Social media platforms are fantastic for recruiters trying to reach and engage with (passive) job seekers, but they can also be a source of discrimination. Many social media campaigns rely on automated interest or look-alike targeting and can easily start to discriminate against certain groups of people - and that is not OK.

Meta (Facebook/Instagram) is taking further steps to prevent discriminations in ad targeting for Employment ads. On October 12, Meta will remove Special Ad Audiences for ads within the recruitment, credit and housing sector. What impact does the removal of the important targeting option have on the performance of Recruitment Advertising Campaigns?

Our clients rely on performance from social media advertising, so at Aimwel we are always looking for new opportunities within Meta. By running hundreds of recruitment ads every day we can continuously experiment with our algorithms and improve results.

The latest changes for employment ads on Meta

Meta introduced Special Ad Categories in 2021 as a way to reduce the number of targeting options for specific topics (specifically for credit, housing, social issues, and employment) and prevent discrimination in their targeting. Meta limited the available targeting options for Employment from 12.000+ to 338, but still allowed the creation of Lookalike Audiences under the name Special Ad Audiences.

Source: Special Ad Category - Meta

As part of an agreement with the US Government, Meta will make another significant step to prevent discrimination in ad targeting. On October 12 they will discontinue the Special Ad Audiences, making it impossible for anyone to create Lookalike Audiences for Employment Ads.

Source: Expanding Our Work on Ads Fairness - Meta

Continuous testing and our results

During the past months we at Aimwel tested an extensive range of hypotheses on Meta - not only focusing on targeting but specifically at the combinations between targeting, bidding, budgets and content. Finding the right solution is not only important for the current changes, but also to anticipate future changes by Meta in a timely manner.

Our experiments have revealed that the right solution performs a lot better: our ads receive 86% more conversions (job apply starts) and have a 171% higher conversion rate compared to ads without Meta’s targeting restrictions. This is not only a result of our continuous development, but also because of changes to algorithms and Meta appreciating what we are doing with our technology (which is at its turn rewarded by the Meta algorithm). Our biggest advantage at Aimwel is that we are facilitating campaigns for thousands of jobs on a daily basis, so we have a lot of data available. We are continuously using this data to experiment and provide the necessary feedback to Meta, so we can together work towards success for our clients - getting relevant job applications.

Aimwel purpose and vision is to improve Recruitment industry performance

At Aimwel our goal is to deliver the best results possible for our clients. We do this not just by reaching and converting active job seekers on many job sites, but also by reaching and engaging passive job seekers on social media.

Our Recruitment Advertising Platform is created for this very purpose: to automatically create and optimise advertising campaigns for individual jobs. We distribute these job ads across aggregators, social media and display with smart systems that automatically handle bidding and budget allocation.

If you have any questions about the changes by Meta or the product we have created at Aimwel, please reach out to Peter Hoogendijk, our Head of Product (peter.hoogendijk@dpgmedia.nl)