The traditional recruiting approach is to hire a third party recruiting firm or individual recruiter who writes boring job descriptions, throws “hail mary” listings on job boards and works their network.

There is nothing wrong with this, but if you want younger, tech-savvy employees, I believe you need to go to Facebook: home of 1 billion people!

Here are 5 companies that are leveraging their Social Recruiting efforts by doing a good job with their Facebook Careers pages.  All these pages have nice cover images, a clear, consistent content strategy, respond to questions in a timely fashion, and leverage Apps or Tabs well:

Microsoft - They use great visuals that show what it’s like to work at Microsoft, including pictures of employees and cupcakes!  Including pictures (a form of Visual Recruiting) that your employees will like helps to spread the word naturally and socially.

The Home Depot – This page uses their Apps to educate recruits on the different Career Areas to search for Jobs and to apply for internships.

Intuit – They do a great job of staying topical and not always focusing just on Intuit. For example, they post about current events (Hurricane Sandy and Veterans Day).  They also showcase the company’s good deeds because most people appreciate working at a company that cares.

Ernst & Young – They do a good job of curating helpful articles and tools for jobseekers.  Remember, the goal of any good Facebook page is for visitors to like the page because it provides immediate value.

US Navy Life - This page provides an inside look for those interested in joining the Navy.  They know they need to inspire recruits to take action and this page attempts to do so with great use of Recruiting Videos and pictures.

3 Steps I Recommend For A Better Facebook Careers Page

Step 1: Create an attractive and informative page.

You do this by creating an original cover image that best depicts the spirit of your company. If you think the key to your company is pictures of its people or products, then show those.

Also, remember that there are a number of creative elements to a great Facebook page including the cover image, the app images, the favicons, and avatar. All of these elements should be designed to look great together.

Step 2: Post content that is helpful and interesting.

The key to good content is to think in terms of what your community wants to learn and discover vs. what your company wants to talk about. A few key best practices about each post: keep it short (under 90 characters), always use a picture or video, test it for Mobile (since over 50% of views will occur there).

Step 3: Humans will help you build a community and maximize your social reach.

A final tip is to track your performance on every post by counting the level of engagement & sentiment. A quick way to track engagement is to count the number of actions: Likes + Comments + Shares.

Sentiment is trickier, but you can count this by tracking positive and negative comments and then seeing the % positive over time.