Development Seed Blog

How We Advertised a Job on Facebook

When we needed to post a new job ad online, we started going through the list of usual suspects: Idealist, Craigslist, various DC tech job boards, and advertising on sites where we knew people might be. Then we thought, "What about Facebook?" We couldn’t remember ever seeing a good job ad on Facebook, but we figured we'd try it out. Here's what we found.

First, Facebook's combination of price, targeting options, and ease of use made it just about unparalleled from the perspective of the ad placement itself. But those of us who use Facebook are used to these ads being nightlife promotions, surveys to make quick cash online, or corporate ads. I even remember once seeing an ad for a plastic surgeon in the Midwest (they weren't making the best use of the targeting feature, unless they expect a 26-year-old male from Colorado to fly to Wisconsin for Botox ;). Would a reputable job ad work? We created one in order to find out.

We guessed that our best chances would be to target it to people who live in the Washington DC metro area and have interests in things we might look for in a job candidate. We used Facebook's ad placement tool to target people in DC, VA, and MD, and then listed out keywords that we thought the ideal candidates may have. Some of the keywords we thought of didn't hit any users' profiles, but others did. When they hit, the Facebook ad placement interface told us how many people used this keyword in their profile. In the end, here's what our list looked like – there are a couple odd ones, but it was what we had to work with:

Next we had to choose the ad method. Would CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per impression rate) go further? Since the targeting generated a field of less than 4,000 total people targeted, we went with CPM assuming it would get us better exposure, and we were right. We had to pay almost a dollar a click for CPC and only got 2 clicks, based in part on our bid being lower than others who were doing CPC. But with CPM, our ad got served over 40,000 times to our targeted users over the course of eight days, and for a total cost of...about $13. At a $.42 bid per thousand ads, our ad was served an average of 10 times to each user in the targeted pool.

At that rate, our guess is that we achieved something close enough to saturation among a very targeted group of people who would possibly be interested in the job, all for pennies on the dollar compared to BlogAds, high-traffic local websites, or high-visibility advertising in local papers or other publications. (Facebook only serves one ad per page, so it's not quite the same as using the classifieds in the Express.)

Results matter too though, right? In the last week, we've seen an influx of really great job applications. We also advertised in all our usual places too, but the quality of the applicants was much better than the last round when we advertised only on Craigslist and Idealist.org. What we're seeing now are people with much better skill sets and who look like better applicants. Can we attribute it all to Facebook? Not at all, but it's a good sign that something is going better this time. And we did have one applicant who explicitly said he found the job on Facebook. He starts next Monday.  : )

The next time we're looking to advertise something with a local element to it, for the cost and time involved, we'll be using Facebook for sure. The cost is nearly negligible, and the exposure appeared to be great. For nonprofits or other organizations who are looking to advertise online effectively and keep an eye on the budget, our little test confirms that Facebook is an especially attractive option to try when looking for new hires, advertising events, or even working on a fundraising campaign. Want to ask every 18 to 25 year old in the United States who's interested in "saving the world" to join your campaign? You can have 7,860 people (and counting) as a captive audience.