Facebook can be a great way to ask employees for referrals, as well as for your employees to find referrals. As a best practice, you should also allow those candidates to apply directly on Facebook. If you take any part of the process off of Facebook, you may find that they loose interest. If you’re going to ask people to reach out to their Facebook network of friends and family to help you find referral candidates, you should ask them to do so using Facebook. Also, because your employees are finding candidates on Facebook, you should allow those candidates to apply on Facebook, so that you’re not taking anyone off the medium they’re already using.

A Facebook group is an easy way to communicate with your internal employees about job openings – you can post your jobs, ask for referrals, and send the location of the application. If you can keep all of this on Facebook – even better.

As a best practice, you would ideally want to lead your referral candidates to your Facebook Business Page to see the job description and apply. Job Posting Apps make this easy. 

To get the most out of your page, you should also work on conveying your employment brand to attract candidates. Add pictures of your employees, your office, and company events to paint a picture of what working for your company would be like. You can also add videos to your page – for your more important positions, you may want to create a video with the hiring manager introducing the company, the position, and what the ideal candidate would look like. You may also want to take an office tour, and ask some of the other people in the hiring department what they like about their job.

You also want to make sure that you’re posting valuable content on your Timeline which will appeal to referral candidates. This may include articles from your employer blog or third party blogs, press releases about your company’s successes, and milestones that you are proud of.

This gives the referral candidate additional information about your opportunity, which is particularly helpful if your employees are referring passive candidates. Since passive candidates are generally considered to be happily employed, they may need this extra reassurance that your opportunity is worth considering. Therefore, you must put a lot of thought into your strategy for sourcing passive candidates.

Once you’ve gotten your employees enthused about your referral program and attracted some great candidates, you need to handle them appropriately to keep your successes going.