Just to recap: Passive candidates are magical unicorns. They will instantly improve your business, upgrade your company culture, and double your chances of winning the lottery.

Recruiting passive candidates will solve all of your problems!

Sadly, this is extremely difficult to do because passive candidates live in a land without help wanted ads, job boards, or desktop computers. It’s a scary place.

Annnd back to reality.

Passive candidates are not the be all end all of recruiting. They do, however, make up a huge percentage of the labor market (80%), they tend to need less skill development (around 17% less), and they also tend to be more driven once hired.

Why recruiting passive candidates has higher ROI than you think

The part about passive candidates being hard to reach was a little more realistic. These candidates already have employment and are not actively seeking work in the traditional sense. So, no, they usually aren’t looking on job boards.

But, many of them are interested in new career opportunities, 61% of them according to Jobvite. They may not be actively looking, but they are open to being contacted by a recruiter, and if they stumble across a really cool job post, they’ll happily apply.

Last week we talked about how to use social to source passive candidates. This week we’re going to focus on how you can get your job posts seen by those candidates.

No surprises here, the best way to reach passive candidates is social recruiting.

The Why

Passive candidates may not be checking the help wanteds, but they are checking their Facebook accounts (76% of them every day, often multiple times per day!) This means that you can use Facebook’s targeted ads to reach the candidates you can’t reach with traditional recruiting channels.

The How

First you need a company Facebook Page. I’m going to assume most of you have one of those already. If you don’t have one, it’s actually pretty easy to set up. Whether you plan to use it for recruiting passive candidates or not, you need a Facebook Page!

Here’s a simple guide to setting up a Facebook Business Page.

Next you’ll need to create a Facebook Career Site. It’s important that your Facebook Career Site is customized to your employer brand. Brand consistency is important because it makes your Page look legitimate which is important for garnering potential candidates’ trust. Building a fully branded Facebook Career Site will also help you gain social proof, and grow your employer brand’s internet presence in general.

Here’s how you can get started building a Branded Facebook Career Site

Now you’ll need to post some jobs, and promote the heck out of them!

As much as I would love to tell you that all you need to do to reach candidates with Facebook is post a few jobs, share them, and then get back to the one million other things you need to get done… It’s just not that easy.

Like all good things, Facebook recruiting does take effort. Luckily, it doesn’t take a lot of effort. In fact the ROI is quite high according to most recruiting surveys (the Jobvite, and Bersin recruiting studies to name a couple.)

If you want your posts to reach passive candidates, using Facebook Targeted Ads is the most effective way to do it. With FB Ads you can target users based on their demographics, work history, skill set, and interests. This means that your job posts will reach not only more potential hires, but the right potential hires.

 Here’s a step by step guide to using Facebook Ads for recruiting

Using Facebook Ads is currently your best option for targeting passive candidates, and converting them into applicants. But ads aren’t the only reason Facebook is a great platform to reach these potential hires. You also need to take mobile, user demographics, and industry requirements into account…

Wow, this article got long.

You must be exhausted.

We’ll cover why mobile is extra important when trying to reach passive candidates, why LinkedIn (although totally rad) is probably not your best bet for recruiting passive candidates, and how many times I can type the words “passive candidates” before developing a nasty case of carpal tunnel.

Happy social recruiting everyone!