5 Reasons Why your Facebook Job Ads aren’t Working and How to Fix It
Facebook boasts 2.9 billion+ users. It’s impossible to deny that your target audience, qualified caregivers, are not on the platform. They are there.
Yet, many home care agencies tell us that they’re not able to get qualified caregivers to apply for their jobs through the platform. They feel that they’ve wasted their money or had very low quality candidates.
So, why hasn’t your home care agency seen success with the platform? There are many potential reasons. In fact, too many for one blog post! In this post we’ll cover some of the top reasons we’ve seen:
Target audience too broad or too narrow
Application process too long
Call to action unclear
Incorrect bidding strategy for your market
Creative Fatigue
Target Audience Too Broad or Too Narrow
The reason that marketers consistently rank Facebook the best ROI is because of the advanced capabilities around market segmentation. You can reach audiences with specific demographics, interests, preferences, behaviors and so, so much more!
But, with all these choices, newbies to the audience targeting may find that they select either too broad or too narrow of a group to show their ads.
If your audience is too broad, then you will waste money by showing the ad to people who aren’t really interested. If your audience is too narrow, you may exclude some who would be a good fit for your ad or you may create “creative fatigue” by accident which can further drive up your costs. We’ll cover creative fatigue later in this post.
How do you solve the audience problem?
Facebook places restrictions on the type of audience targeting that you can use when promoting employment. This is, rightly-so, to prevent discrimination (for example, you can’t marketing a job to only women between the ages of 18-44).
Thus, if you’re only using facebook job ads alone to market your positions, you may inadvertently be advertising too broad of an audience.
One solution is to run job ads simultaneously with engagement ads about your business. An engagement ad is simply your own great, visual content about your business with ad spending behind it. With an engagement post (like a lead form or messenger ad), you’re able to create a well-rounded set of parameters and it helps build an audience of passive job seekers who are starting to become familiar with your business and who will later see your job postings.
Application process too long
When you learn about a product or service online, do you usually buy right away? Not usually… unless it’s an urgent need. The same is true for creating a hiring funnel on facebook for caregivers.
Engagement posts create awareness, job ads turn that awareness into real consideration. Then you or your recruiter needs to convert that caregiver into an employee.
Hubspot describes the process well in the context of a sales funnel, here:
This means that you should not expect that a caregiver applying for a job through facebook will complete a 3 page job application. It’s simply too high of a barrier to entry at the consideration stage.
How do you fix this?
Try altering your application process for your facebook job ads:
Step 1: Facebook job ad applications include only your top 5-6 required knock-out questions as your qualifications.
Step 2: Call the caregiver or use automated scheduling to get an appointment with the caregiver as soon as a qualified applicant comes in. Do a phone screen and invite successful candidates into the office to complete the next steps.
Step 3: When the caregiver is in the office, complete as much of the hiring process as possible at once. Have them complete your full length application with references, do their state registration, and initial orientation training all at the same time.
Call to Action Unclear
A call to action is a sales and marketing term which simply means the action that you want your ad or sales call to result in by your target.
Here’s an example of an ad for Augusta with a clear call to action:
“Augusta drives a new pool of caregiver talent to apply for your jobs at your successful home care agency. Book a demo today!”
Other examples could be “apply now!” “buy now!” and so on.
If you’re trying to combine two calls to action in one ad, you’re confusing your reader. This could happen when your ad shows the action of “apply now” but the copy of your ad directs the reader to click on a separate link to your full length application.
How do you fix this?
When using Facebook job ads, you’ll start by creating a job post. This will include a job description and your knock out questions among other things.
Next, when you “boost” or put ad spending behind the post, your ad will automatically be created with a simple “apply now” call to action. This button will take the candidate to your facebook application (not to your typical full length application). And that’s OK! In fact, it’s better than your full length application as I described earlier in this article on improving your hiring funnel. Just make sure that all of your facebook job ad copy directs the reader to use that one, same call to action button of “apply now.”
Incorrect bidding strategy for your target audience
What the heck is a facebook bidding strategy?! It may sound complicated, but it is not.
In the simplest terms, we define your bidding strategy as how much, for how long and over how many types of ads.
Some home care agencies tell us they’ve tried Facebook’s automated bidding for delivery optimization options and haven’t gotten the results they wanted.
How do you fix this?
Switch to using Facebook’s manual bidding and set a budget for each ad that you want to try out (whether it's a job ad, or engagement ad or both).
You will need to do some testing alongside the audience that you’ve selected for your ads. But, the most important thing here is: do not change your ad content or tactics too quickly. Facebook has a bid optimization system and you will confuse it if you do not leave your ad up for a long enough amount of time. Depending on the audience size you chose, you may want to consider at least a three month testing period.
Creative Fatigue
When you’re watching TV and you see the same ad 3 or 4 times, you put it on mute or change the channel, right? This is creative fatigue.
Creative fatigue means that your audience has seen the same content from your company too many times.
It’s a problem for several reasons, but the big one is: you’re wasting money and time on people who have already been shown to not be interested in what you’re offering. This makes your ad spend go up.
The other ancillary problem is related to your audience size that we mentioned earlier in this article. If you’re audience is too narrow, creative fatigue will happen fast and you will get very few conversions from your ads.
How do you fix this?
Run a A/B tests on your engagement postings and your job ad postings. This simply means that you create two different versions of each of your ad types and run them simultaneously.
Again, make sure you give enough time for the ads to run. Minimum one month, but three months is going to be better.
After your test is complete, analyze the results by measuring how well the applicant to hire or rejected ratio was. Here’s another article we wrote about how to measure and improve your hiring funnel.
It’s important to measure further down your funnel to whether or not each applicant was qualified for an interview and then hired or rejected. Don’t stop by just measuring how many applicants there were through each ad as this will not tell you the quality of the applicants.
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