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Social media can eat your time. One minute you’re rolling up to your desk, coffee in hand, tummy full of eggy muggin, and the next you’ve got five-o’clock shadow and an angry tummy demanding dinner, or a chocolate bar. Usually a chocolate bar. All because you decided to check the company Instagram.

Instagram led to YouTube, and then you had to tweet all of the hilarious cat company culture videos you found, and post a bunch of the links from your Twitter feed onto your Facebook Page… and then you realized that all of your co-workers had gone home, and the janitor was giving you the evil eye.

Not optimal.

Don’t get me wrong, I spend a lot of time on various social networks for work, but nowhere near as much time as you would think considering my job title. If I spent all day on Facebook and Twitter, I would have no time to write these blog posts, attend meetings, or come up with better social media strategies to keep us evolving.

Spending more time on social media does not necessarily get you better results, and in fact, it can even hinder them. If you’re too busy checking your Instagram feed to go over your Instagram analytics, update your content strategy, or regularly check in with your co-workers and clients, then you need to rethink things.

Here’s how I keep my social media-obsessing in check, prioritize tasks, and keep myself sane, all while staying social.

Assess the Situation

It’s impossible to change your situation unless you know what your situation is.

Maybe you think you’re spending 30 minutes per day posting content to your Facebook Page, but in reality it’s more like two hours when you take into account how long it takes you to search for content, curate it, and add in a bunch of hashtags.

Time-Saving Tips:

• Make a list of the social networks and apps you use.

• Spend one or two days tracking exactly how much time you spend on each network and app.

• Reorder your list to reflect time spent, and clearly note how many hours you devoted to each.

Now you have a solid understanding of how much time you are spending on social media, and exactly how that time is spent.

Prioritize

You only have so much time in your day, so you need to divide that time wisely.

The more effective a social network is for your goals, the more time you should devote to it. Chances are, you’re neglecting some networks that deserve more of your time, and you’re still using some networks that deserve none of it.

Time-Saving Tips:

• Go over your analytics and make a list (if you hadn’t noticed, I’m really into lists!) of the social networks you use, ordering them from most effective to least effective.

• Compare your two lists.

• Be shocked by the results.

Attention! Not to state the obvious, but if you spent two hours / week on Facebook and that resulted in ten applications, and you spent 8 hours / week on Twitter that resulted in fifteen applications, then Facebook is the more effective of the two. Yay math!

Create Guidelines

Now that you have all of this super-useful information at your fingertips, it’s time to make another list! I’m kidding… kind of!

Actually it’s time to lay down some guidelines for how to divvy up your socializing.

Time-Saving Tips:

• Decide how many hours you have to spend on social media. Aim low!

• Budget out that time. Allot more time for the social networks that get you great results, and less for the networks you’ve found to be less effective.

• Consider dropping some social networks altogether. If Vine hasn’t driven a single applicant to your career site, you probably don’t need to make it a part of your social strategy.

Bring in the Big Guns

• A content strategy template will help you manage the content you post. Here’s a basic content strategy setup for Facebook.  You can also check out this blog post if you want specifics on improving your content strategy for recruiting. 

• Social apps can save you tons of time. The Jobcast Facebook Recruitment App‘s Enterprise plan takes care of all of your Facebook Ads, job posts, and content management for you, and it’s also totally mobile-friendly! Hootsuite lets you manage Twitter lists and hashtags, which can save you hours every week.

• Scheduling tools like Buffer App help you line up all of your content at once, instead of having to manually share it throughout the day. Hootsuite, and Jobcast already have scheduling tools built in.

• Content curation platforms, like Alltop, help you stay on top of trending topics in your field, without having to spend a bunch of time surfing the web.

• Pocket is a reading list app that let’s you save blog posts, and sort them with tags, so that you’ll have a steady stream of  content to share.

Give these strategies a try, and hopefully you’ll never end up stuck in a social media vortex again. If you have any great time saving tips, let us know in the comments.

Happy social recruiting!

We’ve been all about millennials on the blog lately — what kind of employees they are, what they’re looking for from an employer, and how to recruit them.

One of the biggest takeaways from our research is that Gen Y is allll about lifestyle perks, flexibility, and challenging projects. If you want to attract and retain my peers, let them have flexible hours, the option to work from home, and/or put them in charge of something that piques their interest….

Like, for example, your social media strategy! Here are a whole bunch of fantastic resources about training employees for social media success. You could watch all of them yourself; or simply put a Gen Yer on it and let them attack social with all of their youthful exuberance!

Another great way to retain millennials is to get them a discount on burritos. I am only half-joking. Great perks are attractive to all generations of employees, as are burritos. AnyPerk is a super cool start-up that allows small businesses to group together, so that they have enough clout to offer the same kinds of perks that large businesses can afford.  You can keep your employees happy with cellphone discounts, cheap gym memberships, and deals on delicious Mexican food!

The ability to work from home is often considered to be a perk, although in all honesty, unlike most other millennials, I prefer the camaraderie that an office has to offer! Apparently close to 90% of companies are currently offering some sort of telecommuting option for employees, so the ability to work from home may no longer be considered an added bonus by candidates, but instead something they simply expect from all potential employers.

When it comes to retention, company culture plays a huge role.  I’m not talking about whether your culture is edgy, or old-school, or anything fancy like that. I’m talking about how welcoming you and your staff are to new employees. Having a welcoming and inclusive company culture is a great way to improve retention. Here are some great ways to foster an environment of respect and inclusion in your work place.

Well, that’s a whole lot of great ways to make your workplace more appealing to candidates, and keep those new hires happy. Perks are pretty great, but just a warning, you may want to think twice before you offer free beers as a workplace perk — even if it is craft brew!

Last week we talked about how Generation Yers are entering the workforce en masse. We also discussed what these millennials want from employers, besides an endless supply of single origin coffee and permission to wear very tight pants.

This week, as promised, we're going to explore the top ways you can attract millennial candidates.

As always, I'm going to present data from surveys, and polls, but since I am a millennial myself, as are most of my homies, I am also going to share some anecdotes and my own personal thoughts on the matter. Like Gen Y, these tips will both meet and defy stereotypes... they will also be heavily fueled by caffeine and free-range, ethically-farmed, sustainable bacon from a pig named Apple.

Tips!

Focus on lifestyle over salary

“Once a salary meets their basic needs, millennials still desire progression and growth, along with challenging and interesting work that piques their interest,” - Razor Suleman (founder and chairman of Achievers)

Millennials want a challenge. They want to solve problems, try new things, and think outside the box. This is a generation reared on online strategy games. Millennials get bored easily, so keep them progressing, and on their toes. Not only will this entice Gen Y candidates, but it will keep your corporate culture fresh, relevant, and thriving.

Another great way to entice millennials is to offer them the ability to move around (laterally) within your organization.

Take my lovely friend Masako, for example. The company she works for encourages their employees to spend time working in different branches of their organization. She has expressed just how much she loves this initiative nearly every time we discuss her career. And it is truly a great policy, because it gives employees a better overall understanding of what their company does, and, who knows... maybe Cheryl in shipping is actually a genius at customer satisfaction!

Make us excited to grow with you

52% of millennials listed ‘the potential to grow with a company’ as an essential part of their decision to accept a position.

As previously mentioned, when assessing a first-time employer, Gen Yers like myself are looking for a committed relationship. One of the best ways to woo millennials is by showing us that your company is growing, that it will offer us opportunities to advance, and that working with you will help us progress in our careers.

We don't need no plaques and trophies

Seriously, stop it with the employee-of-the-month certificates already. Gen Y gets enough of that from gamified apps like Fitocracy, and at least with Fitocracy badges, all of your Facebook friends can see how bad-ass your Crossfit skills are!

Millennials value choice, so let them have a say in what kinds of incentives your company chooses to offer. Gen Yers also value experience over stuff (yeah, I was just as shocked!), so if your employee reward budget allows, offer experience-based rewards like zip-lining tickets, or a gift certificate for a yoga retreat.

Be social or die

Not to be an extremist or anything, but the amount of times my friends have listed a potential employers' outdated social media practices as a major reason for turning down a job offer is too often to ignore.

Over 83% of millennials use social networks every day (and honestly, I think that stat is very conservative), and Gen Y's use of LinkedIn has gone up by 700% in the last year (yet that one may be a bit exaggerated!)

More job seekers than ever before are using Facebook to connect with potential employers, and Facebook's recent recruiting-friendly updates have made it a better place to build a talent pool than any other online platform.

1 in 6 Facebook users access the social network from mobile exclusively. And at least 77% of potential candidates will be surfing your career site from the comfort of their mobile device, myself included. In fact, I work almost exclusively from my iPad.

If you want to connect with millennials, your recruiting and application process must be social. And today, all social recruiting strategies must take mobile into account. If your candidates cannot complete their application from their smartphone, chances are they won't complete their application at all.

Offer coffee

Good coffee. Preferably Bows & Arrows. Please — no Nespresso!

Okay, so that last tip is directed pretty specifically at my favorite employers: Ryan and Johnny — Hi guys!

But, hopefully, the rest of these tips will help you grow your own super army of millennial hipster/rockstar employees, who will make your company thrive! Or at least introduce you to weird drinks like kombucha, and bring some vintage flare to your company culture.

Sources:

Mercer - Generation Y: Realising the Potential

Acheivers - The Class of 2013

Mashables - How Job Seekers are Using Mobile

PWC - Millennials at Work: Reshaping the Workplace

Cracked.com - #hipsters

Millennials are the best. We are the best at iPhones, the best at Tumblr, and we are the best employees. No, I do not have any solid research to back up those claims, but they are all 100% true facts - based on knowledge that I have gained by surfing the interweb. Okay, so maybe we are not better employees than our Gen X rivals, but we are the next big wave of candidates entering the workforce! And as such, it’s important for employers and recruiters to know what Generation Y is all about, besides Tumblr and Apple products. Luckily, I do have quite a bit of great information about millennial candidates, and all of it comes from very reliable sources! On Monday I wrote a post about what employers can expect from millennials, and what millennials expect from them. In the process of writing that piece, I dug up some killer surveys, articles, and Infographics that you really ought to check out. Here are the links! Dice interviews recruiters at Talent Tomorrow in this awesome YouTube video about the top tactics to attract millennials.

Some topics, like the importance of mobile and Facebook recruiting, are agreed upon across the board, while others, like the importance of stressing growth opportunities, are highly contentious. These differences of opinion are what make Dice’s video so fascinating, and definitely worth the two and a half minutes! If you have more than a couple minutes, Achievers’ in-depth study, Class of 2012: Understanding the Needs of your Future Workforce, is an incredible resource for understanding both how to recruit, and how to retain millennials. It’s an undeniably #longread, but the PDF version I’ve linked to is extremely well laid out, which makes the information very easy to digest. If you simply don’t have time, here are some of the most important stats on Gen Y candidates taken from their study. Now that you know what Gen Y wants, it’s time to take that knowledge and start recruiting them! But where is the best place to connect with millennial candidates? Why Facebook of course, at least according to this Infographic. Now, if you really want to effectively target millennials with Facebook recruiting you had better make sure your job applications are mobile-friendly… I know a certain app that will do that for you, just sayin’! Back to the heavy duty research! PWC — I'm sadly, unsure of what PWC actually does, but according to their website, they create value for clients. What that means, I have no idea. Sorry. Nonetheless, they released a fantastic survey on millennial employees. The survey covers everything from what Gen Yers value in employers, to their views on flexible working, to the compromises they are willing to make, and why they'll make them. Lastly, I’d like to revisit Achievers, because not only do they provide tons of great info about recruiting Gen Y, but they also provide some pretty cool software that helps employers retain millennial employees, which is just as important as recruiting them in the first place!

I always wanted to be part of Gen X. It just sounds super cool, and punk rock, and so much better than my generation: Gen Y.

The term Gen Y makes us all sound like pretentious hipster-philosophy students, who drink $5 made-to-order, single-origin, pour-over coffees. Granted, all of this is bang-on, but it still sounds pretty terrible. The alternative term, “millennials”, doesn’t appeal either, but that has more to do with my inability to spell it correctly (darn you double N!)

Dislike of the terminology aside, I am pretty excited about it being my generation’s time in the (recruiting) sun. Millenials (darn!) are entering the workforce en masse, and employers will have to revamp their recruitment strategies in order to snag these hip, young candidates.

Being a social recruiting blogger, and an uber hipster Gen Yer myself, I feel it is my duty to write about what we want from employers and recruiters, and about how you can recruit us, while busting some of the myths about what kind of workers we actually are.

First things first:

What can you expect from an office full of millennials?

Gen Y is very willing to compromise. In fact 72% of millennials surveyed were willing to make major sacrifices when it came to location, benefits, and salary, in order to enter into their desired field.

We do not want to jump ship every 18 months. That is a huge myth about Gen Yers, and it must end now!

Yes, on average millennials change employers every 1.5 years. But, 21% say that they desire to stay with their first employer for at least 5 years, and 22% optimistically prophesize a 10 year commitment. The fact that we tend to leave our first job so quickly has more to do with retention issues than the employees themselves.

Millennials love anything that is labelled artisan — especially coffee. We are also obsessed with Portland and Berlin. In fact, the majority of Gen Yers surveyed believe that they need field experience overseas in order to further their careers.

What do millennials want from employers?

Meaning.

I know, I know, it sounds like sarcasm, but I am being completely sincere. Remember how I said that all of us Gen Yers are philosophy-loving hipsters? Well, it’s completely true. Millennials value meaningful work, and they value a balance between work and life over high salaries.

Flexibility.

This may have something to do with the popularity of yoga, and Lululemon stretch pants.

We Gen Yers want to work for companies that provide flexible scheduling, we want the potential to work from home (at least part-time), and the ability to move around within the organization for which we work. Basically, we hate structure, and are horribly afraid of being tied down!

Kidding aside, this can actually be a huge plus for employers, because it means you can give us millennials more responsibility, and instead of grumbling about it, we’ll take it as a challenge and try our best to impress.

Tech.

Millennials want our employers to be reachable via social media, our workplace to be up-to-date with current technologies, and, when applying for a job, we expect to be able to complete the entire application process from the comfort of our smart phone.

We’ve grown up with all the access that the internet allows at our fingertips, cell phones attached to our ears, and our social lives shaped by networks like Facebook and Twitter. Gen Y is reliant upon these technologies, so we expect our workplace to incorporate them, or at least be open to incorporating them in the near future.

Employing more millennials, and tasking them with updating your company’s use of tech, is a great way to make your business more social!

To be Continued…

Stay tuned for next Monday’s article where we break down exactly how you can effectively recruit millennials.

Is your recruiting strategy missing out on one of the most important demographics? Odds are, the answer is yes. Over 60% of job seekers are using mobile devices to look for work. That means that over half of your potential candidates will be trying to apply for your job openings via mobile. But, in our most recent survey, we found that only 1 in 20 career sites were mobile-optimized, even though quite a few of them thought that their employer sites could accommodate mobile applicants. So what's the big deal? Won't these candidates simply apply later from their computers? Well, actually, no they won't! In fact, 40% of your potential hires will abandon the application process entirely if it is not mobile-friendly. And your candidates have very high standards when it comes to mobile experience. Simply put, if your potential hires cannot complete their application immediately, and completely, from their mobile device, they will not complete their application at all. (Caveat: of course this does not apply if you are hiring for president, or CEO, or the next Batman!) Hopefully we all agree that mobile friction is a huge problem, so now we can move on to the easiest possible solution.

The Jobcast Facebook Recruiting App is your mobile solution.

It's easy to use, it's completely free (although I highly recommend upgrading to our Enterprise plan), and with Jobcast, all job applications can be completed immediately from any mobile device. Most other recruiting apps do not allow candidates to submit their resumes from their mobile devices. Since most iPhone or iPad users don't or can't access their file system from their phone, there is no way to upload a resume, or any document, from their mobile device. The Jobcast team has used Cloud Technology to solve this problem. This new Cloud integration makes it possible for your candidates to submit their resumes with Dropbox. Here's how: From your Career Page, the candidate will start the application by clicking 'Apply Now'.

• You'll notice that the applicant has the option to apply by uploading a file or with Dropbox.

• Applicants applying from their desktop computer or with an Android phone or tablet can select a resume from their hard drive by clicking the "My Computer" button.

• The next button is where the magic happens! Your applicant can tap on the Dropbox button to access their Cloud data, from any mobile device, or any computer.

• A pop-up window will appear, and the user will be asked to log in to Dropbox.

• Once they are logged into Dropbox, they will have access to all of the files that they have saved in the Cloud. Your applicant can then select the copy of their resume they wish to attach.

• Through the magic of the internet, lo and behold, their resume will now be attached to their job application. They will then have the option now to 'View' the file that they have attached, or to 'Remove' it and instead select another.

As with all applications, you will be sent a notification, and a copy of the resume via email. Of course, the applications and attached resumes will also be viewable in the "Manage Jobs" section of the Jobcast App. If you like, you can post this tutorial on your Facebook Career Page for applicants to see, but we believe that the design is intuitive enough on its own; they won't even notice a difference between applying from their computer, and applying from their phone. At Jobcast, our main goal is to make your recruiting better. We believe that mobile friction is the biggest hurdle employers currently face. Trends predict that mobile job searches will double over the next year, making a frictionless mobile application process more essential than ever.

Make your recruiting mobile with Jobcast!

I follow a lot of blogs — many of them are related to HR and social media — but just as many of them are not. I also follow too many YouTube channels, and Podcasts. Out of the hundreds that I follow, only one is related to HR, because most HR podcasts and HR YouTube channels are just too boring for words (Jim Stroud is the hilarious exception to that rule, so check him out)!  A few of them are specifically about social media, but most cover a broad range of topics.

I consider this kind of engagement with media an essential part of my job. And though I certainly don’t charge for the time I spend listening to Planet Money (please, please, please listen to Planet Money, it’s amazing!), that time still positively affects my ability to keep this blog relevant, engage with our Twitter community, and keep our Facebook content varied and interesting.

In today’s social media driven culture, it’s more important than ever to stay plugged in to a broad range of media and topics in order to remain relevant.  Heck, Gen Y is about to take over the workforce, and you had better know what their interests are if you want to snap up all of the best millennial talent!

On that note, here are a bunch of the best articles about social media, HR, and other interesting trends I’ve read this past week:

We’ll start on topic with this interesting post by the very lovely HR pro, Nisha Raghavan, about how stealing your competitors’ star employees may not benefit your company at all.

Now to get a little off-topic, here are 24 ways you can relieve your tech stress! Nothing to do with HR specifically, but recruiting is stressful work, and kicking some of that stress in the butt is a great way to become more productive. The article is presented in partnership with a pretty cool new healthy living web app called whil, created by the founder of Lululemon. Definitely check out their site if you want to see incredible branding in action, oh, and if you want to relax and stuff.

Let’s get back to recruiting for a minute with Talent HQs’ round up of 45 mobile recruiting tips and trends. That’s a whole lot of information to help make your social recruiting more mobile-friendly. If you get overwhelmed, I highly recommend using Jobcast Premium to make your Facebook recruiting mobile-friendly in a jiffy. I also recommend using the word jiffy whenever possible!

Oh, and did you know that YouTube is going to host its own music awards show? Bet you can’t guess what it’s called! Yes, you are correct; it is called the YouTube Music Awards. Very creative, YouTube! This is the kind of stuff you need to know about if you’re going to relate to all those new Gen Y employees you are about to hire.

The topic of our final link is a strange combination of sci-fi paranoia, social media, and human resources, which seems perfect for this particular Link Love. Are You Going to be Replaced by a Robot? is written by Steve Boese, so not only is the meshing of topics perfect, the writing is also wonderfully witty, although sadly lacking in alliteration.

That’s all the Links I’ve got for this week. Next week’s theme will probably have something to do with how sick I’m getting of everyone talking about pumpkin spiced lattes, unless you have a better idea. Let us know in the comments!

Just when you thought Facebook recruiting couldn't get any better...

The social network rolls out Facebook Skills! Employers and recruiters all over the globe rejoice —

this is awesome, in a totally nerdy HR kind of way. The reasons that the addition of a skills section to Facebook is so awesome are many, some are obvious, some less so. First, let me break down exactly what this new feature is for those of you who don't obsessively check The Next Web #Facebook, and then we'll look at how FB skills will benefit your recruiting. Facebook's new 'Professional Skills' option shows up under the 'Work and Education' heading in the about section of a user's profile. The new feature basically allows users to add a list of their professional skills to their profile a la LinkedIn, thus making that information available to their connections, and through Facebook Graph Search. Even cooler, when a Facebook user adds professional skills to their profile, the list does not remain static. Facebook takes the information they've entered and links them to relevant groups based on each skill. What's to love:

Organic Interaction

Linking users’ skills to groups automatically fosters engagement and allows employers to interact with potential candidates without it feeling forced. By introducing these skill-based groups, Facebook is giving recruiters and employers a foot in the door with candidates, even if they are not connected to them in any other way. A Shift Towards the Professional

Facebook has lost traction amongst tweens. Tweens are too busy sending Snapchats of themselves dressed as Miley Cyrus to check Facebook these days (and you thought us millennials were a bad bunch!). In response, Facebook is growing up and becoming more professional. Last year 52% of job seekers surveyed by Jobvite reported using Facebook to look for work. The social network is becoming less about memes and drunken photos, and more about forging connections with others in your field, showing off accomplishments, and professional skills. This shift in focus is bad news for companies using Facebook to advertise crop tops, but fantastic news for recruiters. Tweens can't legally work for you, nor, I'm betting, would you want them to! The introduction of Facebook Skills is changing how users perceive Facebook; they are becoming more open to it as a place to connect professionally, which makes them more open to being contacted by employers and recruiters. Awesome. Prompts to Make HR Smile

Every time Facebook rolls out a new feature, users get a barrage of prompts urging them to check it out. Prompts encouraging users to fill out the skills section of their profile also encourages them to update the rest of their profile information, because it reminds them that that part of their Facebook Page exists. The more information users make available to Facebook's Graph, the more employers and recruiters have to go on when searching for candidates. Facebook Skills bring us one step closer to that, ever elusive, employer dream of using Graph search to make the recruiting of passive candidates easy for even the most difficult to fill positions. Our day will come! Facebook Ads Now 20% Better for Recruiting

Okay, so I made the 20% part up, but the sentiment is all true! More searchable information available on users’ profiles means you can get even more targeted with your Facebook Ads campaigns. We already know that Facebook Ads are the most effective tool for social recruiting. We also know that the reason that they are so effective is that they allow you to target talent based on demographics, work history, occupation, education, location, interests, and now, SKILLS! Yes, skills, the most pertinent of all information! If you thought Facebook Ads were awesome before, just you wait until users start updating their profiles to share all of their mad skillz, and you can target them based on things like "joinery skills", "CSS skills", and "customer service wizardry". Or don't wait. Check out our tutorial on targeting candidates with Facebook Ads, download the Jobcast Facebook recruiting app, and get recruiting! Heck, if you read through the tutorial and decide that using Facebook Ads is too much of a hassle, just sign up for Jobcast Enterprise and we'll handle everything for you.So then you can have more free time to update your own Facebook profile. We're nice like that!

It's that time again — time to share some of our favorite articles, videos, and apps with you, our beloved readers. Keeping up with all the cool, techy, social stuff that comes out every millisecond is no easy feat. We try our best, but sadly we are only human, and not in any way bionic. 

Yet still we persevere in our quest to hunt down every morsel of cool recruiting, and social media related info that the interweb has to offer. Okay, so it's mostly just me. The rest of team Jobcast have their hands full with designing new features, growing our client’s employer brands, and problem-solving. Finding links to love is my quest, and your happiness is my reward! Hopefully, this week's links will make you all super happy by helping you optimize your Facebook employer brand and recruiting. If not, then watch this hilarious video, so you'll at least get a good laugh! Now on to the links:

Crowdbabble is an awesome analytics app that lets you track your Facebook stats in real-time. They present all of your data beautifully, with charts and infographics that are full of data, but laid out in a way that makes it all very easy to understand and apply. We all know that tracking your results is the only way to measure success and make informed strategic improvements. Crowdbabble is a great addition to Facebook Insights and Jobcast reports. Another way to keep your Facebook employer branding top-notch is to be proactive about engagement. Sometimes that means dealing with less than kind comments on your Employer Page and, tempting as it may be to simply hide or delete them, this is definitely not the way to go! Instead you should belittle the negative commenter and insult their mother.... Oh wait, that's also a terrible course of action. What you really ought to do is read this article by Franceen Shaughnessy, where she explains exactly how to handle negative comments on your Facebook Page.

Now that you know exactly how to deal with undesirable comments, let's look at a way to get more positive ones. Image-based content always get the most engagement from Facebook users, and you know what's even better than one great image? A collage of great images of course!

Pic Monkey is a really cool app that lets you compile images into super fancy collages, which you can share on your Facebook Page. It even lets you add bunting graphics, which will give you all the hipster cred you need to appeal to millennials like me! Speaking of appealing to millenials, Facebook now allows users to target iOS IDs in custom audiences, so you can make sure all of those hip gen Yers with iOS7 see your lovely collage. Last, but not least: the best way to improve your Facebook recruiting is by making sure your Career Page is optimized for mobile. You can bet that at least 1 in 6 (that's the most conservative stat. It's probably closer to 80%) of your potential hires are accessing Facebook from a mobile device. You simply can not afford to lose these candidates to friction caused by poor mobile experience. Here's how to create a Smart URL with Jobcast to make your Facebook recruiting mobile-friendly. Enjoy these fantastic links. I'm off to find more of them to post on our Facebook Page, because I really need to start following my own advice! If you have any cool posts, apps, or articles you'd like us to feature on the blog, let us know in the comments.

Change is hard. Otherwise my apartment would be completely spotless, and I wouldn't spend my Saturday nights curled up on my couch, streaming Youtube videos, and munching on slices of gluten-free cinnamon raisin toast. Luckily for my love of toast, other than missing out on cool parties, there are not a lot of negative ramifications for this anti-social habit of mine. Unfortunately for employers with anti-social recruiting strategies, the consequences are much more severe than developing a little case of FOMO! Social recruiting is no longer just an exciting new way to connect with candidates. These days jobseekers (especially millennials) expect to be able to connect to potential employers via Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. They want to be able to engage with recruiters and employers, ask them questions, and get a general feel for company culture before applying. Not only do they expect to be able to do all of this, but they expect to be able to do it from their iPhone. If your recruiting strategy doesn't include social media platforms, and if your Career Site isn't mobile-optimized, you're simply not meeting job seeker's expectations. And yet, you're reading this blog post; this means you're already interested in social recruiting, in fact, I'll bet you already know just how important it is to candidate experience. So what are you waiting for? A colleague, partner, or employee to take initiative? Your boss to command you? Permission? The stars to align?! Since we've already established that you're both well-informed and industrious, it's safe to assume that you're waiting on one of the latter two options. I can't help you with the stars — maybe once I finally master the whole transcendental meditation thing — but what I can do is give you permission. Go for it! Tap into Facebook's 1 billion user talent pool. Grow your employer brand, recruit passive candidates, and most importantly, give your potential hires the engagement they've come to expect from employers. At Jobcast, we've witnessed the employer branding of an entire province, through Facebook alone, with Phoenix Group's Think Sask campaign. We've helped grow Earls' Facebook talent pipelines by over 500% in less than a month, and every day we see more and more companies discovering just how easy and effective Facebook recruiting can be. I'm giving you permission to be one of those companies! In case you need more than just my permission (although that seems extremely unlikely), I'm also going to give you some fantastic resources to help you get any additional permission you may need.

Jobvite

The latest version of Jobvite's social media survey is the most often cited resource for stats on Facebook recruiting. It is extremely comprehensive, and answers most of the questions commonly asked by employers, as well as many questions people don't think to ask. Jobvite's survey is also able to provide information about how social recruiting is trending, because they have data compiled from similar surveys they've conducted over the years. (You do have to give them an email address to access the full survey. Or go to AllFacebook for a shorter version) The 3 Pillars of Social Recruiting

If you think you'll need more than just facts and statistics to get the permission you need — do I have the thing for you! In August, we teamed up with Identified to present a comprehensive webinar explaining the basics of why Facebook recruiting is effective, and what successful Facebook recruiting entails.

Earls Case Study

If your audience is still not convinced, then I highly suggest you find a new audience! Or present them with this super cool example of a company using Facebook recruiting to succeed at finding talent in an extremely difficult market. Earls used Jobcast Enterprise to increase their Facebook reach by 500% and get over 200 applications from qualified candidates in just one month's time. Their Earls Wants You Facebook Career Page is gorgeous and completely brand-consistent, so they make for a wonderful example of how successful social recruiting can be, and how to use Facebook to reach talent. Hopefully you now have all the permission you need to get started with Facebook recruiting. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments below!