Blog: Jobs

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: