Welcome to Jobcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy recruiting!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The video below shows you how to post jobs on Facebook using the Jobcast app. If you like what you see and would like to install the app on your Facebook Page - click here. Post jobs on Jobcast

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

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

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

We now offer you the ability to only show job details to those users who have "liked" your Facebook Page. You may want to enable this to boost the number of "likes" on your Facebook Page, but be warned that if users are reluctant to "like" your Page, then fewer users will see your jobs.  To enable this feature, go do "Admin Options" and change your "Like Button Settings" as shown below:

Once enabled, users will still see a list of your published jobs, but viewing job details will require them to "like" your Page first:

Similarly, jobs will still be visible on your Facebook Page's Wall, but once users request details, they will be asked to "Like" the Page:

I hope you find this useful.  If you have any feedback or comments, please send us a note or add a comment.

When the Jobcast.net Facebook App was launched in February, we didn’t offer customers the ability to delete jobs.  Jobs could be archived (either manually or automatically when the expiry period passed) and while these archived jobs were no longer publicly visible, you could still view the job applicants and any statistics associated with those jobs from the Admin Panel:

With archiving in place, we didn’t think it would be important for customers to be able to delete jobs. Besides, why would you want to lose valuable statistics about your job? Well, it turns out that we were wrong. We received a number of requests for a delete option and here are the reasons:

• When a lot of our customers first install our Facebook App, they often test it by creating sample job postings. These postings serve no purpose other than to test our App, so having them sitting in the Archived list clutters the list.

• Some of our customers have more than 100 archived jobs. With so many jobs that are archived, it becomes difficult to manage the list and an occasional purge is necessary.

We now offer you the ability to delete your jobs.  Deleting is permanent, so we didn’t want it to be so easy that you could do it inadvertently, but we also didn’t want to make it so burdening that it impacts the user experience. You will be asked to confirm your action whenever you performed a ‘delete’, but hopefully in a non-intrusive way.  Here are some examples:

Deleting a single job from your list:

Deleting multiple jobs:

I hope you find this feature useful.  If you have any feedback (on this topic or any other), please drop us a note.

This is a quick blog post to let you know that we now allow you to customize the message that gets posted to your Facebook Wall when you publish a new job.  You will find this option under “Admin Options”:

And this is how it will look on your Facebook Wall:

Please note that this “Wall Message” is specific to each Facebook Page. This means that if you have our app installed on multiple Facebook Pages, then you can set a unique “Wall Message” for each one.  This also means that if you have multiple users that administers your Facebook Page, then regardless of who publishes a job, this “Wall Message” will be used.

I’ve had  several customers ask for this feature, so I hope you find it useful.

This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the enhancements in our updated Facebook App:

• Facebook Job Recruitment App Redesign (March 8th)

• Applicant Routing (March 10th)

• Customize Your Email and Empty Jobs Tab (March 17th)

We often heard from our customers that it’s sometimes hard to classify a job posting into a single category (e.g. Accounting, Administrative) or type (e.g. Full Time, Part Time). For those times, we now offer you the ability to select multiple categories and types from the “Create Job” or “Edit Job” form:

Also, if you have more than one administrator for your Facebook Page, you can select multiple recipients to receive job applications:

I hope you find this feature useful.  Also, we’re conducting usability tests in an effort to continue improving our Facebook App. If you can participate, please contact us. Together, I hope we can continue to improve the recruitment experience on Facebook.

This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the enhancements in our updated Facebook App:

• Facebook Job Recruitment App Redesign (March 8th)

• Applicant Routing (March 10th)

In today’s post, I’m going the cover 2 important enhancements that our customers have been requesting:

• Change the email address where job applications are sent.

• Customize the content of the Jobs tab when you’re not actively recruiting.

Both of these requests are now supported.

Changing Your Primary Email

By default, we use the email address that’s stored in your Facebook account when sending you job applications. This was convenient because this email addresses was pre-approved by Facebook and we didn’t need you to confirm the validity of it. However, we understand that you don’t always want to use the email address stored on Facebook for your professional needs, so we now allow you to customize this email. We still use the email address stored on Facebook by default, but when you first authorize our app, you will be given the opportunity to change this email address.

Also, you can click Admin Options from the Admin Panel at anytime to this change your email.

Please note that after you request your email to be changed, you will still need to confirm the change before it’s finalized. We will send you an email with a confirmation link that you will need to click on to finalize the change. This is to ensure that we don’t inadvertently start sending job applications to an unauthorized email address.

Customize Empty Jobs Tab

There are times when you may not be actively recruiting. For these times, we display a generic message to users in your Jobs tab:

You can now personalize this message as follows:

As always, we welcome your feedback on these changes. And if you’d like to participate in an ongoing usability test that we’re conducting, we’d really like to hear from you. Together, I hope we can continue to improve the recruitment experience on Facebook.

This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the enhancements in the new Facebook App Redesign:

• Facebook Job Recruitment App Redesign (March 8th)

In today’s post, I’m going  the cover our new “Applicant Routing” option.  In the past, we collected all job applications on Syndicruit so that you can retrieve them at any time from within the Admin Panel of the Job Recruitment Facebook App:

We also emailed these job applications to users who have subscribed to receive them. But we’ve heard from some customers that they would like to route users to their own website and collect job applications there. For those circumstances, we now offer you an “Applicant Routing” feature. It’s available when you create a new job or edit an existing job. You can now choose to route candidates to an external website by simply specifying any website address:

Please note that once you choose to direct candidates to an external website, we no longer collect job applications on your behalf, so you won’t be able to retrieve them from within the Facebook App.

As always, we welcome your feedback on this change. And if you’d like to participate in an ongoing usability test that we’re conducting, we’d really like to hear from you. Together, I hope we can continue to improve the recruitment experience on Facebook.