How to Use Facebook for Social Recruiting Messaging

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Job recruitment officers should not ignore Facebook’s potential when it comes to recruitment as it has 1.38B monthly active users and 890M daily active users as reported by Boolean Blackbelt.

Seventy-six percent of job seekers obtained their current jobs through Facebook as according to Jobvite’s 2014 Job Seeker Nation Report. Jobvite discovered that job seekers use Facebook in seeking jobs, while recruiters opt to LinkedIn when finding potential candidates.

Much has been written regarding Facebook’s Graph Search. Although it is not as powerful as it was before, it is easy to find people to recruit on Facebook.

Facebook’s Potential on Messaging Candidates

On the contrary, only a few blog posts have been written on how to use Facebook to reach out to potential job hires. Only a few knows the ins and outs of messaging people on Facebook. Most job recruiters think that people might feel awkward to receive messages from potential employers.

Username@facebook.com email

Facebook used to target users into using a @facebook.com email. Facebook users have an email that utilizes their username.

A person’s username can be checked on by looking at the URL of their profile.So if the URL of a facebook user is http://www.facebook.com/julia.ramirez, her email address becomes julia.ramirez@facebook.com.

However, in February 2014, Facebook terminated their email service because of a low percentage of users. If a recruiter sends an email to a person’s @facebook.com email address, that email will be sent to the email address the user utilized when they signed up.

Theoretically, a person can send an email to any Facebook user and this will be displayed in their personal email inbox. Although this sounds awesome, reality shows that there are some ‘hindrances.’

A spokesperson of Facebook reiterated that the social media platform limits the number of messages an individual can obtain in their inbox and from people who are not connected with them. Facebook also has methods of detecting spam and does not forward messages that it considers as spam. Furthermore, external email providers also have their own system of checking spam. Moreover, users also are empowered to turn off email forwarding.

The good news for recruiters is that most people are not familiar that they have a @facebook.com email address. Thus, they will not turn off @facebook.com email forwarding.

However, tests have shown that sending emails to @facebook.com email addresses from Outlook rarely succeeds and Gmail labels incoming emails as spam.

Whatever the case, it is still worth trying as this is free and easy.

 

Messages on Facebook

Anyone can send a message to anyone on Facebook. There is the possibility that it might never get seen unless one pays.

A person who sends a message to someone of whom he has no connection will have the message on the person’s Other folder. This often goes unnoticed as people are not notified of these messages and people are unaware that they have another folder.

A recruiter can have the option to pay to send a potential candidate a message to his primary inbox.

 

Facebook Messaging Inbox

It costs around $1.00 to send a message to a person who has no connection with the other in the US.

Although some may think that it is expensive to pay $1.00 to get into someone’s primary Facebook inbox, it costs more when a person sends an email on Indeed. The pricing of LinkedIn when it comes to sending emails would be greater than $1.00 each. Thus, it is considered to be affordable and reasonable to spend $1.00 to send a message to a potential candidate.

 

Message to Send to People

Recruiters can approach people through apologizing for reaching out to them through Facebook. People will allow job recruiters for further communication if they feel that the other understands and respects their privacy.

Another way is to use a subject line. Although Facebook does not have a specific space for a subject line, recruiters can use the first line of the message as a subject line. This will avoid confusion with the recipient of the message.

 

Conclusion

Facebook has a great potential when it comes to finding a gem for one’s company. You can post your comments on what you think about this article and if you have any ideas on how to use Facebook as a social recruiting message platform.