Convinced that leveraging Facebook to engage with potential candidates is right for your company? Consider creating a strategy to ensure you are getting the most out of your time and financial commitment. Consider this 5 step approach:

Objective. What is the purpose of your account and/or Like page? Is it to build brand awareness, enhance your employer brand, establish leads to build an email list, drive traffic to your recruitment page, engage your community or a combination of the above? Perhaps you are looking to leverage your solid consumer brand reputation to drive candidate flow. Determining whether you will host a combined or separate recruitment and marketing page will be your first step.

Design your social media strategy. Will you use Facebook as a stand-alone marketing and candidate generation tool or integrate with other sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube or a company blog or website? Will you cross-populate content and followers to increase your overall employer and company brand reputation? Creating a targeted and measurable plan will help you derive value from Facebook while also ensuring return on your financial and time investment.

Determine your content. Develop a plan for publishing content, including updates, photos, videos and links. Consider creating a matrix to determine what content will be fed to which site to get the right messages to your followers. Using a platform such as Tweetdeck or HootSuite will allow you to schedule your content and send out automatically. For recruitment, consider posting information about current job opportunities, promotions in the firm, company activities and team building events, videos, even employee testimonials.

Plan to promote. As discussed above, consider ways to promote your social media accounts. This may be through paid Facebook advertising or promotion on your website, blog, other social media sites, direct marketing literature, groups, updates etc. By integrating your online and offline communications programs, you’ll reach a larger audience and cross-promote your marketing and recruitment messages.

Aim to convert. While it is great to have large numbers of followers, it it inconsequential if they don’t convert into job applications. Build your community by providing timely and relevant content, while also engaging in dialogue. Social media is about two way communication, not just feeding followers content.

These are just a few suggestions to get you started. Once you’re using Facebook for recruitment on a regular basis, you’ll gain a better understanding of which methods are best for your market. Now that you’re armed with some basic concepts on Facebook strategy, why not get started today? To install our Facebook recruitment app, click here.