As the recruitment industry is becoming highly reliant on social media, social media recruiting as a new domain of HR expertise is picking up momentum. Facebook is one such social media giant that HR recruiters cannot give this platform a miss.

Companies are now going vigilant with awareness of the fact that Facebook is a site wherein they can get easy access to both passive and active talent. Facebook penetrates the social media arena to depth immeasurable, as a result there are number of apps that support this social media platform to garner maximised reach.

Each of these recruitment apps on Facebook are made to cater different talent requirements for different industries with unique recruitment needs. These applications, which come as add-ons to Facebook, vary in their quality and effectiveness. But each is competing with the other to attract maximum eyeballs in the social media space.

Hence, we came up with an idea to compile the chosen five Facebook apps that are a must-have for HR professionals planning to recruit best talent for the perfect job.

1. Work4 Labs – This app is a global leader in social media recruiting as it aims to connect companies with the right talent using social media as a platform to maximise reach. This app facilitates hiring managers to easily target candidates based on their education, location, experience, work history and use such data to post relevant company information such as job ads, company news and events for selected individuals.

The key feature of Work4 is that a career tab appears on the navigation bar of company’s Facebook page. Current job openings are posted here and candidates can apply for jobs with one single-click. The previously stored information on the social site is sent across to the hiring manager for consideration.

There is also an upgraded solution of the Work4 app that provides recruiters a solution to their needs, called “Work4 Recruiter.” This new app on Work4 is similar to LinkedIn. It comprises of potential talent database and recruiters can source talent from billions of users on Facebook.

The recruiter solution is made to adapt to Facebook’s graph search and it syncs well with application tracking, adds automated search indicators and helps find talent easily on the social networking site.

Simplicity of design of this app makes it user-friendly to like and share jobs during application. Work4 Labs further offers detailed metrics of the recruiter’s progress to indicate – number of page views, applicants and likes for each posting.

2. Jobvite – Jobvite has two Facebook apps namely “Work with us” and “Jobvite Facebook Application”. “Work with us” app displays job listings currently within the company Facebook page, enables users to search listings that meet their requirements and apply for jobs using the social site.

The users are further enabled to add jobs to any Facebook page and send referral job invites to other users who may be interested in the job opening.

This activity on Jobvite is all tracked, helping the recruiter to monitor interest in a particular job openings and progress of the listing. On the other hand, the Jobvite Facebook application helps create large network of Facebook friends and enables recruiters to easily search for potential matches to the listed job openings.

Using the matching technology of this Jobvite Facebook app, users can privately invite matches to apply for a particular job using Facebook. When employees refer a connection, they will be credited with an incentive.

See: Social media recruiting gets bigger in 2015

3. Jobcast – The USP of this app is the assumption that not everyone is on job boards.Therefore through Facebook, this app helps recruiters open up reach to passive candidates.

This application is popular due to its wide usage by brands such as Pizza Hut and Samsung, that helps companies transform their Facebook page to a career website by posting jobs directly on their timeline. Jobcast also allows users to comment, share, refer and like a particular job.

The automated sharing feature of this app facilitates broadcasting jobs on multiple sites like LinkedIn and Twitter at one go, thus saving time and efforts to create and post separate listings.

4. LinkUp – The LinkUp app begins with offering a free-30 day trial to test if the software helps meet your recruitment needs. Using this app, the candidates can have easy access to more than 40,000 company sites and build an up-to-date list of current listings that captivate their interests.

Once the trial version is up, there are three different plans to choose from. This is entirely dependent on the company’s recruitment needs. The most basic package starts at $99 and it allows ATS integration, search and share, unlimited job access, email updates, posting on wall of multiple brands and the likes.

5. Bullhorn Reach – Bullhorn Reach app can be integrated with Facebook. It is only available with the Bullhorn Reach team product. It shortlists social media connections that are most suited for the position advertised.

Also features like brand customisation and “silent follow” (that allows passive candidates to not alert friends of their action on silent job search) and “Reach Radar” helps filter through posts to find updates relevant to your business and find professionals in your network.

While choosing the best application of these apps listed above, is not so much an easy choice for it’s entirely organisation dependent considering their requirements in time and budget constraints.

Most of these Facebook apps offer a free basic plan which can be later upgraded as and when required, if you are satisfied with the services and needs advance through time.  At the end, it all zeroes down to what you need and the budget you’re ready to invest in social media recruitment efforts.

Also read: All You Need to Know about Social Recruiting