Forget fan pages, applications, and searching for user profiles. One of the easiest ways to get in front of users on Facebook is by using Facebook Ads.
Fast forward to Apr 2010 and many organisations are using Facebook for recruitment by embracing targeted advertising. Here is a selection of ads I have found over the past few days from job boards, employers, recruiters and training providers.
Recruitment
Education & Training
A recent report by Nielsen/Facebook titled "The Value of Social Media Ad Impressions" found that consumers trust their friends and peers more than anyone else when it comes to making a purchase decision. It’s critical that we understand advertising not just in terms of “paid” media, but also in terms of how “earned” media (advertising that is passed along or shared among to friends and beyond) and social advocacy contribute to campaigns.
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Interesting post. I am lead online consultant at Net Natives. One of our specialities is actually using Facebook business pages and Facebook advertising specifically for recruitng.
You can find loads of useful information on our blog.
Symantec has put together a short educational video on how cyber mule jobs work and why you need to avoid these types of job ads. Job boards work very hard to put in processes to validate each advertiser and the legitimacy of the job ads before they are posted on their site. But scammers are getting smarter and we all need to learn how to spot suspect job ads.
In this day and age we’re all aware of the threat cybercriminals pose to our personal information. If you’re not careful, items such as your credit card number could fall into the wrong hands, resulting in unauthorized goods and services being purchased in your name. What may come as a surprise is not everyone participating in these activities is a full-blown cybercriminal. Some are ordinary citizens - just like you and me - that unintentionally get caught up in illegal activity.
How does this happen? Let’s say you’ve recently lost your job and are desperate to find new work. So, you post your resume on a job recruitment website. A short time later you receive an email from a recruiter:
Acme Inc. is opening a vacancy for the Correspondence Manager position.
What luck! The job is done entirely from home, receiving and reshipping packages. It’s easy work that pays quite well:
Base Payment Mail handling managers receive $1000 salary per month and additionally $25 for every shipped package during the trial period.
It sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it is. The job, should you accept it, actually entails redistributing goods purchased online with stolen credit cards. Congratulations, you’re a cyber mule.
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MyCareer has (finally) updated their homepage design with a smaller menu bar, large job search box and quick links for the various job seeker tools. The design is less "yellow" and creates a smoother job search entry.
What could be a case of the dreaded "1 step forward, 2 steps back" syndrome. It seems the same error I picked up on last year has resurfaced. The job search title of ads that were placed in the newspaper and also posted online, are truncated to 20 characters. Interesting.
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Do you use WordPress? Are you aware of the security implications around the software? Over the past week, thousands of WordPress websites have been compromised with malicious malware code inserted into the database
If you use WordPress, you better check your site. Prevention is better than cure.
Wordpress stores the database credentials in plain-text at the wp-config.php file.
This configuration file should only be read by Apache, but some users (well, lots of users) left it in a way that anyone could read it (755 instead of 750 in Linux slang).
A malicious user at Network Solutions creates a script to find those configuration files that were incorrectly configured.
This same malicious user finds hundreds of configuration files with the incorrect permissions and retrieves the database credentials.
Yes, he again (the bad guy) launches an attack and modify the database for all these blogs. Now the siteurl for all of them just became [malicious website]. Easy hack.
The problem for just about any web application that requires access to a database is that there just isn't a good way to secure the database login credentials in a plain text file.
At some point, the web application has to be able to send those credentials to the database server. And if the web server can read/generate those credentials, then there is always the possibility that an unauthorized party on the same server might be able to gain access to them "if the server and app are not secured properly".
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Feel free to join in on the conversation. All comments are moderated before publishing. Comments posted by subscribers don't necessarily reflect the views of Recruitment Directory.
If you tried to recruit via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc and have since stopped. It may be a good idea to delete your social networking presence to avoid the embarrassment from clients, candidates and other recruiters from finding your profile and calling you a failure.
You can always start again, and do it correctly this time.
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One, why would you consider it embarrassing to have tried social media and abandoned it? Odds are you abandoned it for something more profitable or lucrative. If you're too busy making money and running a business to update your MySpace page, there's probably not much cause for embarrasment there.
Two, if your clients, candidates and peers are bagging you out for not being active enough on social media, then either they feel the need to demonstrate superiority in a field you've deliberately abandoned, or they're looking for something to criticise, and this is the best they can do. Either way, surely whatever you're doing is more important than listening to critics with so trite and meaningless a complaint.
I've seen many recruiters fail at using social media in general as they simply don't understand the premise. I wrote an article a couple of years back about how consultants were using Facebook and so many had just set up groups that looked like their web page. Others were jumping in on group conversations and advertising jobs.
It's like all the spam you see on twitter with job adverts.
I'm sure that has a very low success rate.
The only consultants that I saw who were using Facebook successfully were thinking about it's purpose, which is friends hooking up where there was already some sort of connection previously. They'd set up events type pages for drinks at the pub. They were the only ones who seemed to have any sort of response or people joining their group.
Just over 12 months ago I wrote a blog post titled Integrating Facebook Connect with your Job Board on the pros of doing this. Since then, I have only seen a handful of job sites with Facebook Connect integration. Why? apparently it's too hard to do.
One of the most useful and powerful features of Facebook Connect is the ability to access a user's profile information as soon as they connect with your site. This can enable you to provide a much richer and personalised experience for the user without forcing them through multiple set-up screens.
Facebook claims that
97% of users have full name
85% of users have uploaded a picture
8% of users have specified education history
Once a user connects to your site or application, you are able to access and use information that the user has shared on their profile to provide a richer experience. In addition, you can access information about the user's friends and others on behalf of the user of your app - basically any information that is available to that user on Facebook can be used through the lens of your site or application.
You should use this information to immediately create a personalised and social experience. For example:
Localise jobs to the users geography.
Feature content shared or created by the users friends
Identify other users in the same geography or industry and feature content or trends of those users.
Create tailored or different experiences based profile dat
Suggest a users friends to invite to your product and service based on the friends interests
Feature key information from a user’s stream that is related to your website or application
Integrating Facebook Connect is not rocket science. Yes, you need to understand programming to do so, but there is a wizard to help you through the process. Take this example I created last night - a total of 20 mins work and I am already half way there!
Once a user has authenticated with your application or website, you can use any of the Facebook APIs listed below to access data about the user that they have made available to applications. In addition, to provide a more social experience, you may access data for a user’s friends to bring those friends into the experience.
You may also request permission from the user to access information from the user’s stream to view information shared by the user’s friends.
When accessing and using the user's data, it's important to keep a few things in mind
Users have provided this data to Facebook in order to share it with their friends.
Users have discrete control over who can see this data via privacy settings - and your site needs to honor those completely.
Users may choose to make some of this data public, which you can then use to display publicly as well (often the case for name, picture)
Users can change this data at any time and often do. Most frequently changed fields are status or user posts to stream, profile picture, interests, friends, and privacy settings. Because of this, you should make sure you always have up-to-date information and may not only cache the data in your system for more than 24 hours
Contact information (email address, phone number) are not directly available via the APIs. However, they do provide other APIs and permissions for you to contact users by email or SMS, or for users to contact their friends via the Stream, requests, notifications, and more.
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Highlighting keyword search terms in a search result list or job advert may look and feel nice. It can also be useful for quickly finding relevant words within large pages of text. But, it can have the reverse effect if you don’t script it correctly!
Same job advert, 3 different keyword searches. Notice how the search function searches within the HTML code and breaks the formatting tags.
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Max (7:12pm Monday 12 April 2010)
Your a legend.
Lucky we didn't go ahead with this vendor.
Ronald (10:56am Wednesday 14 April 2010)
Ok. Anybody that uses the terms you used as an example (S, P, DIV) deserves to get those results. That is more than an unrealistic example of how one would use the keyword field. Next I would question any site that allowed the HTML to show up in either the search results or the job listing itself.
I'm not completely sure who your audience is but I cant see this relevant to anybody- at all.
Australian Job Board Statistics measuring the total unique browsers during March 2010. Data source - Nielsen NetRatings. SEEK 4.26m, CareerOne 1.789m, MyCareer 1.493m
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Maraphype (3:49pm Tuesday 13 April 2010)
Hi I am currently out of work in Nashville, TN. I have searched all the job boards more times than I'd care to recall and applied to 100s of positions. However, i have not been able to find a single good response to my resumes. If anyone knows about any particular place where i can look for a good job, please reply me with the location details. I will be thankful to you for your early response.
The iPad has finally been released into the wild, and everyone is now scrambling over it to see what changes it will have on the way people view and experience web sites.
I have uploaded an iPad emulator script for you to see how your website will look in a landscape and portrait mode on the iPad. Click on the top border to rotate the iPad canvas from landscape to portrait mode. Please note that Flash is not yet available on the iPad, and you may be able to view Flash components in this script.
Before you go spend money building an iPad job search application or specific optimised website, consider the following...
The iPad will affect the way we design websites. There is no RIGHT way of viewing websites. That means you can view it either in landscape or in the portrait mode. But for the designer that means two completely different layouts for which to design. It is for this specific reason that the iPad highlights the need for smart fluid width design.
Macworld points out that one major difference between Safari on the iPad and the iPhone is which version of a web page, (desktop or mobile) you see when visiting a site. While the iPhone version of Safari is usually served the mobile version of a page - one with a tighter layout, fewer images, and other design differences that make the page easier to view on a tiny screen - Safari on the iPad usually gets the full-blown desktop version of the page.
In most cases, this is a good thing, as the iPad’s larger screen means you’ll want to see that full version. The exceptions would be sites where the mobile versions of pages are optimized for touch screens, or ones where the desktop version uses Flash for video while the mobile version uses H.264 or another non-Flash format; in those cases, you’d want to view the mobile version.
Assuming a Web server provides both mobile and desktop versions of its Web pages, which version you get depends on how the server is configured. When a Web browser contacts a Web server to request a page, the browser identifies itself to the server; based on that identification, the server sends (what the server administrator thinks is) the appropriate version of the requested page: a mobile-phone browser gets the mobile version, a Mac or Windows browser gets the desktop version. Most, but not all, dual-version sites serve mobile-optimized pages to the iPhone. (There are exceptions, however: some sites prefer to send desktop versions to iPhones, given that the iPhone handles desktop sites much better than the typical mobile phone.)
As with the iPhone, users will have the ability to add bookmark icons to the home screen of the iPad. These will offer direct links to specific web sites through Safari. You should consider adding a custom Apple bookmark icon to your website code. The browser also features a drop-down bookmarks menu that looks similar to the one on the iPhone.
The iPad (and iPhone) use the Apple Safari internet browser.
Search engine choices include Google and Yahoo
Search bar includes suggestions from the set search engine
The larger screen will allow you to view entire web pages at once, unlike what you see on smaller mobile devices.
To open a link found on any page, simply tap it. In the case of a URL shortener or “disguised” link, you can tap and hold to see what the url is prior to actually opening it.
Rotate your iPad to change easily for Portrait to Landscape view, and Safari automatically adjusts itself to fit your entire screen.
Tap the + sign on any page to quickly add it to your bookmarks. You can add pages to home screen, copy text and images, etc. Remember to add the Apple icon to your website code.
Security settings include fraud warning, in addition to cookie and auto fill settings
Flick your finger across the screen to scroll up or down a page.
Pinch your fingers on the page to zoom in or out.
The text will be large enough on the screen to actually see and read it easily.
The Thumbnail view allows you to see all of the pages you have open in a small grid pattern. This lets you quickly change from one site or page to another.
Safari on the iPad supports the latest video innovations found in HTML5. You can watch compatible videos from within the page, or double-tap them to watch full screen.
Sync your bookmarks from your Safari install on your Mac or PC. It only takes a moment. This ensures that you always have your favorite sites right at your fingertips.
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I can imagine this becoming an important issue as prospects tend to only take a few seconds sometimes glancing at your site. If your contact details aren't immediately available, you may very well lose them as they continue on to other 'optimised' sites.
Isn't it amazing how technology can change things?
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Once a user has authenticated with your application or website, you can use any of the Facebook APIs listed below to access data about the user that they have made available to applications. In addition, to provide a more social experience, you may access data for a user’s friends to bring those friends into the experience. 
I have uploaded an iPad emulator script for you to see how your website will look in a landscape and portrait mode on the iPad. Click on the top border to rotate the iPad canvas from landscape to portrait mode. Please note that Flash is not yet available on the iPad, and you may be able to view Flash components in this script.
Assuming a Web server provides both mobile and desktop versions of its Web pages, which version you get depends on how the server is configured. When a Web browser contacts a Web server to request a page, the browser identifies itself to the server; based on that identification, the server sends (what the server administrator thinks is) the appropriate version of the requested page: a mobile-phone browser gets the mobile version, a Mac or Windows browser gets the desktop version. Most, but not all, dual-version sites serve mobile-optimized pages to the iPhone. (There are exceptions, however: some sites prefer to send desktop versions to iPhones, given that the iPhone handles desktop sites much better than the typical mobile phone.)
The iPad (and iPhone) use the Apple Safari internet browser.
You can find loads of useful information on our blog.