content strategy by focusing on the type of content that is most effective for your needs.

Hot Tip:

When it comes to engagement #hiring is your friend, as is video!

Now, what you’ve all been waiting for…

The Most Important Metric: Where do they all come from!

Job seekers who view your job posts, applicants, your latest social recruiting wins hires… They all come to your job posts from somewhere, but do you know where that somewhere actually is?

Knowing where your candidates are coming from will help you know where to focus your time and money for future campaigns.

With the Jobcast Social Recruiting App you get full reporting on job views by source, applicants by source, and hires by source.

This is an example of the metrics for job views by source on a test post, just to show you what our reports look like:

We’re also working on more detailed reporting for the future, so stay tuned 🙂

Get a handle on your candidate source data, install the Jobcast social recruiting app toady. 

Happy hiring, and stay social!

Hello and welcome to the first Link Love for July.

It is going to be hot hot hot… 

Okay… Not really, but we do have some sizzling articles to share!

If this blog post was actually that hot, then it would be NSFW. If this blog was NSFW, then you would have to read it outside of office hours which would cut into your time in the sun.  

Now that we’ve explained the lack of bikini clad HR pros and muscle bound recruiter dudes, it’s time for the links:

“To win in the marketplace…you must first learn what makes your employees want to be in your workplace.”

This quote is from a Switch and Shift article called The Employee Trinity: Engaged, Happy and Motivated, by Shauna Sexsmith. In the article she explains how to get the most from your employees by making a few small changes to the way you interact with them.

Next up: Is Your Recruiting Process FEEP. 

You heard read me right. FEEP. Sounds like a noise made by an adorably fluffy Pixar character, but it is actually an acronym for fast, engaging, easy, personal invented by Raj Sheth.

Much less adorable is the stat Raj shares on candidate experience stating that: “46% of candidates rate their experience poor or very poor.” Raj’s solution, make your recruiting a little more FEEP (bet you  didn’t see that one coming)!

Speaking of innovative recruitment ideas, have you heard of “evergreen jobs?” I certainly hadn’t, but it’s a very cool concept. 

“Simply put, these (evergreen jobs) are the one or two most critical corporate jobs where you continuously search and hire every more-than-qualified applicant who fits the culture in order to ensure that you always have enough talent in these critical positions.” 

This concept is promoted by Doctor John Sullivan, in his recent article for TLNT: The Evergreen Advantage: Why It’s Smart to Always Be Recruiting.

To always be recruiting sounds a touch exhausting no? But at least you have podcasts to help get you motivated! In fact, thanks to Nisha Raghavan, you have a pretty epic list in the DriveThruHR HITS Series for 2014 that you can turn to when you need a little human resources inspiration to get you going.

Listen to enough of these HR smarties on Nisha’s podcast and you may even decide you have some ideas worth sharing. If so, you’ll need an audience to share them with!

The Buffer Blog has your back with Alex Manthei’s: 5 Methods and 15 Tools To Find Your Audience And Build a Community.

As a “community manager,” I was especially pleased by Alex’s line: “the secret is, you grow with your community just as much as your community grows with you.”

It made me feel all warm and fuzzy.

In a completely safe for work kind of way!

Happy Link Loving, and don’t forget to have a summa 😀

Delving into the world of Facebook terminology is befuddling!

Everyone, Facebook included, has a different way to refer to Facebook Page features and functionalities. This can make creating tutorials on the subject pretty challenging, but we promised in last week’s blog post that we would explain how to navigate Facebook Business Pages.. and we always keep our promises!

The Anatomy of a Facebook Page

Top/Admin Navigation Bar

Facebook calls a lot of different layout features “navigation bars”.

This can be extremely confusing when trying to explain how to use the social network to new users. A bar, in web design speak, generally refers to a grouping of information contained within a single line across a web page. The bar we’ve highlighted in the above image is often referred to as the “Top Navigation Bar”, but is also called the “Admin Navigation Bar,” which makes more sense, as it is where most of the features important to Page Administrators exist.

Within the Admin Navigation Bar you will find several “Tabs”. Think of the tabs on Facebook like you would tabs on file folders — they help you easily navigate to the folder/information you wish to access.  I have given each tab a letter in the screenshot below.

Admin Navigation Bar Tabs:

A) Page Tab: Your Page Tab takes you to your Page. Easy peasy.

B) Activity Tab: Your Activity Tab takes you to the section of your Page that lets you view all of your Page activity— such as messages and notifications.

C) Insights Tab: Your Insights Tab is extremely important! It takes you to the part of your Page where all of your metrics are displayed. “Insights” is just Facebook-speak for “data”, which makes sense, as this is where you can gain insights about your Page Likes, Reach, Visits, Posts, and “People” (demographics of your visitors). The Insights Tab is far too complex to explain here… Can you guess next week’s blog post theme?!?

D) Settings Tab: Your Settings Tab takes you to where you can change the basic settings of your Page. You can edit information about your business, how often you receive notifications, and, most importantly, your profanity feature!  

New This Week Module

The “New This Week” module is one of our favourite new features of Facebook’s 2014 layout upgrade. It displays a recent Page Likes and Page Reach tally, and alerts you to pending notifications, and unread messages.

User Action Buttons

I let my husband name this section, because he is a UX designer, so that is basically his job (just don’t tell him I said that), and because there’s no standard name for it. As a Page admin, these buttons have everything, and nothing to do with you. Everything, because your Page’s popularity relies on users clicking on them to “Like”, “Follow”, and “Share” your Page, and to send you messages… and nothing, because you won’t have much interaction with them yourself.

Cover Image

Your cover image should be a simple, high-quality image that represents what your business does. It is also best to keep text to a minimum and positioned towards the top of the image, otherwise it may become illegible on certain mobile devices.

The image dimensions should be: 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels high.

Profile Picture

Your profile picture should be an image very specific to your brand. If you have a logo, use it here! You may also use your own personal image, if you are the best representation of your company’s brand.

The image dimensions should be: 160 pixels wide by 160 pixels high.

Page Navigation Bar

Your “Page Navigation Bar” contains tabs that help Facebook users navigate your Page. Both you, and your fans, will make significant use of the tabs contained in this bar.

These tabs include:

1) Timeline Tab: This tab directs you and users to your “Timeline” so that you can post motivational quotes, and your users can Like them!

2) About Tab: This tab navigates users to your “About” Page where they can find out more information about your business. You can also use this tab to update the info on your About Page.

3 – 5) Custom Tabs: This is where tabs get interesting! You can choose two other tabs to display within your Page Navigation Bar. The screenshot above displays two “Custom Tabs” : Photos and Careers. 

3) The tab labelled “Photos” is standard to Facebook. This tab is shown by default and links to a pre-built photo gallery created for you by Facebook. 

4) The tab labelled “Careers” links to my Careers Page. I added this tab myself using the Jobcast Social Recruiting App. You can add more tab options by installing apps to your Page, or by creating your own custom tabs for fans to interact with.

Highlight your two most important tabs, the ones that you most want fans to click on. For the Jobcast Facebook Page, we display our “Install App” tab because we want users to install our app, and our “Features” tab, because we hope that after reading about all of our great features, users will install our app! 

5) More Tab: The tabs you do not choose to display are still available to your fans, but they are hidden within the “More Tab,” so they are not immediately visible. 

Read this tutorial to learn how to manage your tabs.

Hopefully this guide will help you navigate Facebook yourself, and help you explain Facebook to your colleagues, clients, maybe even your parents!

Happy social recruiting.

Engagement is one of the pillars of effective social recruiting.

Likes, comments, and shares are the best way for you to get more eyes on your jobs, because much like with referrals, when your job post reaches potential candidates through these actions they are imbued with social proof.

If a friend shares a job posting to your Facebook Page, even if they have no connection to the employer, it still seems more trustworthy than if it was sent by a random recruiter.

Encouraging this kind of sharing from your fan base is difficult. They have friends’ engagement status updates to Like, news of Kim Kardashian’s latest adventures to comment on, and their latest Spotify playlist to share.

In order to engage them, you must understand their priorities:

1. Kittens

2. Gossip

3. Kittens gossiping about puppies

Now, if you are not hiring for a feline related position, you are probably thinking “How the heck am I supposed to get my job posts out there!!!”

The obvious solution is, of course, to attach pictures of your, or your neighbors pets to every job you share.

The effective solution is to broaden our scope, and understand our audience’s priorities in terms of medium of posts, instead of message.

Top genres for engagement:

1. Video

2. Images

3. Inspirational Quotes

Posts with video receive three times more inbound links than plain text. (via Moz) – Click to Tweet

Mobile video ads that include social media buttons drive 36% higher engagement. (via Rhythm New Media)  – Click to Tweet

Job postings that include video receive 34% more applications than those without! (via Talent Square) – Click to Tweet

Recruiting with video may seem intimidating at first, but it really doesn’t have to be.

You can go pro like our client Earls did in this fantastic recruiting video.

Or silly, embarrassing, and extremely low budget (actually no budget) like our Vine recruiting video!

Just make sure your video represents your culture, your values, and expresses what it’s like to work for you company.

I think our video makes it very clear that to work for jobcast you must have a sense of humour, the ability to check your ego at the door, and basic Jiu Jitsu training.

Some recruiters even create short videos for every job, or category of job that they post so that they can attach one to each new job post they share.

We also highly encourage every Jobcaster to embed a recruiting video directly into their Facebook Career Page.

In fact, we even made a short video explaining exactly how to do this in less than 3 minutes:

(video not available)

Happy video recruiting!

The Jobcast blog has tons of articles explaining why Facebook is great for recruiting, how to use Facebook to reach candidates, and how to build an employer brand on Facebook. What we haven’t written about is the most basic step for getting started with Facebook recruiting: creating a Facebook Page for your company. This may be old hat for many of you, but we get tons of emails from employers who want to start social recruiting, but don’t have a Facebook Page yet, or a Twitter account, or even a LinkedIn Profile. We always walk these employers through the steps to setting up a Page, starting the process of employer branding, and building a fan base. But, for every email we receive, I’m sure that there are ten employers out there who don’t reach out for help. This post is for you guys!

A Simple Illustrated-Guide to Setting Up a Facebook Page for Your Company

Step 1

Login to Facebook:

If you do not have a Facebook account already, you’re going to need one, so check out this awesome blog post over at wikiHow.

Step 2

Now that you are logged in/signed-up, go to the Create a Page page: Facebook.com/pages/create.php

 Step 3

Select the type of Page you wish to create. This can actually be kind of confusing, but this blog post will help you determine which kind of Facebook Page is best for your business!

Step 4

Choose a category from the dropdown. There are lots of choices, but if none of them fit you can always go with “small business”, although it will make you less searchable to potential fans:

 Step 5

Enter your business’ name, and click on “Get Started”:

 Step 6

Go through all of the “Set Up” steps

6a

- Start by filling out the “About” section:

6b

- Then add a “Profile Picture”. It’s a great idea to use your company’s logo here:

Kitties are always the second best choice:

6c

- Next add your Page to your “Favourites”. Don’t skip this step, as it will help you find your Page much more easily in the future!

6d

- Now get angry at Facebook for trying to get you to spend money on ads before your Page is anywhere near ready for promotion! You’ll probably want to skip the “Reach More People” prompt at this stage in the game :D

 Step 7

Install the Jobcast App. Just kidding, first you’ll need to explore a little. Facebook will invite you to explore with a “Getting Around” prompt:

I highly suggest you take them up on this, but next week we’ll show you our best tips for navigating your Facebook Page, and teach you some important Facebook related terms. Have a lovely Monday, and stay social! PS. If you do already have a Facebook Page for your company, you probably do want to install the Jobcast Facebook Recruiting App!