How to Use Facebook for Recruiting College Students

By Francine Fluetsch on March 26, 2017

image via Hiring People

What are college students constantly glued to? Their phones. And what exactly are they doing on said phones? Probably browsing social media every couple minutes or so.

College students know it’s a bad habit, but it has become so ingrained in their everyday lives that it would feel very abnormal not to check social media 24/7. Whether you are down with the social media age or not, one thing is for sure: if you want to recruit college students, social media is a great way to do it.

Even though Facebook is starting to hit a small decline for the younger generations, plenty of college students still utilize it to connect with friends and look for work, and this is where your recruiting can come in. So how exactly can you use this platform to your advantage?

Make a page

First and foremost, you want to build a social media platform for your company if it doesn’t already have one or revamp the one that it currently has. You want it to be easy to search for and to hold a good amount of information about the company and positions that need to be filled.

When making a page, you can have a “contact” option in place so interested students will be able to contact you while they are browsing Facebook. This contact button usually comes with a reply rate that you will accumulate as you reply to requests, so make sure to be constantly checking this and responding to inquiries as college students tend to love fast responses.

You should have enough content on your page so the students can get a good feel of who you are as a company and what the work environment might be like, but don’t go into post overload mode.

How many times should you post?

You want a good balance when considering the amount of content that you post on your page. You don’t want to post multiple times a day, as this will clog up the newsfeed and might cause students to unfollow you, and you also don’t want to post too far apart, as students are looking at a million pages a day and will forget about yours if you aren’t active on your site.

Again, don’t take this to the extreme, but try and post at least three times a week and make sure to check the site at least once a day for any messages or posts that you need to respond to.

How can you branch out?

It takes a while to get a following, so how can you make sure that your Facebook page is getting out there? You can ask college counseling and career centers to advertise your Facebook link when sponsoring you in their hiring newsletters, can remind students to like you on Facebook when you meet them at job fairs, and can also ask your current employees to all like the page and post it on their personal Facebook if they feel comfortable. You need to start somewhere, and slowly but surely this will build itself up and get you more follows in no time.

Think about it: most college students post the company they work at on their Facebook pages, and this can get others to click on it and possibly get you more potential employees. If you keep your social media active and well maintained, your employees will do a lot of the marketing of the page for you.

Who should be posting?

Ideally, you want all of your social media platforms to hold a consistent voice and image, so rather than having multiple employees posting on it, try and have one or two social media correspondents work on the page. They need to work together to brainstorm the aesthetics and attitude they want for the page and then need to stick with it; students really enjoy consistency. Also, make sure that you have people doing it who are fairly fluent in social media in general and how it works. This will result in great feedback from students.

Highlight key moments

If you throw an office party, have friendly competitions at work, or have a bring your pet to the office day, you want to make sure that the events are being documented and are showing up on your Facebook page. This way, students will get all aspects when they click on your page: they will be able to see what positions are available, and through the pictures, will also see what they will get when they apply/if they get the job. These are great incentives for students to linger on your page instead of just scrolling to the next, so make sure your social media people are on this.

Overall

The key aspects of using Facebook in order to recruit college students are to stay active on social media, have friendly responses to questions ASAP, don’t be naggy or post 24/7, and show that you are having fun with it! It takes a little time to get the hang of, but having a social media presence is well worth it.

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