What Facebook's Anti-discrimination Policies Mean for Social Recruiting 

If there’s one thing we can count on with social media, it’s that the policies, procedures and best practices are always changing. Most recently, an anti-discrimination policy that was previously rolled out in other parts of the world (notably, the U.K., U.S. and parts of Europe) is finally being enforced in the Nordics. 

If you’re using the Adway platform versus an agency or in-house marketing team, however, implementing the mandatory anti-discriminatory policy is seamless in its integration, making unbiased recruiting and behaviour-driven targeting the cornerstone of your TA strategy. 

Keep reading to learn more about what Facebook’s anti-discrimination policy entails and how its recent Nordic enforcement will impact your social recruiting strategy. 

SoMe Best Practices Are Constantly Evolving

Like many social media platforms, Facebook has a vast number of policies that social recruiters must abide by when running job advertisements on their site. These policies help increase the quality of content that’s rolled out and keep their ads compliant and user-friendly. 

Up until now, Facebook had notbeen enforcing its anti-discrimination policy in the Nordics for special ad categories, which include those relating to real estate, financing or jobs. 

In light of this new change, recruiters will need to make immediate updates to how they roll out their social media job ads and it could have some unexpected impacts on their recruitment marketing strategies. 

At a high level, the special ad category changes are as follows:

1. Job ads must be declared as a “special ad category” and marked as “employment.”
2. Geographical location of where job ads run must be specified, as different regions have different anti-discrimination rules.
3. Once steps 1 and 2 are completed, the ad creator will lose some of the standard targeting options they may have been used to in the past. 

We’ll get into some of the more substantial changes below. 

Updates to Employer Branding Ads and Job Ads

In terms of the implications foremployer branding and job ad settings, the enforcement of the anti-discrimination policy has a few specific updates to be aware of: 

Changes to Geographic Settings

Previously, ad creators could assign a city and area to target a specific geographical location and exclude other locations in the process. This type of targeting can now be perceived as discriminating against people based on where they live. 

Changes to Demographic Settings

All ads must target people of all genders aged 18-65+ for a wider, more diverse audience. 

While you might consider this to be a bit tricky if you’re recruiting for a certain demographic, keep in mind that the content of the ad will effectively determine the audience, not the settings. If you have representation in the ad, you will attract that type of person to the ad. The algorithm will take over and show the ad to more and more people of the same representation.

Changes to Detailed Targeting

Previously, ad creators were able to specify the demographics, interests and behaviours of their target audience. For example, they could target people who were studying at university, specifically. An embryo of detailed interest-based targeting still exists, but it has been extremely watered down.

This option is no longer available with the new enforcement of Facebook’s anti-discrimination policy. Which means agencies and marketing departments who rely solely on ad targeting (versus user behaviour) have lost the ability to influence a target audience. 

How do these changes affect those who use the Adway platform?

Keep reading… 

Adway’s Behaviour-Driven Tools Reach Your Target Audience

Adway installs tracking on a customer’s career page and segments the traffic into different audiences based on the types of jobs they’re looking at and the behaviours they’ve already directed toward the website (i.e. have they applied for a job? Requested more info?). 

By installing this tracking, our clients can bring a data-driven approach to their targeting, only showing candidates who are relevant for that particular role regardless of their age, whether they studied at university, or any other detailed qualifiers like the ones mentioned above. 

In doing so, we are able to implement a completely unbiased recruitment process for the candidates we want to reach for our clients. We’ve effectively developed a better, unbiased tool to reach your target candidate audience while staying completely compliant with Facebook’s ever-evolving policies. 

Adway stands apart from agencies and internal marketing departments as the only data-driven, behaviour-driven, unbiased approach to targeting candidates on social media.