How a Facebook Ad led to a job at a startup
Last month I was quite frustrated with my job search. I wasn’t happy with the job leads that were available, and I hadn’t yet found the product or company that felt like a great fit. Out of that frustration came two things: my blog post about Community Management, and a Facebook Ad campaign that sent traffic to my Linkedin profile.
Within hours of the ad campaign going live, I was scheduling coffee with the co-founder of a small startup, who weeks later would end up hiring me.
The strategy for my Facebook ad campaign was relatively simple, since all I wanted to do was drive more traffic to my Linkedin profile, with the hope of converting people to message me. I created and tested multiple ad units, with different creative units (pictures) and different placements on Facebook. I quickly found that Facebook sidebar ads had terrible click-thru-rates (CTR) as opposed to Facebook Newsfeed ads, and after experimenting with creatives, the picture that performed best was the picture that showed off my tattoo.
My guess is that the tattoo quickly catches a person’s attention (it’s also easy for people to remember and recognize later), and I like that it can share a bit of my personality within an ad. I found that this ad had a 1.65% CTR.
After I created the ad unit, I targeted it to a specific group of people that I felt were in my target demographic of folks that worked at startups in San Francisco/Silicon Valley.
Lastly, I made sure that my Linkedin profile’s “Summary” included a quick elevator pitch on who I was, and included a call-to-action that invited people to message me on Linkedin or email me directly.
I ran this experiment over the span of a few days, received 86 clicks to my profile, and spent $45 on ads. Over those few days I received a handful of emails and messages, one of which led to coffee and ultimately a job offer. Last week I joined TransitHero as their Community Manager and first employee,where I will be working alongside the founders to build a community of TransitHeroes.
While I obviously can’t say that everyone will have the same experience that I did, I definitely encourage you to get creative and find ways that you can drive inbound interest to your resume. Try blogging, running Facebook and Linkedin Ads, go to meetups, etc. It’s worth a shot!
Have any thoughts?Let me know on twitter @SamHouston or by leaving a comment.
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