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Stacey Moseley
Facebook advertising yields the best recruits, according to an award-winning principal.
At the recent Real Estate Business Principal Roundtable John Cunningham, principal at Cunninghams Property in Sydney, told the forum that Facebook recruitment was a strategy that yielded his office the best recruits.
“We’ve had some really strong success through employment on Facebook,” he said.
“Six of the last eight people we’ve employed have come through Facebook. We put up our ads on Facebook and it’s basically the networks we are part of that help us.”
According to Mr Cunningham, Facebook is a more productive version of word-of-mouth.
“We have 36 people in the office, 32 are on Facebook, and people recruit people they know. We post it on our page and share it around our personal networks; we’re not going to Seek, or the newspaper. Most people we hire already know someone in the organisation,” he explained.
Cunninghams Property considers Facebook such a serious recruiting tool they even offer staff members who find recruits through their social media channels a recruitment fee.
“We actually have a recruitment fee for people within our company to bring other people on. So we’ve taken a very different path to making sure that people want to work for us,” he said.
“To me it’s the key; it’s not about how much we want them but how much they want to work for us.”
Alison Beveridge, principal at Breakfast Point Realty, agrees Facebook is an instrumental tool in recruiting staff from within the area.
“We’ve just employed somebody who was working for me for seven years. I thought she’d gone off to do her own thing, we put the post on Facebook and she rang me within the hour and said ‘I want my old job back’,” she told the roundtable.
“I thought that after seven years she’d made the break, so had I not posted that on Facebook I’d have never had the great staff member come back.”
However, Domenic Bucciarelli, principal at LJ Hooker Ashfield warned that while Facebook is a great tool to recruit staff, it is also important that businesses remain humble on social media.
“In our business, we find that connecting to possible Gen Y recruits is easiest through Facebook. But we’ve refrained from turning our Facebook page into a bragging exercise, which is what a lot of offices tend to do,” he explained.
“We’ve gone down the path of softly and quietly saying 'we’re human, we celebrate birthdays, we take photos and put them online’. And at the end of the day people see us as human beings, not a big faceless corporation.”
Other attendees at the Principal Roundtable included Daniel Formosa, principal of Starr Partners Blacktown, Ewan Morton of Morton&Morton, Craig Marshall, principal of CENTURY 21 Cordeau Marshall Group and Aris Dendrinos of Richardson&Wrench Marrickville.
For full coverage of the event, make sure you see the June edition of Real Estate Business.
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