Social media is emerging as the next frontier for job ads

To egregiously misquote Charli XCX: I think the job board is dead, so now we’re advertising on s-o-o-o-o-o-cial media.

The job market is a nightmare. Many employers are overwhelmed by endless AI-written and submitted job applications, and job seekers are frustrated by endless ghost jobs. Now, some employers are questioning the value of job boards, looking for other ways to reach top candidates.

Enter social media. At least half of US adults visited social media sites including YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram in 2025, according to Pew Research Center. These platforms’ reach, coupled with their efforts to purge bots from their sites, seems to have appealed to some employers. In recent years, they’ve increasingly turned to social media to get their jobs in front of real humans.

“We’re all in on social really being the dominant recruitment media in the next few years, and a lot of that actually ties to where we see active job search moving, which is away from humans on job boards and really to agent-led job searches,” Adam Stafford, CEO of AI-powered talent acquisition platform Recruitics, told HR Brew.

Cause for restraint. Employers have long used social media to increase brand awareness, according to Sean Worden, CEO and co-founder of Reelist, a tech firm that helps employers hire for frontline and skilled trade roles on social media. Using it to advertise specific jobs has been less common, due to compliance and cost challenges.

Employers have to navigate a minefield of state and federal regulations regarding hiring, which extend to social media. The former may include anti-discriminatory hiring laws, pay transparency laws, and emerging laws related to AI use in hiring and employment decisions, such as that in California.

At the federal level, employers must comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment decisions based on protected statuses including race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. In 2019, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a series of rulings that found seven companies—including Capital One, Edward Jones, and Enterprise Holdings—violated Title VII by using Facebook’s ads to target direct job postings to younger, male workers (excluding women and older workers).

Employers cannot target users based on demographic information or use language or filter information that might indicate a preference for applicants of a certain protected status. For example, ad copy encouraging “digital natives” to apply, signaling preference for millennial or Gen Z workers, or targeting candidates based on zip code. They also can’t use lead forms—typically used in e-commerce to gather information about potential customers—to ask EEO questions.

Advertising jobs on social media can also be cumbersome and expensive.

Job ads are typically text-based and static, but posts that are visual and dynamic are king on social media. There are also different rules associated with advertising on social media vs. job boards. Employers looking to attract applicants on social media typically need to hire a marketing or production agency to create a campaign to advertise their job, a process that typically takes weeks, not to mention the investment on top of the cost of the ad space.

“When you thought about advertising on social media, you had to think, ‘I’m not just paying for the cost of the ad space; I’m also paying for all of the content production,’ which ultimately made social media a much more expensive way to generate inbound applicants than job boards and other options,” Stafford said.

That’s changing. Now, there are specialized firms that handle the nitty gritty of posting job ads, making the process easier, and cheaper.

Reelist is one such firm. Founded in 2022, it syncs an employer’s ATS with social media, porting screening questions and other information, and handling targeting, placements, and ad buying.

“Just like you would post an ad on Indeed, that’s how you can do social now with our platform,” Worden said.

Reelist takes down job ads once positions are filled, saving employers advertising costs. And Reelist and Recruitics offer other capabilities that can help employers save. Both use generative AI to create visuals for job ads in a matter of seconds, avoiding the need to find stock images or shoot an ad campaign.

“The cost of engaging with the channel is basically cut in half because the cost of the content is so much lower,” Stafford said.

Similarly, both firms offer capabilities that help employers reach ideal candidates much more easily than if employers posted the ad to its socials. For example, Reelist’s technology factors in driving times and distance to a work location, because social media location options don’t account for travel inconveniences like bodies of water, or tunnels.

If you do your targeting incorrectly, you’re going to be targeting people that are potentially two hours away, and so they’re never going to show up. So you’re just burning a bunch of money,” Worden said.

The job ads that have the most success on social media tend to be those for in-person roles that are not performed at a desk and have high turnover or competition (i.e., nurse, in-home care assistant), as well as those in rural areas.

Employers hiring for these roles on social media will get first dibs on top talent, according to Worden. If competitors are only advertising on job boards, the employer who instead pursues social advertising is “getting in front of the 80-plus percent of the workforce that’s on social every day” and necessarily spending nearly the same amount of time on job boards, he said. “They’re getting to these people first.”

Other considerations. Even employers that hire firms to post job ads on their behalf should be vigilant about the information they share and the language they use. Mark Girouard, an employment attorney and shareholder with the law firm Nilan Johnson Lewis, told HR Brew that the EEOC, in its latest National Enforcement Plan, noted intent to scrutinize job ads for language that encourages applications from people of certain protected statuses.

“It’s an area that we saw litigation a while ago. The content of online ads and how they are targeted can still lead to claims,” Girouard said. “And then we have a recent pronouncement from the administration that their employment rights enforcement agency is looking in particular at the content of job ads.”

Girouard recommended employers vet all job ads before they or a firm post, and have indemnification language in the written agreement with the agency.

“It’s a good reminder for employers to look at what their vendors are posting and not just assume it’s going to be compliant,” Girouard said.