Which platforms reach your candidates, paid versus organic, published ad formats for five placements, eight real recruitment ads in the feeds they ran in. Canonical: https://recruitmentads.com/social-media-recruiting Social media recruiting # Social Media Recruiting: Platforms, Ad Formats and Campaign Workflow Which platform reaches the people you are hiring, what paid actually does that organic does not, the published format figures for five placements, and eight real recruitment ads shown inside the feeds they ran in. No stock advice, no invented results. Niels GeominyFounder, RecruitmentAds.comPublished 1 September 2026Last updated 1 September 2026 Social media recruiting is the use of social platforms to reach and hire people: paid ads in feeds, organic posts from company and employee accounts, and direct messages to people who were not looking. It also goes by social media recruitment, social recruiting, and recruiting on social media, and the four mean the same thing. This page is the operating manual rather than the argument for it. Which platform reaches the people you are actually hiring, with the reach data behind that instead of the usual assertion. What paid does that organic cannot, said plainly. The format figures each platform publishes, with the date we read them. Eight real recruitment ads we made for named employers, shown inside the placements they ran in. The rules that apply because the ad is a job ad, which nothing else ranking for this search mentions. Then a six-step workflow and the four numbers worth watching. On this page - [What is social media recruiting?](https://recruitmentads.com/social-media-recruiting#what-is) - [Which social media platform is best for recruitment?](https://recruitmentads.com/social-media-recruiting#which-platform) - [Paid social media job ads versus organic posts](https://recruitmentads.com/social-media-recruiting#paid-versus-organic) - [Social media job ad formats and sizes, by platform](https://recruitmentads.com/social-media-recruiting#formats) - [Social media recruiting examples in the placements they ran in](https://recruitmentads.com/social-media-recruiting#examples) - [The rules that only apply to job ads on social media](https://recruitmentads.com/social-media-recruiting#job-ad-rules) - [A social media recruiting strategy in six steps](https://recruitmentads.com/social-media-recruiting#strategy) - [What to measure in social media recruiting](https://recruitmentads.com/social-media-recruiting#measurement) - [Questions about social media recruiting](https://recruitmentads.com/social-media-recruiting#questions) - [Make the ads from the job post you already have](https://recruitmentads.com/social-media-recruiting#make-the-ads) ## What is social media recruiting? Social media recruiting is hiring through social platforms rather than through job boards alone. It covers three separate activities: paid advertising aimed at people who are not searching, organic posting from company and employee accounts, and direct outreach to individuals. Most employers do one of the three and call it a strategy. The distinction that decides everything downstream is between a job posting and a job ad. A posting waits to be found: somebody searches, filters and reads it. An ad is pushed into a feed in front of people who never typed a search, which is why the creative has to earn attention before it is allowed to say anything about the role. The difference between a posting and an ad is the whole hinge of this page, and it is set out at greater length in our guide to [what a job ad is](https://recruitmentads.com/resources/guides/what-is-a-job-ad). That is why the same words that work on a careers page fail in a feed. A posting competes on completeness. A social ad competes on the first two seconds, and it competes against holidays, babies and football. The employers who do well here are not the ones with the best jobs. They are the ones who accepted that they are advertising, and started behaving like advertisers. Everything below assumes you are hiring, not job hunting. If you are looking for a job in social media, this is not the page you want. ## Which social media platform is best for recruitment? There is no best platform, only a best platform for the people you are hiring. YouTube and Facebook reach the most adults, Instagram and TikTok reach the youngest, and LinkedIn reaches about a third of them, which is the right third when the role is senior or specialist and the wrong one when you need forty people on a night shift. Every guide on this subject opens with LinkedIn. That order is a habit, not a finding, and it is worth checking against a source that has no product to sell. The table below is Pew Research Center's, not ours: the share of US adults who say they ever use each platform. ### % of US adults who say they ever use each platform | Platform | Share of US adults | Survey wave | | --------- | ------------------ | ----------- | | YouTube | 84% | 2025 | | Facebook | 71% | 2025 | | Instagram | 50% | 2025 | | TikTok | 37% | 2025 | | LinkedIn | 32% | 2024\* | | Snapchat | 25% | 2025 | | X | 21% | 2025 | Pew did not measure LinkedIn in the 2025 wave. This is the reading from the wave that closed on 10 June 2024, so it is a year older than every other row. Source: [Pew Research Center, Social Media Fact Sheet ](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/), read 2 September 2026. Pew surveyed 5,022 US adults from 5 February to 18 June 2025 for its National Public Opinion Reference Survey, using address-based sampling and a mix of web, mail and phone. The question is whether a person ever uses the platform, not whether they use it daily. Read the LinkedIn row carefully. It is the platform every competing guide names first, it reaches fewer than half the adults Facebook does, and its most recent Pew reading is a year older than every other row because Pew did not ask about it in the 2025 wave. None of that makes LinkedIn a bad channel. It makes LinkedIn a precise one, and precision is the wrong tool for forty warehouse operatives. Total reach is the less useful half. This is the half that settles most channel arguments, and it is the table nobody ranking for this search publishes: ### % of US adults who say they ever use each platform, by age band | Platform | 18 to 29 | 30 to 49 | 50 to 64 | 65+ | | --------- | -------- | -------- | -------- | --- | | YouTube | 95% | 92% | 85% | 64% | | Facebook | 68% | 80% | 74% | 57% | | Instagram | 80% | 62% | 40% | 19% | | TikTok | 63% | 44% | 30% | 12% | | Snapchat | 58% | 31% | 13% | 4% | | Reddit | 48% | 35% | 16% | 6% | | X | 33% | 25% | 16% | 10% | LinkedIn is not in this table because Pew did not ask about it in the 2025 wave, so no age breakdown exists for it in the same survey. Anyone showing you a 2025 LinkedIn age split is showing you a different source, and should say which. Source: [Pew Research Center, Social Media Fact Sheet ](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/), read 2 September 2026. Same survey and same question as the table above. Read it as a hiring brief. Care assistants and drivers, where the median applicant is over thirty-five: Facebook and YouTube, and it is not close. Apprentices and first jobs: Instagram, then TikTok. A finance director: LinkedIn, and accept the price per click, because you are buying access to a named shortlist rather than reach. The channel notes below are ours rather than Pew's, and carry no percentages on purpose. They are what we have learned making these ads, which is a different kind of evidence from a survey and should not be dressed up as the same thing. ### Facebook 71% of US adults, and the only platform in Pew's age table whose reach peaks in the 30 to 49 band instead of the youngest one. - Best for Volume hiring where the applicant lives near the site: warehouses, care homes, retail, hospitality, logistics, manufacturing. It is also the channel where a local employer with no employer brand can still get a good cost per applicant, because the targeting is geographic before it is anything else. - The ad that works A 4:5 feed video with the role, the place and the pay legible in the first two seconds, and a second static variant of the same thing. Nothing cinematic. A colleague in the actual uniform, in the actual building, outperforms anything shot on a gimbal. - The catch The audience skews older than most hiring teams assume, and comment moderation is a real job. If nobody is watching the comments on a Facebook hiring ad, the comments become the ad. Facebook is the channel most volume hiring should start on, and the [Facebook job ad examples and specs](https://recruitmentads.com/examples/facebook) page carries the placement figures and the employment-policy link in full. [Sourced Facebook specs →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/facebook) ### Instagram 50% of US adults, and 80% of 18 to 29 year olds, the highest of any platform in that band except YouTube. - Best for Early-career and apprentice hiring, and any employer whose workplace looks interesting on camera. Feed for the considered roles, Reels and Stories for anything you need in volume from people under thirty. - The ad that works Vertical 9:16 for Reels and Stories, 4:5 for feed, built to be read with the sound off. Face to camera, one claim, one link. Stories is the least forgiving surface in recruitment advertising: one screen, no scroll, and the platform's own interface sitting on your frame. - The catch Instagram is where a thin employer brand shows fastest. If the ad is the only good-looking thing on the profile, the click-through rate tells you so quickly, and the fix is not another ad. Reels and Stories behave differently enough to be treated as two channels, which the [Instagram recruitment ad examples](https://recruitmentads.com/examples/instagram) page takes apart placement by placement. [Sourced Instagram specs →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/instagram) ### LinkedIn 32% of US adults in Pew's 2024 wave, the most recent reading it published. Every other row in the table is 2025 data. - Best for Salaried, professional and senior hiring, and any role where the person you want is currently employed somewhere you can name. It is the only channel where job title and employer are first-class targeting inputs rather than inferences. - The ad that works Square 1:1 or vertical 4:5 video in the feed, twelve to fifteen seconds, with the copy written to LinkedIn's soft character limit rather than its hard one. The feed card does half the work here, so the intro text is not an afterthought. - The catch Of the five channels here it reaches the smallest share of adults, and it is the one we pay most per click on. Both of those are fine for a head of engineering and ruinous for forty warehouse operatives. Two of the ads below ran on LinkedIn, and the [LinkedIn job ad examples](https://recruitmentads.com/examples/linkedin) page carries the full character limits, the four ratios and the safe-zone absence. [Sourced LinkedIn specs →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/linkedin) ### TikTok 37% of US adults, and 63% of 18 to 29 year olds. It has grown more than any other row in Pew's table since the platform first appeared in it in 2021, from 21% to 37%. - Best for Frontline and trade hiring where the work itself is visually interesting, and early-career volume. Welders, chefs, drivers, care workers, technicians: jobs that are boring to describe and compelling to watch. - The ad that works Vertical 9:16, shot on a phone, sound on. The ad that reads as an ad dies here. The one that reads as somebody showing you their Tuesday gets watched to the end. - The catch Production discipline that works on LinkedIn actively hurts you here, and the caption is part of the creative rather than a label on it. TikTok also publishes no numeric safe zone for its in-feed placement, so where the interface sits on your frame is something you have to check by looking rather than by reading. [Sourced TikTok specs →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/tiktok) ### YouTube 84% of US adults, the widest reach in Pew's table, and 85% of 50 to 64 year olds. - Best for Employer-brand work that has to keep running, and multilingual hiring. It is the only channel where the same asset serves as an ad today and as a searchable answer long after the campaign stops, and the only one where a 16:9 landscape cut earns its keep. - The ad that works 16:9 in-stream for the paid run, plus a vertical cut for Shorts. Front-load the brand and the role: the skip button arrives at five seconds and does not care about your establishing shot. - The catch It is a poor direct-response channel for a single vacancy closing in ten days. Treat it as the place candidates check you out, not the place they discover you. [Sourced YouTube specs →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/youtube)[How the video side of this works →](https://recruitmentads.com/recruitment-video) ## Paid social media job ads versus organic posts These are two different jobs that share a login. Confusing them is the most common way a social recruiting programme quietly wastes a year. ### What organic posting is actually for An organic post reaches the people who already follow you, plus whoever those people show it to. For most employers that means their existing followers, and a meaningful share of those already work there. That is not a distribution channel for a vacancy. It is an employer brand, a proof archive, and the thing a candidate scrolls through after they see your ad and before they apply. - Post the work, not the workplace. Somebody doing the job beats another photo of the office. - Give employees something worth resharing. Their networks are the only free reach that scales, and it is reach into the exact communities you are hiring from. - Keep the last twenty posts good rather than the last two hundred. A candidate checks the grid, not the archive. - Answer comments. On a hiring post the comments are the FAQ, and an unanswered one is a conversion you paid for and dropped. ### What paid does that organic cannot Paid buys you strangers. Specifically, it buys you people who are good at the job, are not looking, do not follow you, and would never have seen the vacancy. That is the entire value proposition, and it is why paid is the half that fills hard roles. - Run a set, not an ad. One job, several cuts, sized per placement, and let the auction pick the winner instead of a meeting. - Give it enough budget to leave the learning phase, or you are paying for an experiment that never finishes. - Point it at a page that loads fast on a phone and asks for four fields, not forty. The ad cannot fix an application form. - Refresh creative before performance drops, not after. The decline is the symptom. Organic posting is [employer branding](https://recruitmentads.com/employer-branding) wearing a recruitment hat, and it works on the timescale employer branding works on rather than the timescale a vacancy does. The asset that does the most work across both halves is [employer brand video](https://recruitmentads.com/employer-branding/video), because the same footage cuts into an ad and into a month of organic posts. Every recommendation here assumes the colleagues on camera agreed to be there, so take the free [employee photo release form](https://recruitmentads.com/resources/employee-photo-release-form) before the first shoot rather than after it. Organic posts and paid ads are written differently even when they carry the same vacancy, which is easiest to see side by side in our [job ad examples](https://recruitmentads.com/examples/job-ads). ### Boosting is neither Boosting an organic post is the middle option that looks like both and does the job of neither. You get a fraction of paid's targeting, none of the format control, and creative that was written for people who already know you. It is a reasonable way to put a small budget behind an open evening. It is not a hiring campaign, and it should never be the whole of a social recruiting budget. ### How to split it If you are starting from nothing, put the effort into paid and the discipline into organic. Paid produces applicants this month and gives you real data about what your audience responds to. Organic produces the thing that makes the paid work six months from now, and it produces it slowly. Employers who do it the other way round spend a year building a following and still cannot fill the night shift. Social is one half of paid distribution; the other half is [programmatic job advertising](https://recruitmentads.com/programmatic-job-advertising), which pushes the posting itself across job sites rather than pushing creative into feeds. ## Social media job ad formats and sizes, by platform Not one page ranking for this search publishes a single format figure. That is a strange gap in guidance about advertising, because the format is the part that decides whether anybody sees the pay figure. Here are the numbers each platform publishes for the placements recruitment actually buys, each with the platform's own classification and the date we read it. The Type column carries the platform's own word for the figure, not ours. A technical requirement is enforced. A design recommendation is advice the platform chose to put a number on. Most spec sheets flatten the two into one list, which is how a recommendation ends up being treated as a rule and a rule ends up being ignored. The shape of the frame, per placement: ### Aspect ratio, by placement | Field | Published figure | Type | Source | Accessed | | --------------------------- | ------------------------------------------ | --------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------- | | Facebook Feed, video | 4:5 | Design recommendation | [Ads Guide, Feed video](https://en-gb.facebook.com/business/ads-guide/update/video/facebook-feed) | 16 Aug 2026 | | Instagram Reels and Stories | 9:16 | Design recommendation | [Ads Guide, Reels video ](https://www.facebook.com/business/ads-guide/update/video/instagram-reels)· [Ads Guide, Reels image](https://www.facebook.com/business/ads-guide/update/image/instagram-reels) | 5 Aug 2026 | | LinkedIn feed, vertical 4:5 | 720 x 900 px | Design recommendation | [Help Centre, video ads](https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms/answer/a424737) | 16 Aug 2026 | | LinkedIn feed, square 1:1 | No recommended value published | Design recommendation | [Help Centre, video ads](https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms/answer/a424737) | 16 Aug 2026 | | TikTok In-Feed | 9:16, at least 540 x 960 px | Technical requirement | [Auction In-Feed Ads](https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article/tiktok-auction-in-feed-ads) | 5 Aug 2026 | | YouTube in-stream | 16:9 horizontal, 9:16 vertical, 1:1 square | Design recommendation | [Google Ads Help, video ad specs](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/13547298?hl=en) | 16 Aug 2026 | LinkedIn is the odd one out in this table and the difference is worth knowing before you brief a designer. Every other platform names a recommended ratio. LinkedIn names a recommended pixel size for each ratio it accepts, and for square it names none at all, only a minimum and a maximum. The ratios are in the left column for that reason. The two LinkedIn rows also carry a published minimum and maximum, which is what the square row has in place of a recommended size: - LinkedIn feed, vertical 4:5: 360 x 450 px to 1080 x 1350 px ([Help Centre, video ads ](https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms/answer/a424737), read 16 Aug 2026) - LinkedIn feed, square 1:1: 360 x 360 px to 1920 x 1920 px ([Help Centre, video ads ](https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms/answer/a424737), read 16 Aug 2026) How long the platform will let it run, which is not the same as how long anybody will watch it. Every one of our own eight ads runs between seven and fifteen seconds, which is at the short end of every row below and is deliberate: ### Video duration, by placement | Field | Published figure | Type | Source | Accessed | | --------------------- | ----------------------------------- | --------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------- | | Facebook Feed, video | 1 second to 241 minutes | Technical requirement | [Ads Guide, Feed video](https://en-gb.facebook.com/business/ads-guide/update/video/facebook-feed) | 16 Aug 2026 | | Instagram Reels | 0 seconds to 15 minutes | Technical requirement | [Ads Guide, Reels video](https://www.facebook.com/business/ads-guide/update/video/instagram-reels) | 5 Aug 2026 | | LinkedIn, allowed | 3 seconds to 30 minutes | Technical requirement | [Help Centre, video ads ](https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms/answer/a424737)· [Marketing Solutions, video specs](https://business.linkedin.com/advertise/ads/sponsored-content/video-ads/specs) | 16 Aug 2026 | | LinkedIn, recommended | 15 to 30 seconds for all placements | Design recommendation | [Help Centre, video ads](https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms/answer/a424737) | 16 Aug 2026 | | TikTok In-Feed | Up to 10 minutes | Technical requirement | [Auction In-Feed Ads](https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article/tiktok-auction-in-feed-ads) | 5 Aug 2026 | Every ad on this page is video, and [how the video side works](https://recruitmentads.com/recruitment-video) is set out on its own page, including what changes when the same script has to run in four ratios. The safe zone is the part of the frame the platform's own interface sits on top of. It is where recruitment creative fails most often, because the call to action and the pay figure are exactly the things people put at the bottom. What each platform publishes about it is as informative as the figures themselves: Published ### Instagram Reels and Stories Meta publishes a band off the top, a much larger band off the bottom and a margin on each side, and classifies all three as a design recommendation rather than a requirement. [See the figures and the read date →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/instagram) None published ### Instagram Feed at 4:5 and 1:1 Meta's safe-zone article covers Feed only for 9:16 video, which it points back at the Reels guidance. For 4:5 and 1:1 it publishes nothing at all. [See the figures and the read date →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/instagram) Two readings published ### Facebook Stories Meta's video page and image page for the same placement give different bottom bands. Both are Meta's; neither is wrong; you have to pick one and know you picked. [See the figures and the read date →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/facebook) None published ### LinkedIn, every format LinkedIn publishes no safe zone for any ad format. Nothing covers your creative, which is genuinely useful to know before you letterbox a video for no reason. [See the figures and the read date →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/linkedin) Every figure in these tables sits on a page with the platform's own URL and the date we read it, and the [free ad mockup tool](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup) draws the same zones on your own file in the browser. ## Social media recruiting examples in the placements they ran in Eight recruitment ads, made with our own product for eight named employers, each shown inside the placement it was built for rather than as a bare video on a white page. Between them they cover seven placements across five platforms. The commentary is first-hand, which is why every one of them also says what we would change. Each ad gets the same three-part read as our recruitment ad examples: what happens in the first two seconds, why it works, and what we would do differently. The aspect ratios and durations were measured on the files themselves, not read off a format label. None of the eight carries a performance number. We hold results for some of them and they are not verified with the customers yet, so they stay out. If a guide shows you a campaign and a percentage without naming who published the percentage, you are reading a claim, not a result. The square LinkedIn ad below is one of a set, and [how Dunhill runs this at scale](https://recruitmentads.com/customers/dunhill) is written up as a customer story. Facebook feed4:5 · 12 seconds ### Grant Thornton: 4:5 feed ad for an Economic Consulting Analyst role, Facebook Made with RecruitmentAds.com, shown in the Facebook feed placement. Aspect and duration measured on the file. [Sourced specs for this placement →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/facebook) Why this channel A professional-services role on Facebook rather than LinkedIn, which is the choice most hiring teams get backwards. The audience for an analyst role is not only on the professional network, and this ad went to the feed where more of them are. The hook A purple panel wipes down over a yellow band and the line "Join Grant Thornton as Economic Consulting Analyst" is already set at half a second. By two seconds a consultant has appeared in the curved cutout below it, smiling at the lens, with the Grant Thornton mark parked bottom left. Why it works Naming the firm and the job in one sentence means the first frame still works for everyone who watches nothing else. The curved cutout is a real brand asset rather than a stock motion template, so this reads as Grant Thornton before you find the logo. Later frames swap the person and move the copy to the role plus two facts, collaborating across audit, tax and advisory, and London hybrid. Sell first, qualify second, in that order. What we would change Twelve seconds is generous for a feed placement. We would test an eight second cut with the London line earlier, because location filters candidates faster than a responsibility bullet does. Result: No result data. Instagram feed4:5 · 8 seconds ### Randstad: 4:5 feed ad for a scooter courier role, Instagram Made with RecruitmentAds.com, shown in the Instagram feed placement. Aspect and duration measured on the file. [Sourced specs for this placement →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/instagram) Why this channel The clearest case for Instagram feed at 4:5: a courier role, a city, and an hourly rate, aimed at exactly the age band where Instagram out-reaches every platform except YouTube. The hook A courier sits on a parked scooter with an Uber Eats box on the back, and the line "word bezorger op de scooter in Rotterdam" is already on screen at half a second. By two seconds the pay, 14,40 to 15,40 per hour, has landed underneath it. Why it works The role, the city and the money are all readable before anyone decides whether to keep scrolling. Randstad's navy and green carry the branding without a logo lockup eating the frame, and the Uber Eats box in the shot tells you who you would actually be riding for. A hiring ad in a paid feed gets scanned with the sound off, so putting the hourly rate on screen instead of in the caption is the whole move here. What we would change The closing frame swaps the footage for a flat navy end card. Next time we would test holding the rider on screen to the end, logos over the footage, so the ad keeps moving until the last frame. Result: No result data. Instagram Reels9:16 · 8 seconds ### Profield: 9:16 vertical reel for a defence vehicle mechanic role, Instagram Made with RecruitmentAds.com, shown in the Instagram Reels placement. Aspect and duration measured on the file. [Sourced specs for this placement →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/instagram) Why this channel Vertical, for Reels. The same employer would need a different cut for the feed, which is the whole reason a set of ads beats an ad. The hook A mechanic lifts an oversized open-ended spanner off a case in a workshop, and "VACATURE: Monteur Defensievoertuigen" is fading up over him inside the first half second. By two seconds the gross monthly band of €2.500 to €4.000, a line about a family firm in Amersfoort, and a purple Meer informatie button have all arrived. Why it works The workshop is the workplace, so the footage qualifies the viewer before a word of copy does. Three bullets is the right ceiling for a reel, and these three answer money, location and team in that order. Ending on the subject turning to camera with the spanner still in his hand is a stronger closing frame than a logo card. What we would change The most interesting thing in the ad, building unique military vehicles, sits in the third bullet. We would test it in the headline, where a fast scroller cannot miss it. Result: No result data. Instagram Stories9:16 · 8 seconds ### Ilionx: 9:16 vertical ad for a Data Platform Engineer role, Instagram Story Made with RecruitmentAds.com, shown in the Instagram Stories placement. Aspect and duration measured on the file. [Sourced specs for this placement →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/instagram) Why this channel Stories is the least forgiving surface in recruitment advertising: one screen, no scroll, and the platform's own interface sitting on top of your frame. Meta publishes a safe zone for it, which is the only reason anyone knows where the interface lands. The hook An engineer in a dark red shirt works at a desk in profile, and "Data Platform Engineer" is already set in ilionx crimson across the top left at half a second, with the brand's X mark under it. By two seconds a magenta panel has slid in carrying the salary, €4.000 to €6.500 plus bonus. Why it works Vertical is a hostile format for text and this one solves it by keeping copy in the left third and the person in the right, so nothing overlaps. The subject stays in profile for the opening seconds and turns to camera around five, which gives the clip an arc without needing a cut. Leading on the salary rather than the culture bullets is the right order for engineers, who will check the number first anyway. What we would change The two lower bullets, "ai gedreven werken" and "altijd werken met de nieuwste stack", are the ones we would iterate on: naming the actual stack would make them pull as hard as the salary line above them. Result: No result data. LinkedIn feed1:1 · 14 seconds ### Dunhill: 1:1 square hiring ad for a cleared Release Engineer role, LinkedIn Made with RecruitmentAds.com, shown in the LinkedIn feed placement. Aspect and duration measured on the file. [Sourced specs for this placement →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/linkedin) Why this channel Square, on LinkedIn, for a cleared engineering role: the case where LinkedIn's higher cost per click is obviously worth paying, because job title and current employer are targetable inputs rather than guesses. The hook A woman in an office with a city skyline behind her is mid-sentence at half a second, with "Release Engineer SME, TS/SCI Clearance" stacked beside her and the Dunhill mark in the corner. By two seconds three facts have stacked underneath: three days a week onsite in Arlington, VA, a band of $130k to $200k, and a note about the regulated government setting. Why it works Dunhill recruits for cleared federal IT roles where neither the staff nor the sites can be filmed, so the professional on screen is a generated stand-in and their customer story says so plainly. Putting the clearance level in the headline disqualifies most of the feed on purpose, which is what you want when the eligible pool is that small. A salary band arriving at two seconds is rare on LinkedIn, and it is why this gets read rather than scrolled past. What we would change The fourth bullet, two lines on CI/CD pipelines, is the one we would trim next time. A shorter card there gives the Apply now button more room to land. Result: No result data. LinkedIn feed1:1 · 13 seconds ### Kremer: 1:1 square ad for a recruitment open evening, LinkedIn Made with RecruitmentAds.com, shown in the LinkedIn feed placement. Aspect and duration measured on the file. [Sourced specs for this placement →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/linkedin) Why this channel Not a vacancy. An open evening, which is the format most employers forget they can advertise. The ad sells an hour of somebody's Thursday instead of a career decision, and the bar to say yes is far lower. The hook Two people talk across a workbench in a Kremer workshop, one holding a clipboard, with a red INLOOPAVOND tag already pinned top right at half a second. By two seconds "INLOOPAVOND BIJ KREMER" is set across the middle and the date and time, 21 mei, 16.30 to 18.30, has arrived in the first green pill. Why it works This is an event ad, not a vacancy ad, and it is the version almost nobody makes. There is no role to be rejected from, so the ask is only to turn up, which is a far lower bar than an application form. The two lower pills still filter, listing the disciplines Kremer wants: electrical engineering and industrial automation, then energy, security, ICT and technical management. The ad narrows its audience without naming a single job title. What we would change The date is the entire point, and it shares its styling with the two pills below it. We would give it its own visual weight and add the address. Result: No result data. TikTok in-feed9:16 · 7 seconds ### Vytech: 9:16 vertical ad for a welder and fabricator role, TikTok Made with RecruitmentAds.com, shown in the TikTok in-feed placement. Aspect and duration measured on the file. [Sourced specs for this placement →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/tiktok) Why this channel A welder and fabricator role on TikTok. The work is visually interesting and impossible to make sound interesting in a job posting, which is the exact shape of role this channel was made for. The hook A welder in a full mask works through a bright blue plume of arc light at half a second, with "Constructeur - lasser" already set over it and the Vytech Industrial Solutions logo boxed top left. The first bullet, on the salary package, is fading in underneath by two seconds. Why it works The arc is the hook and it needs no explanation, which is the right bet in a placement where the first frame is the whole audition. White type survives against both the bright plume and the darker frames that follow, because it stays in the left column where the footage keeps out of its way. The benefits named, meal vouchers, bike lease and a bonus system, are the specific Belgian package rather than generic perks, so a welder reading it can price the job. What we would change The arc footage is the strongest material in the ad and it ends around four seconds. We would bring it back for the closing frame, so the ad ends as strong as it opens. Result: No result data. YouTube in-stream16:9 · 14 seconds ### Haldu Groep: 16:9 landscape hiring ad in Polish for metal stud fitters, YouTube Made with RecruitmentAds.com, shown in the YouTube in-stream placement. Aspect and duration measured on the file. [Sourced specs for this placement →](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup/youtube) Why this channel Landscape, on YouTube, in Polish. Multilingual hiring is where YouTube stops being a brand channel and starts being the cheapest way to reach a workforce that other channels' targeting cannot see. The hook Three fitters install metal stud framing on an unfinished floor, under a blue bar carrying a phone number and [\[email protected\]](https://recruitmentads.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection), and nothing else for the first second. By two seconds the Polish headline "Oferta pracy: Monterzy Metal Stud w Rijswijk, Holandia" has landed with a Dutch flag beside it and the orange Haldu Groep badge in the corner. Why it works The ad is written in Polish for Polish tradespeople and advertises work in the Netherlands, which is a cross-border employment advertising problem most templates cannot handle at all. Landscape has room to breathe, so holding unedited site footage for a full second before any text is a fair trade here. All four bullets are logistics: weekly pay, free accommodation with a private room, an immediate start, and a category B licence. That is what this audience decides on. What we would change The top bar carries a phone number, which is a hard action to take from a video placement. We would test that space on the pay figure and keep the number for the landing page. Result: No result data. For a wider set, including seven campaigns other teams made, we have [fifteen recruitment ads taken apart](https://recruitmentads.com/examples) with the source named on every claim. ## The rules that only apply to job ads on social media An ad offering a job is not an ordinary ad, and every major platform treats it differently from an ad offering a sofa. The targeting options you are used to are narrower, some of them are switched off entirely, and a campaign built without knowing that either gets rejected at review or quietly under-delivers. Nothing on page one of this search result mentions any of it, so here is what we could read at each platform's own page, and where we could not read it, we say that instead. ### Google Ads, which covers YouTube What the page says Google classes Employment as one of its Access to opportunities categories, alongside Housing and Consumer finance, and applies the restriction in the United States and Canada. On its own page, ads in that category cannot target audiences using gender, age, parental status, marital status, or ZIP codes. Geographic targeting still works: radius targeting is allowed with a minimum of one kilometre around a location, and city and country targeting are allowed. In Canada the first three characters of the postal code are acceptable. If your plan was to reach thirty-somethings within ten minutes of the depot, half that sentence is not available to you. Build the audience around the location and the interest, and let the creative do the age filtering, because the creative is allowed to. [Restricted targeting in Personalized advertising](https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/143465) Read 2 September 2026. ### LinkedIn What the page says LinkedIn's advertising policies carry a discrimination clause that names age, gender, gender identity, disability, religion, ethnicity, race, colour, national origin and sexual orientation as personal attributes it does not tolerate discrimination on, and it requires ads to comply with laws prohibiting discrimination in employment. The policy is written as a standard your campaign has to meet rather than as a list of switches, which means the review is judgement-based and your copy is part of what gets judged. The wording of the ad matters as much as the audience settings. A line about wanting young, energetic people is a policy problem before it is a taste problem, and on this platform the policy is the thing that will catch it. [LinkedIn Advertising Policies](https://www.linkedin.com/legal/ads-policy) Read 2 September 2026. ### Meta, which covers Facebook and Instagram What we could not read Meta applies extra requirements to ads offering employment, and its own help article is the place those requirements are published. We could not read it: on 2 September 2026 the page returned an error to our request, which is the same result recorded when we checked it for our Facebook examples page. So we are not going to tell you what it says. Open Meta's page yourself before you build the audience, not after the campaign is rejected. It is the one platform rule in this section that we cannot summarise honestly, and a summary you cannot check is worse than a link. [About ads for employment](https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1537759006681893) Requested 2 September 2026. ### TikTok What we could not read TikTok's special ad categories article did not load on 2 September 2026: the page returned its shell and the message that the article no longer exists or failed to load. We are not going to state a TikTok employment rule on the strength of a page that did not render. Check the current policy inside TikTok Ads Manager when you set the campaign up, since that is where a category selection would appear if one applies to your market. [Special ad categories](https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article/tiktok-special-ad-categories?lang=en) Requested 2 September 2026. These are advertising-platform rules. They are not employment law, they change without telling you, and the law underneath them depends on where the job is. Read the platform's own page on the day you build the campaign, and where the stakes are real, ask somebody qualified rather than a guide. ### Looking at a candidate's profile is a separate decision Advertising on social media and screening candidates on social media are two different activities that share a noun. Advertising puts your job in front of people. Screening looks at their account, and the moment you do that you have seen protected characteristics you were not entitled to weigh, whether you meant to or not. If your team screens profiles, write down who does it, at what stage, what they are looking for, and what they are required to ignore. If you cannot write that down, that is the finding. ## A social media recruiting strategy in six steps This is the order we build campaigns in, and the order matters more than any individual step. Most social recruiting fails at step one, then spends its budget correcting for it at step five. 1. Start from the job post, and fix it first. Pull the title people would actually search, the location, the hours, the pay, and the three most concrete reasons somebody would take this job over the one they have. If the post does not contain three, the campaign has no raw material and no amount of budget invents it. This is the step teams skip. 2. Pick one channel for the audience, not five for the coverage. Use the reach table above and the shape of the role. One channel, run properly, beats five channels running the same square video on a token budget each. Add the second channel when the first one is working and you know why. 3. Build a set, sized per placement. One job, several cuts: vertical for Reels, Stories and TikTok, 4:5 or square for feeds, 16:9 for YouTube. Same message, same brand, different frames. A single asset cropped five ways is how the pay figure ends up underneath a caption. 4. Check the placement before you check the budget. Put each cut into the placement it will run in and look at what the interface covers. This is a two-minute job that routinely saves a campaign, and it is the reason we built the mockup tool and gave it away. 5. Set the audience inside the platform's employment rules. Job ads are a restricted category and the usual demographic switches are narrower or gone. Build around location, interest and behaviour, and read the platform's own page on the day you build it. The section above has the sources. 6. Run for long enough to learn something, then change one thing. Give it enough budget to leave the learning phase and enough time to produce a number you would defend. Then change the creative, or the audience, or the landing page, but only one of them. Changing three things and getting a better result teaches you nothing you can repeat. If step one is where your campaign stalls, start from the [free job ad template](https://recruitmentads.com/job-ad-template), which has the wording already written and downloads without an email address. If step three is the one you have never done, [how to make one](https://recruitmentads.com/recruitment-video/how-to) covers the shooting and editing side without assuming a production budget. Steps three and four are the two that take real time by hand, which is exactly why they are the two the product does automatically from a job post link. Every step above can be done by hand, and most teams start there. When you want to stop doing it by hand, we have compared [the tools that do each step](https://recruitmentads.com/social-media-recruiting/tools). social-media-recruiting-checklist Six steps, four numbers, four policy pages. No sign-up. Copy the checklist #### The six steps, in order 1. Start from the job post, and fix it first. 2. Pick one channel for the audience, not five for the coverage. 3. Build a set, sized per placement. 4. Check the placement before you check the budget. 5. Set the audience inside the platform's employment rules. 6. Run for long enough to learn something, then change one thing. #### The four numbers worth watching - Cost per qualified applicant - Application completion rate - Hold rate on the first three seconds - Time to first qualified applicant #### Read these before you build the audience - Google Ads, which covers YouTube · [Restricted targeting in Personalized advertising ](https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/143465)We read it - LinkedIn · [LinkedIn Advertising Policies ](https://www.linkedin.com/legal/ads-policy)We read it - Meta, which covers Facebook and Instagram · [About ads for employment ](https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1537759006681893)Refused our read - TikTok · [Special ad categories ](https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article/tiktok-special-ad-categories?lang=en)Refused our read ## What to measure in social media recruiting Four numbers, in the order they tell you something. Everything else is a dashboard decoration, and impressions in particular are a number that only ever goes up. 1. Cost per qualified applicant Not cost per click, and not cost per application. Qualified means somebody your hiring manager would interview. It is the only number that connects spend to hiring, and it is the one that exposes a campaign that is buying traffic from people who cannot do the job. 2. Application completion rate Of the people who reached your form, how many finished it. When this is low, the campaign is not the problem and no amount of creative will fix it. This is the number that tells you the ad worked and the process ate the result. 3. Hold rate on the first three seconds The share of viewers still watching at three seconds. It is the fastest read on whether the hook works, it moves within hours rather than weeks, and it is the only creative metric worth checking daily. 4. Time to first qualified applicant How long from launch to the first person worth interviewing. For a role closing in three weeks this matters more than any cost figure, and it is the number that tells you whether the channel was the right choice at all. Two warnings. Attribution on social recruiting is genuinely hard, because the person who saw the ad on Tuesday often applies through a search on Friday and gets counted as organic. And platform-reported conversions are the platform marking its own homework. Where the two disagree, believe your applicant tracking system, and take the platform's number as a direction rather than a measurement. ## Questions about social media recruiting ### How do you recruit via social media? Pick the platform your candidates are actually on, turn the job post into a set of ads sized for that platform's placements, run them as paid rather than boosted, and send the click to a page that a person can complete on a phone. Post organically alongside it so the profile a candidate checks after the ad is worth checking. That is the whole method; the difficulty is all in the execution. ### Which social media platform is best for recruitment? The one that reaches the people you are hiring. Pew Research Center's Social Media Fact Sheet, read on 2 September 2026, puts YouTube at 84% of US adults and Facebook at 71%, with Instagram at 50% and TikTok at 37%, and its last published LinkedIn reading is 32% from a year earlier. For frontline and volume roles that ordering is the answer. For senior, salaried and specialist hiring, LinkedIn's smaller audience is the right audience, and the higher price we pay per click there buys targeting the others cannot match. ### What are the advantages and disadvantages of social media recruitment? The advantage is reach into people who are not looking, with targeting a job posting cannot do, and for high-volume roles it is where we see the lowest cost per applicant. The disadvantages are real too: employment ads are a restricted advertising category so your targeting is narrower than an ordinary campaign, creative goes stale faster than anyone budgets for, attribution is messy, and an unmoderated comment thread can do more damage than the ad did good. ### What does the social media recruiting process look like? Six steps: fix the job post, choose one channel for the audience rather than five for coverage, build a set of ads sized per placement, check each one inside the placement before spending, set the audience inside the platform's employment rules, then run long enough to produce a number you would defend before changing one thing. The full version, with what goes wrong at each step, is the strategy section on this page. ### How much does social media recruiting cost? There is no list price. Social platforms auction attention, so the cost depends on the role, the location, the audience and, more than anything, the creative. A good ad and a bad ad in the same auction do not cost the same per applicant, and the gap is usually larger than the gap between platforms. Budget for the production of several variants rather than one perfect asset, because that is the lever with the most movement in it. ### Should we look at a candidate's social media before hiring? Treat it as a decision your organisation makes once, in writing, rather than something individual managers do quietly. The moment somebody opens a candidate's personal profile they have seen characteristics they are not entitled to weigh, and no amount of good intent unsees them. If you do it, define who does it, at what stage, what they are looking for and what they must ignore, and keep it consistent for every candidate. Advertising on social media does not require any of this, which is one more reason to keep the two activities separate. ### Do you need an agency to run social media recruiting? No, and the honest test is what you are buying. If you need strategy, market knowledge and someone accountable for the outcome, an agency earns its fee. If what you actually need is ads produced quickly and sized correctly, that is a production problem, and production is the part software now does in minutes. Plenty of teams keep the agency for the thinking and take the making in-house. ### Is social recruiting the same as social media recruiting? Yes, in practice. Social recruiting, social media recruitment and recruiting on social media are used interchangeably by vendors and agencies. If anyone draws a line, it is usually that social recruiting leans towards sourcing and direct outreach while social media recruiting leans towards advertising, but no standards body defines either, and nobody outside the industry uses either phrase. Production cost is the one part of this you can fix in advance, and [what we charge](https://recruitmentads.com/pricing) is on one page with no call required. ## Make the ads from the job post you already have Every one of the eight ads on this page started as an ordinary job post. Paste a vacancy link into [RecruitmentAds.com](https://recruitmentads.com/) and it comes back as a finished set, video and static, inside your brand template and sized for the placements you are about to run it in. Or start smaller and free: drop your current creative into the mockup tool and see whether the pay figure survives the platform chrome. Create ads from a job post[Try the free mockup tool](https://recruitmentads.com/free-tools/ad-mockup)