How can we use Facebook to recruit?

That was the question I was asking myself today as I am working on a project to hire people for the Mountain View Branch of Residential Pacific Mortgage.

Indeed, most of the networking places, whether they are on line or off line are used by headhunters to find prospects.

Therefore, as I am defining a strategy to promote the agency and find possible agents, I was wondering how to use Facebook, which is the new big social network, to promote our company as a possible fit for mortgage agents.

Ernst & Young use Facebook to recruit college students as they are finishing their studies.

As I was undertaking research about this topic, I found this article about Ernst & Young recruiting people through Facebook. According to the article “E&P's page is the first sponsored page on Facebook that is used exclusively for recruitment purposes.”

“E&P's sponsored Facebook page contains information and discussion boards aimed at college students.” I don’t think that would be very useful for my situation, as it does not exist a specific program to become loan agent, so I assume there is no

Visit of their facebook page

At first sight, the page seems to be a simple recruiting page, describing the Ernst & Young vision of doing business. What I liked how ever, is the interactivity with the discussions. For example, there was a student asking how his education could drive him to a career in this company. One of the article key point was that you need to have people answering fast to questions asked on the page, and I think this is true as all the different questions were answered in the forum.

The only problem I face is how did they promote their page? By using the flyers proposed by Facebook? If so, that might be very powerful. My concern is that I am looking for mortgage agents, and the term “mortgage” is not a keyword proposed by facebook, therefore I can’t target these people. I have to find some other ways to promote it.

I think Facebook can be used to recruit college students as they are the primary users of Facebook and as they are seeking for information about potential employers.

My opinion
In my opinion, Facebook can be a great tool to promote a company for college students, because Facebook is used primarly by this target. It can turn into something more global later if Facebook become bigger on the other targets.

Do you know some other companies using Facebook for hiring purposes?