In the rush to find recruiting gold in the "shining city on the hill" that is Facebook, I present some details on Flyers Pro, Facebook's new Google AdWords-like application.  Flyers Pro allows you to create relevant advertisements in Facebook by targeting users based on gender, age, school, location, workplace, and interests. 

Fortunately, I didn't have to create a campaign to get some data on how Flyers Pro performs - Joel Cheesman at Cheezhead reviewed it a while back, and while he liked the flow and functionality, the results of the ads he created were less than stellar.  From Joel:

"Setting up was easy enough: Upload an image (a major difference compared to Google AdWords), write some text and save. Payment is ecommerce driven and my card continuously gets charged each month.

Targeting is impressive - being able to put my ad in front of particular companies is a big plus - but the keyword function is unlike what you’d see in a typical search marketing campaign, driven more by specific subsets on Facebook than on-page content.

Facebook’s poor click-through rates on banner ads is well documented, and my experience was no different. Albeit a very small test for a very short time, I would imagine my results of about 1/2 of a percent would stay consistent."

Here's a breakdown of the specific results Joel's campaign generated:

The results underscore a major problem with web advertising.  While impressions are still easy to generate, clickthroughs are VERY difficult to get - there's just too much noise on the web, including inside Facebook.  Joel's Facebook recruiting campaign got served up to 1,108 candidates inside Facebook, but only 6 clicked through.  How many of those six would take the next step of action?  2?  1?  0?

The take seems to be to give Flyers Pro a try, if you want to try to leverage Facebook and get your inner geek on in the process.  Just don't be adding capacity to your careers site to handle additional traffic.

Of course, the other side of this is that recruiting can be a lot like selling a house.  All it takes is one.  So maybe it's worth the effort... Probably depends on the job and how sharp your copywriting skills are.