Survey: Paid Social Media Advertising in Recruitment

Marketers spend hundreds of billions of dollars on digital advertising each year, with social media advertising taking a huge share of the revenue. The largest by far is Facebook, which generated $70 billion from ads in 2019. It’s one of the reasons why Facebook is under growing scrutiny for how the platform handles hate speech and racism. A campaign called #StopHateForProfit, organized by the Anti-Defamation League, is calling on businesses to suspend advertising on Facebook during the month of July 2020. Dozens of companies are participating, including Coca-Cola, Unilever, Patagonia and Verizon. Some companies are also pausing their spending on Instagram and other social channels.

We asked the Rally Recruitment Marketing community: Do you use paid social media advertising in recruitment, and will this boycott affect your plans?

Here are the results:

Use of Paid Social Media Advertising in Recruitment Marketing

Social media is integral to every Recruitment Marketing and marketing strategy alike. Both teams understand that even a small investment in paid advertising will help increase the reach of their organic social media posts.

In our survey, 75% of respondents said they use paid social media advertising in Recruitment Marketing, which is almost on par with the 79% that said their company uses paid social media ads in marketing.

75% of our survey respondents said their company uses paid social media advertising in Recruitment Marketing, and 79% use the strategy in marketing.

We also asked our survey respondents to tell us, if they know, how much their company spent last year (2019) on paid social media advertising in recruitment. Though we received just 12 responses, we wanted to share the data with you anyway, since we know how hard it is to get access to Recruitment Marketing budget data!

Our respondents reported spending from $500 to $125,000 in 2019 on paid social media advertising in Recruitment Marketing. That’s quite a range! But it reflects how Recruitment Marketing strategy is an emerging discipline and how many practitioners are still proving their effectiveness to justify more budget. Overall, the median spend on paid social media advertising was $22,500 which was about 5-7% of their total 2019 Recruitment Marketing & Advertising budget.

One-quarter of survey respondents said they are suspending their use of paid social media advertising for Recruitment Marketing during July 2020 in support of #StopHateForProfit.

One-quarter of survey respondents said they are suspending their use of paid social media advertising for Recruitment Marketing during July 2020 in support of #StopHateForProfit, with another 10% who said they were considering it. The boycott is dynamic, and currently hundreds of companies have signed on, perhaps even more since our survey was taken.

More and more organizations are using the power of their actions as an employer to end systemic racism and racial injustice. As HR, talent acquisition and Recruitment Marketing professionals, we’re in a unique position to influence this change because we represent the needs and voices of our diverse employees and candidates.

Finally, our survey was conducted from June 28 through July 11, 2020. We received 64 responses and filtered the results to report the answers from those who said they work for an employer, versus others who worked for an agency or vendor.

The far majority of people in the Rally Recruitment Marketing community work in the talent acquisition and HR department, so they may not be fully aware of the marketing team’s social media plan. This may account for the relatively high percentage of respondents who said they were unsure if the marketing team was suspending their use of paid social media advertising in support of #StopHateForProfit in July 2020.

Thanks to those who participated in our survey, and Contact Us if you have any questions or would like to suggest other survey topics!