Hireology will bring job posts to Facebook feeds

For Walser Automotive Group, Facebook and other social media platforms hold promise as a source of job candidates.

Last year, the Edina, Minn., dealership group tapped into that promise by hiring several employees via a job posting on the social media platform, said Ryan Moffitt, Walser's director of talent acquisition. Facebook, through staff-written posts and sponsored ads, has worked best as a way to recruit sales reps, entry-level service technicians and support staffers, Moffitt said.

Starting this year, retailers such as Walser, a 26-store group in Minnesota and Kansas, that are looking to expand the pool of prospective hires can get an extra boost from Facebook.

Hireology, a technology recruitment firm that works with dealerships, will integrate its human resources technology with the social media giant's Jobs on Facebook platform. Hireology CEO Adam Robinson said the company plans to announce the Facebook integration at the NADA Show this week in Las Vegas. Hireology and Facebook both said the integration should be live in March.

Facebook also is working with other technology companies, such as digital retailing vendor CarNow, which will soon integrate a scheduling bot called ScheduleNow for Facebook, according to representatives for both companies. ScheduleNow for Facebook will connect directly with a dealership's scheduling tool for what Facebook says will be a "frictionless service scheduling experience" on its site for both dealership and customer.

Facebook says more integrations with software providers are in the works. "Facebook is currently working with the top platforms in the auto retail space to automate the best-in-class [dealer] strategies," Bob Lanham, Facebook head of automotive retail, said in a statement to Automotive News.

Hireology's roughly 4,000 dealership customers will be able to use the Facebook tool at no additional cost, Robinson said. Dealerships will need to link their Facebook business pages with their Hireology accounts, and every job posting a dealership creates through Hireology automatically will flow through to its Facebook page.

For Walser, a Hireology customer, the more seamless the process can be, the better. The goal is to get more people to click on the links, Moffitt said. Walser intends to sign up for the integration, he said.

"The integration with any of these social media outlets is something I'm definitely interested in and excited to see," said Moffitt, who noted that Walser also is exploring using Pinterest and Snapchat to advertise open jobs.

Robinson told Automotive News that Hireology expects "widespread adoption" for the Facebook integration.

"Dealers don't need to do anything any differently. They're already all-in on social media," Robinson said. "We're opening up a brand-new channel that has already made a meaningful impact in consumer retailing of vehicles and service."

In a report last year, Hireology found that Facebook job leads required 16 applicants for every successful hire — better than Google and text messaging, free and paid job boards and targeted ads. The company said that data came from dealerships that pasted the web link to a Hireology job listing directly on their Facebook business pages. Going forward, that process will be automated, with the job listing appearing on the dealership's Facebook page, on the Jobs on Facebook and Marketplace pages and in the main News Feed, according to Hireology and Facebook.

The company reported a cost to dealerships of $14 per applicant and $220 per hire for job leads sourced on Facebook. An employee referral remains the most effective lead source, Hireology said, requiring just four applicants before a successful candidate is hired. Referrals have the lowest cost per hire, at $21, according to the study.

For Hireology, the move comes as dealership customers have asked for more technology, including a mobile app, which the company plans to launch this summer. It will be available at no added cost on both Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems.

"Increasingly, job applicants, just like car buyers, expect to communicate with dealers through their phone," Robinson said. "It needs to be consumer-oriented and really easy to do."

Dealerships filled nearly 50,000 jobs through Hireology in 2019, Robinson said. He predicted that will grow to close to 80,000 this year.