Some Facebook Strategies to Consider

Harting says Accenture has 30 career pages on Facebook, all of which both promote the company as a nice place to work and list specific job postings. Many people share job postings with friends they feel would be interested in them, he says, adding that referrals from Facebook friends tend to be highly trusted. "Things tend to move along more smoothly when the referrer and candidate can do everything without leaving Facebook," Harting says.

Vineland, N.J.-based Louis P. Kadetsky, managing director of KGTiger, which provides services to help corporate recruiters, describes three levels of involvement in Facebook that corporations can engage in.

The first is simple brand identity. Create a Facebook "work for us" company page that describes, in general, the benefits of working for the company and the types of positions the company is looking to fill.

While this may closely resemble similar pages on the corporate website, when Facebook users "Like" the site, any new material will appear on their newsfeed and be visible to their friends. "You get the advantage of spreading your brand well beyond the person who landed on your page. And because the person 'Liked' your page, you get the benefit of an implicit recommendation," says Kadetsky.

The second level is to post specific jobs on Facebook. To ease the burden of posting and updating many listings, he says, most companies opt to only post jobs that are either difficult to fill or will most likely appeal to Facebook's younger demographic. New Facebook apps that automate the process of posting jobs, however, are beginning to encourage companies to post more of their jobs -- sometimes all of them -- on Facebook.

The third level is to target specific types of people by joining Facebook groups. This allows recruiters to engage directly with people who have the needed skills. Kadetsky points out that participating in group discussions is much more efficient than one-on-one telephone calls. "Recruiters can reach a lot of people in a single posting," he says.

One potential advantage of Facebook over corporate career websites is that visitors may not only communicate with corporate recruiters but also with current employees, who tend to be more trusted resources.

Kevin Wheeler, president of The Future of Talent Institute acknowledges that security-conscious organizations may limit employee access to social media in order to prevent possible leakage of sensitive information. "Companies naturally want control over what their employees say on Facebook. But if you have too much control -- if there are no even-slightly-negative comments from employees -- Facebook users won't trust them," Wheeler says.

Finally, he says, prospective applicants should "have a realistic picture of what it's like to work at your company." For example, if programmers sometimes work 10 hours a day when a new system is installed or may be called in at 3 a.m. to fix bugs, those are not things you'd want to hide from candidates.

While Facebook may not be completely ready for prime time when it comes to job postings and recruitment features, a number of companies are developing add-on applications aimed at improving Facebook recruitment functionality.

What about LinkedIn?

According to its website, LinkedIn has 120 million users, which makes it the largest professional network on the web. And while its membership is only one-sixth that of Facebook, virtually all its members are there to publicize their professional and academic information for the purpose of advancing their careers, so LinkedIn profiles very often have much more comprehensive job and educational histories than do Facebook profiles.

For recruiters looking for a specific, hard-to-find skill, a LinkedIn search is likely to be more fruitful than a Facebook one. And people are more amenable to being contacted about a job on LinkedIn than they are on Facebook.

There is also a bit of a generational gap between LinkedIn and Facebook. Harting and others find that, for high-level executive positions -- those that tend to be filled with people over 40 years old -- LinkedIn is better. On the other hand, he says, many college students or recent graduates on Facebook are either not on LinkedIn or have virtually no information there that they do not also have on Facebook.

Kadetsky believes Facebook has the potential to become a more powerful recruiting tool than LinkedIn primarily because of its numerical advantage, but also because of what he calls its "warm and fuzzy atmosphere."

"People," he says, "are much more willing to discuss things informally on Facebook. A recruiter who contacts someone at a Facebook group can have a light discussion about the company and suggest a visit to the company's career site. Discussions initiated through LinkedIn tend to be more formal. So unless someone is actively looking for a job, [he or she] may not want to pursue the discussion there," he says.

"We see value to utilizing both as part of our employer brand and recruitment strategy," says Jenny DeVaughn, manager of social media and employment branding at Houston-based Waste Management Inc. More people who visit her company's career website, she says, got there through the company's Facebook page(s) rather than through LinkedIn.