Your Facebook Page is your secret weapon. You can quickly communicate your brand on a channel that most of your target audience is already on. You can recruit passive candidates and convert your employees into brand ambassadors! It’s also a great marketing platform. For smaller businesses with a less-developed website, Facebook has most of the required functionality you need!

1. Make sure your images stand out!

Are your images bold, engaging, and effective? If not, they risk being scrolled past and buried in the graveyard of uninteresting status updates. It only takes a second to catch someone’s eye, but less than that to scroll right on by. Check out this quick guide on what makes images pop! Need more reasons? Here’s a list that explains how visuals improve your social media results.

2. Pin a Facebook Post!

A pinned post to your Facebook page is the first piece of content that most visitors will see. Yet, many people do not even know this functionality exists! There are many different uses for a pinned post – read the article.

3. Update your Cover Image!

Like the pinned Facebook Post, make sure you’re using your Cover Image to the fullest potential! Many pages tend to create a single cover image and never change it: this is wasted potential! This article shares 12 creative ways you can use your cover image. Inspire a purchase with delicious visuals! Promote a specific product. Feature some fans, or celebrate moments – the possibilities are endless.

4. Add a Call To Action button!

Most third party applications don’t work on Facebook Mobile. There’s also a set number of tabs you can have visible on your home page that don’t get buried under the More tab. The Call to Action is a quick fix that lets you present the very best of your digital assets up front and centre, on both desktop and mobile devices. Here’s how!

5. Accumulate Reviews!

Honest reviews left by third parties (your clients!) on a neutral website where you cannot edit your own reviews, are the most valuable digital artifact your business can have. Reviews increase conversions, improve SEO rankings, and provide a significant boost to your brand reputation. Reading reviews is the preferred method of researching a business. Ask your customers to leave you one! Looking for more tips and tricks? Check out these helpful links:

• Social Media Image Size Guide, June 2016 edition

• 53 Graphic Design Terms Explained For Marketers

When researching how to help our users boost engagement for their social recruiting, the most obvious answer was more visual content.

It’s been shown that content which includes images or video gets more engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

So, you’re interested in making your social recruiting visual, how do you go about it. “Social recruiting isn’t an Instagram-ready field, like interior design or fashion!”, you lament.

“How can we best create visual content for social recruitment?”

“How can we make sure that every job post, or piece of employer brand content, that we share is visually-optimized?”

These are great questions. I like your gusto. Let me help.

Here are some of the best practices that we’ve dug out with our research. I can show you how any talent brand — no matter the niche or visual orientation — can succeed in creating gorgeous images for social recruiting.

1. Add a cover image to longform content

One thing that every longform post has, no matter the niche or topic, is a headline.

A headline is a visual element just waiting to happen.

Spinning a catchy headline into a graphical element is a commonplace tactic. It’s a tactic you’ll find on most blogs, but also on career sites like this excellent website from Manpower.

We try to create these for Jobcast blog posts, too.

To make our title images, we use a headline or sub-headline, combined with a stock image. You can also choose to include your company logo to really highlight your brand.

You can mix together a number of different elements to come up with yours:

Another consideration is size.

We build our these images at a 2:1 aspect ratio, which is excellent for both Twitter and Facebook.

2. Build an infographic

One of the most popular types of visual content is the infographic.

Check out our infographics here.

Infographics work across a huge number of topics and niches, and are a wonderful way to communicate with candidates in a fun, engaging way.

So how do you go about building an infographic for your content?

There are plenty of great apps, with more arriving by the day, which can help you build out a stunning visual narrative.

My favourite by far is Piktochart, but Infogr.am, Visual.ly, Easel.ly, and Venngage are some other options you may want to try.

3. Get quotable:

There are so many wonderful quotes out there that you can use to make engaging content to highlight your employer brand.

Remember though, you don’t necessarily have to use quotes from famous people! Quotes from team leaders or team members can even be better.

Ask employees for a nice little soundbite about why they love working for your company and turn it into a lovely visual with a program like Photoshop, or an app like Pablo.

I love using Pablo as it’s super easy and totally free.

Here’s how:

1. Copy and paste your quote into Pablo’s text box.

2. Add a byline or a logo to the image

3. Choose the font you like best

4. Choose a background image (you can even blur the image to emphasize the text more)

5. Download, so you can attach it to job posts or on your company site, or share immediately to your social networks.

Summary

Any brand — visual or not — can create amazing, image-based social recruiting content.

We’re working hard to help our users do this with Jobcast. Case in point, we recently added a new feature called job cards. Job cards allow our users to attach photos and video to their job posts. We do provide a gallery of lovely images that our users can tap into (which is awesome), but using custom images is always better.

And now that you’re a whiz with all the above tips, custom images are a snap!

Now, more than ever, there’s no reason not to get visual. Tell us about your aesthetic wins (and bungles) in the comments below.

Did you know that UK-based companies hire more than 50% of passive candidates on average every year? Or that passive candidates, who are open to hearing from recruiters, account for nearly 85% of the global workforce? Recruitment specialists Armstrong Appointments came out with an infographic that shares some interesting facts and figures about passive candidates – a breed that is fast emerging as the apple of a recruiter’s eye. According to it, traditional job listings and employee referrals are some of the best ways to attract the attention of a passive candidate.

Of all the changes that the Internet and social media have wrought, one of the biggest is changing forever the way that companies and potential employees connect. Social media in particular has created a revolution both in finding out about and applying for jobs for employees, and discovering more about potential hires. But how do companies know if any or all of various social media platforms works for them and their needs? Measurement is key, and that includes setting goals and matching them to distinct metrics. Social media measurement can also help to gauge time and monetary investment, and direct companies to realign recruitment efforts based on outcomes.

Via Salesforce

Happy Canada Day! Did you even know that it was Canada Day? I forgive you if you didn’t. Especially if you are not Canadian. Jobcast is a Canadian company, based out of Vancouver BC, so to honour our Canadian roots this week’s Link Love is all about Canada. To start, here’s an interesting fact for anyone looking for a job in our home and native land: Monday is the best day of the week to turn in your application. Monday applicants have a 10% higher chance of being chosen for interviews. For more fun facts about working in Canada check out this article over at Workopolis:

By the numbers: The cold hard facts of finding a job in Canada in 2014

They also found that the average interview lasts about 40 minutes, but Canadian interviewers make many crucial decisions within the first 4 seconds!

50 Insane Facts About Canada

As a Canadian, none of these facts are insane to me… Of course, I know that we 2.4 million caribou and that we invented basketball… We’re also responsible for peanut butter.

8 Non-Boring Moments in Canadian History

The history of Canada is notoriously boring, just ask any of our high school students! Apparently this has more to do with our teachers than history itself as Mental Floss found some pretty fascinating stories that my history teachers never taught in class. In 1885, the world’s most famous elephant was killed by a train in St Thomas, Ontario. The people of St Thomas butchered the elephant and lived off of its meat for months. We are a pragmatic people.

13 Strange Things You Didn't Know About Canada

The weirdness just keeps on coming! My favourite part of this slide show is about Nanaimo’s annual bathtub race. This one is near and dear to my heart because I grew up on Vancouver Island and because I believe that bathtubs have a need for speed.

Stuff Canadian People Like This link is to a Tumblr devoted to being Canadian, the things that we find amusing, and the stuff we have that the US does not. Like Shreddies the best breakfast cereal ever.

Happy Canada Day from all of us at Jobcast!

Candidate experience should be a core consideration at every stage of the recruitment and hiring process. Social recruiting, mobile-friendly application, and video interviewing should enhance the candidate’s experience as well as the talent acquisition process. I’ve highlighted these three aspects of hiring because each of them speak to how today’s candidate wants to be recruited.

56% of candidates now turn to social media first when commencing their job search, 9 in 10 job seekers are looking for work via mobile device, and 66% of candidates prefer video interviewing to the traditional. Candidates want to be able to connect with companies through social networks, they want to apply for a job from their phone, and they want the option to interview via video. Excellent candidate experience is all about giving the candidate what they want (at least within reason!)

How Do Candidates Want to Be Recruited?

- By Axel Andersen @axelandersen

Are you trying to attract candidates by offering fancy job titles and goodie bags? If you are, then according to Axel Andersen, you might need to rethink your strategy! In this post, Axel discusses the latest findings from LinkedIn and what those findings can teach us about how candidates want to be recruited.

3 Integral Ways to Better Personalize the Candidate Experience

- By Chris Brablc @cbrablc The current job market is candidate driven, which means companies need to pull out every tool in their toolbox in order to attract qualified applicants. Talent analytics is one such tool. Chris explains how companies can use data to create better more personalized experiences for candidates.

4 Ways to Efficiently Schedule Candidate Interviews

- By Emily Tatum @ETphonehome91 Try as it might, technology has not solved the frustration that is scheduling. Scheduling meetings is an unpleasant part of life for everyone, but it can be an especially frustrating experience when it comes to interviewing. This is especially true when the interviewee is currently employed. Emily Tatum has 4 great suggestions for improving the interview scheduling experience and the candidate’s experience as a whole.

Stop Lying To Candidates: Here's a Good Way To Tell Them Why They Didn't Get The Job…

- By Kris Dunn @Kris_Dunn Despite popular belief, a candidate’s experience doesn’t end when you decide not to hire them. Candidates that don’t make the cut for one position may be a perfect fit for a future job opening. Even if you are certain that a particular candidate should never be employed at your company, or any other, they may have friends you’d love to hire. If you burn your bridges with the undesirable applicant, then chances are they will tell their colleagues, friends, and connections about it! Kris Dunn explains how to tell candidates they didn’t get the job in the best possible way.

10 Funny Images That Perfectly Sum Up Recruitment

- By Sophie Deering @sophiedeering How does this contribute to candidate experience? Laughing is the best antidote for a bad mood and happy recruiters, hiring managers, and interviewers makes for happy hiring :D

The rules of work have changed a lot since I got my first real job. It used to be that I had to commute to my job, dress up nicely, and arrive at 8am sharp every morning. These days my work life looks very different... I’m working right now. I am also sitting on my couch wearing slippers. Some days I start at 5am and I'm done by 4pm. Some days I start at noon and work late into the night. Most of my meetings take place on Skype, and our team projects are managed with Basecamp and Trello instead of whiteboards and memos. And my commute is non existent save the occasional bike ride to a near by cafe or coworking space. Some of these changes are extremely welcome (goodbye high-heeled business lady shoes!) Some of these changes are not so great (goodbye coffee break chats with sassy coworkers!) But, love it or hate it, this is a new reality for many of us. Ross Perlin recently wrote an interesting piece for Fast Co. in which he says that these “new rules [of work] belong to another universe—flexible, precarious, and entrepreneurial, less and less tied to specific times, places, and employers.”

These Are The New Rules of Work

- By Ross Perlin

The article provides 5 examples of how work is changing, for better or worse. Perlin’s article is quite controversial and, as such, warrants dialogue and response, which it got from this Blogging4Jobs article:

5 New Rules for the World of Work

- By Mike Haberman

Mike agrees that there is a general shift towards the way of working that Perlin describes, but argues that he is likely overstating the size of that shift.

3 Keys to Effective Branding in a Millennial World

- By Maren Kate Donovan

One of the reasons how we work is changing is that the generation of workers has changed significantly. Millennials work differently and they need to be recruited differently as Maren’s article explains.

5 Scientifically-Backed Ways to Increase Job Tweet Reach

- By Greg Rokos

Researchers at Cornell University conducted a study backed by the National Science Foundation to measure sentences based on construction, rhetoric and keywords to determine which tweets get shared more than others. Greg explains how to improve your Twitter recruiting based on their research.

How to Optimise Your LinkedIn Company Page for SEO

- By Sophie Deering

Once you’ve optimized your Tweets, why not hop on over to your LinkedIn Company Page and get it up to speed as well?! Check out Sophie’s article to learn how. Actually… I think I’m going to head over the our LinkedIn Page and make a few changes too!

LinkedIn threw HRTech software providers and many employers for a loop last week when they implemented changes to their API that restricts the use of their “Apply With LinkedIn” feature.

But us tech nerds aren’t the only ones struggling with LinkedIn these days.

According to Irina Shamaeva anyone using LinkedIn’s “Job Posting” feature to recruiting is at risk of alienating potential hires by no fault of their own.

Why You Lose Potential Candidates with LinkedIn Job Posts – Posted by Irina Shamaeva @braingain

“While professionals may consider changing jobs for many reasons other than money, the salary is one of the most important factors. If you post jobs on LinkedIn, you need to be aware of the salary information, automatically communicated to your potential applicants.”

In her article Irina explains how LinkedIn includes estimated salary information provided by Pascale.com with job posts and in the LinkedIn advanced job search dialogue and why this may be losing you applicants!

I do give LinkedIn props for featuring her piece in their “Recruiting & Hiring” channel 😀

Data Reveals How Candidates Want to be Recruited – Alyssa Sittig

Another thing I think LinkedIn deserves recognition for is their awesome use of infographics.

LinkedIn recently released their Talent Trends 2015 survey of 20, 000 professionals working in 29 different countries.

They then compiled the highlights from their survey in this Infographic.

How Workers Find Jobs Now – Peter Cappelli

If you love information like that released in LinkedIn’s survey, but prefer more objective sources, then this article is right up your alley.

Peter shares relevant information on the state of the labour force and the mindset of job seekers found in the most recent census.

How Social Recruiting Can Give You Advantage in Tight Job Market – By Jessica Miller-Merrell @jmillermerrell

Jessica explains how social presents a unique opportunity to reach, engage and relate to the candidate before they consider applying for a job.

She emphasizes the importance of using social to connect and build your employer brand in order to really capitalize on the unique benefits that social recruiting has to offer.

How to: Actually Engage Candidates You Source (As Proven by Science) – Holly Fawcett @HollyFawcett

Just how do you go about engaging with a job seeker that you randomly tracked down online?

If this is something that you struggle with, or an area where you feel that you could use a refresher, then you will love Holly’s article.

It’s full of awesome, science-backed advice for engaging candidates effectively.

That’s it for this week! If you have a blog post that you think we should feature, then let us know in the comments 😀

Know your candidate is one of the major tenants of recruitment. This knowledge informs how your reach job seekers, how you sell your company to them, and how you convert them into applicants. To help you stay abreast of the latest workforce trends we’ve gathered 5 excellent blog posts about today’s candidates.

Baby Boomer Brain Drain – Alison Napolitano

10, 000 Baby Boomers turn 65 each day! – Click to Tweet

Baby Boomers exiting the labor force will potentially push the skills gap to an all-new high! So expect the current workforce trend towards a candidate drive market to continue. This infographic explains the impact that the Baby Boomer brain drain will have, how companies are preparing (or not preparing) for it, and what you can do to avoid the pitfalls at your workplace.

A Different View of 'Top' Talent, Namely That it is Mostly a Myth – Steve Boese

The desire, especially in tech, to recruit “rock star” candidates is one of my least favourite workforce trends. In this article, Steve explains why this trend is misguided and often harmful to a company’s overall success.

Recruiting Across Cultures: One Size Does Not Fit All – Michael Sanger

Hiring on a global scale is becoming much more common place. Many companies are broadening their talent pools to include a significant number of non-local candidates and employees. HR and recruiters need to consider the cultural differences that influence how they assess candidates. Michael explains how the workforce trend towards diversity complicates HR by forcing us to question employee expectations and cultural bias.

How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters - Neil Irwin

Cultivating a culture of business has been a rising workplace trend for a couple of decades now. Working long hours, traveling at a moments notice, and being in constant contact with clients and colleagues via mobile is no longer the exception, but the norm for todays workers… Or is it? Neil’s article explores recent research showing that many of the people, particularly men, who are supposedly putting in 80- or 90-hour workweeks, are actually faking it!

 73% Of Professionals Don’t Love Current Positions – Sarah Adams

Careerealism’s 2015 Employee Satisfaction Survey results are in! After polling their 1 million plus monthly reader base career advice site, Careerealism found that:

• 38% of participants said their job was “okay, I guess”

• 35% of participants said they hated their current job

• 27% of participants said they “REALLY love” their job

Check out Sarah’s blog post to learn more about their survey.

f you need a hand staying on top of the latest trends in social media in order to keep your social recruiting current, then we’ve got you covered!

For this week’s link love we’ve rounded up the best new blog posts on social media, mobile, and social recruiting for your reading pleasure.

In the articles linked bellow you’ll find excellent information on everything from how job seekers behave on Twitter to how Mobilegeddon actually affected website performance.

Enjoy!

76 Percent of Job Seekers Browse Company Profiles on Twitter – Kimberlee Morrison

The impact of social media on recruitment is undeniable.

The majority of recruiters currently use (or plan to use) social networks to recruit candidates and target job seekers.

73% of recruiters report having successfully used social to recruiting to hire. – Click to Tweet 

In this article Kimberlee explains some of the highlights from a new study about how job seekers and recruiters are using Twitter.

8 Economic Fun Facts About Social Media Platforms – Drew Hendricks 

Did you know that Twitter has “only” made 436 million this year, but Facebook has already brought in 3.5 billion!?

Social media platforms are extremely thorough when tracking their economic ups and downs and their demographics. Drew shares some of the more salient bits of trivia about the most popular social networks. The demographic info alone is worth the read!

The “Why” and “How” of Social Loyalty – Richard Smith

Social Loyalty looks to be the next most significant phase of Social Media. It’s basically old school consumer loyalty, but with a social media edge.

Understanding how to build social loyalty is extremely important for any company looking to improve their online employer brand and run an effective social recruiting campaign.

9 Ways the Pros Curate Content for Success – Peg Fitzpatrick

Content strategy is essential to an effective social recruiting campaign. As such, it is extremely important to create original and share content curated from other trusted sources. But content creation can be extremely time consuming if you don’t have a good plan.

Social media pro, Peg Fitzpatrick, has 9 tactics to help you save time without sacrificing the quality of the content you share.

How Has Google’s ‘Mobilegeddon’ Impacted Mobile Traffic? – Justin Lafferty

Now that we are a couple of weeks into Mobilegeddon, we can look back and assess its impact.

Justin uses several clients and non-clients websites as examples to demonstrate how Google’s algorithm is affecting their site’s performance with mobile users.

When examining responsive (mobile-friendly) sites, Mobilegeddon doesn’t seem to have made a significant difference. It isn’t until Just examines two non-responsive websites that we see the huge impact that Mobilegeddon has made.

Enjoy these links, and stay social 😀