Social Recruiting: The Guide for Employers in Austria

The job is advertised, the ad is running, and nobody applies. Or lots of people apply, but hardly anyone fits. Both usually have the same cause: the people you are looking for are not currently looking at job platforms. This guide shows how social recruiting works, what the setup looks like, what applies legally in Austria and how to tell whether it is the right route for your vacancies.

What social recruiting is

Social recruiting is finding employees through paid ads on Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and Google, combined with a short mobile application. The difference from a classic job ad: you do not wait until someone searches, but actively show your job to the people who fit the role.

It is important to distinguish it from two terms that are often mixed up:

• Employer branding is the long-term building of your reputation as an employer. Social recruiting uses this reputation but does not replace it.
• Organic posting on your own channels (a job post on the company page) mainly reaches people who already follow you. Social recruiting works with media budget and reaches new people in a targeted way.

At its core, social recruiting consists of four parts: an ad that stands out in the feed, a careers landing page that loads on a phone in seconds, pre-qualification that separates suitable from unsuitable applications, and a place where HR sees all applications with their status. If one of these parts is missing, the budget fizzles out at the weakest point.

Which jobs it works for and which it does not

Social recruiting works best when there are many people in your region who could in principle fill the job but are not currently looking. That is the case for many skilled positions.

A few rules of thumb from practice:

• Several open positions with a similar profile speak for social recruiting, because one setup carries several positions.
• A very small pool of applicants speaks more for a headhunter, because targeted direct approach is faster there than reach.
• Confidential appointments do not belong in a public ad.

You will find the detailed comparison of the three routes in the article Headhunter, job platform or social recruiting.

Active and passive candidates

Active candidates are people who are currently looking for a new job themselves, for example on job platforms or via Google. Passive candidates are people who would switch in principle if the offer were right, but are not actively looking.

Classic job ads reach almost only the first group. But many good skilled workers belong to the second: they are in work, often satisfied enough not to look and dissatisfied enough to take notice of a good offer. You reach these people where they spend time anyway, in the feed on Instagram and Facebook.

This has two consequences for everything that follows:

1. The ad has to give a reason to look within seconds. A passive candidate has no plan to write an application today. They respond to a concrete promise: more pay, a shorter commute, better working hours, a team that seems likeable.
2. The application has to be short enough to do in passing. Someone who is not looking does not have an up-to-date CV on their phone. If you require one, you lose exactly the people you wanted to reach.

If you are currently getting no applications at all, first look at the seven most common causes in the article No applications? 7 reasons and what you can change today.

The setup

A social recruiting setup leads people from the ad to the interview in a few steps. Each stage has a task, and each stage is measured.

Careers landing page

A careers landing page is a dedicated page for one job or job group, built for the phone and for people arriving from an ad. It is not the careers page of your website with all open positions, but a focused page with one goal: starting the quiz.

What belongs on the page:

• The headline from the ad. Anyone who clicks on "More pay, fewer weekends" has to find exactly that at the top. We call this alignment message match.
• Salary and framework. Salary, working hours, location, start. In Austria, stating the salary is mandatory anyway; more on that below.
• The team. Real photos or short videos of the people the person will work with.
• Three to five real benefits. No platitudes like "dynamic team", but concrete things: rota two weeks in advance, company car from day one, training during working hours.
• One clear button. "Apply in 60 seconds" leads into the quiz.

Quiz with pre-qualification

An application quiz is a short sequence of questions that checks before submission whether the job's must-have criteria are met. It replaces HR's first screening and still feels easy for the applicant, because they only tap rather than type.

Good quiz questions are:

• Must-have criteria: completed training, driving licence, a specific qualification.
• Availability: from when, full-time or part-time, willingness to work shifts.
• Location: place of residence or willingness to commute in kilometres or minutes.

Questions about age, gender, origin, religion or family planning have no place in the quiz; they are delicate under the Equal Treatment Act and irrelevant to suitability. How to word good questions and which ones to leave out is described in the article Recruiting funnel: pre-qualifying applicants.

Mobile short application

A short application only captures what you need for the first contact: name, phone number, email, plus the answers from the quiz. The CV is optional and can be submitted later.

Our house rule for forms is: at most three fields per step. Better two short steps than one long form, because every extra input costs completions on a phone. The privacy information is linked and summarised in one sentence, not as a wall of text.

Applicant dashboard

An applicant dashboard is where all applications come together with source, quiz answers and status. HR can see at a glance who meets the must-have criteria and can respond immediately.

Three functions are more important than all the others:

1. Routing. Every application goes immediately to the person responsible, with a notification.
2. Status. New, contacted, interview arranged, invited, rejected, hired. Only with status can you later measure which campaign brings good people.
3. Feedback to the platforms. When Meta and Google learn which applications were qualified, the campaigns learn to find more of them. How this works technically is explained in the article on sending lead data back to Meta and Google.

At ad.boutique, this runs via our own lead CRM with live dashboard, which is part of the boutique.OS platform. But you can also connect an existing applicant tracking system if it records status cleanly.

Channels: Meta, Google, job platforms as a complement

In social recruiting, Meta is usually the main channel, because it reaches passive candidates in large numbers. Google and job platforms complement it, depending on how many people actively search for the job.

On Meta, job ads run in a special ad category for employment that restricts targeting. Who is reached is therefore steered mainly via the creative. How this works in practice is shown in the article Hiring with Meta ads.

Creatives: employees instead of stock photos

In social recruiting, the creative is the most important lever, because it determines who stops scrolling. A stock photo of smiling people in an office says nothing about your job and gets scrolled past.

What works in recruiting creatives:

• Real employees who say in one or two sentences why they enjoy working there. A vertical phone video is enough if sound and light are right.
• Everyday work: the workshop, the ward, the kitchen, the vehicle. People want to see where they would work.
• A visible salary and concrete benefits in the first line.
• Addressing the target group in picture and copy: "You're an electrician and fed up with building sites at the weekend?" filters better than any audience setting.

We test several concepts in parallel, for example a talking head video of an employee, a graphic with salary and benefits, a provocative question and a carousel "A day with us". After the first week, the number of qualified applications, not the click-through rate, decides which concept keeps running. With us, production and testing belong together; more on this on the page Content Production.

The law in Austria

In Austria, job ads on social media are subject to the same rules as any other job advertisement. The key points, as of October 2026 (not a substitute for legal advice, please check the provisions in the original text):

• Salary information: under § 9(2) of the Equal Treatment Act (GlBG), the advertisement must state the minimum pay under the collective agreement or by law and indicate a willingness to pay more if there is one.
• Gender-neutral advertising: § 9(1) GlBG requires that jobs are not advertised only for men or only for women. In practice, this means a gender-neutral job title or both forms (German job titles are gendered).
• Non-discriminatory in copy and image: the prohibition also covers other grounds such as ethnicity, religion, belief, age and sexual orientation. Phrases like "young team looking for young reinforcements" are risky.
• Data protection: applicant data is personal data under the GDPR. You need privacy information, a purpose, a retention period and a deletion concept.
• Employment special ad category on Meta: the platform restricts targeting for job ads. Regardless of that, you should never target by age or gender, because that contradicts the principle of equal treatment.

What this means in detail for social ads, and a checklist before going live, is in the article Job ads in Austria: mandatory information for social ads too.

Metrics

You measure recruiting campaigns by qualified applications, interviews and hires, not by reach. Clicks and cost per click are diagnostic values, not goals.

Two rules help when reading these figures:

1. Define "qualified" before launch. If you only decide after the campaign what counts as good, you debate opinions instead of numbers.
2. Count what arrives, not just what the platform reports. The figure in the ad account and the figure in the inbox can differ. Recruiting is no different, which is why we compare both figures every week.

Comparison: headhunter, job platform, social recruiting

No channel is always right; each fits a different situation. The short version:

Often a combination is the most economical: job platform for active candidates, social recruiting for breadth, headhunter for the one key position. You can read the detailed comparison in Headhunter, job platform or social recruiting.

Budget and cost logic

Social recruiting costs media budget, which goes directly to the platforms, and the effort for setup and management. How much budget is needed depends less on the number of positions than on three factors:

• Size of the target group in the region. A nursing job in Vienna has a different pool of applicants from a job for CNC machinists in an Alpine valley in Tyrol.
• Attractiveness of the offer. Salary, working hours and commute determine how many people continue after the click.
• Length of the funnel. Every additional step between ad and application increases the cost per application.

A sensible budget is one that delivers enough data in the first weeks to decide between creatives. A budget that is too small, spread across many ads, only delivers chance. Better to test a few concepts with enough budget and then expand what works. Good candidates do not come in linearly: often the first applications arrive quickly, while the suitable ones only come once the creative addresses the target group more sharply.

What you need from HR

For a campaign to work, three things are needed from the company, and none of them is budget:

1. Clear must-have criteria per position, in writing, before the quiz is built.
2. A responsible person who contacts new applicants within one working day.
3. Brief feedback on every application: reached, invited, rejected, hired. Without this feedback, nobody knows which campaign brings good people.

Typical mistakes

Most social recruiting campaigns do not fail because of the platform, but because of details in the funnel. These are the mistakes we see most often:

1. The ad leads to the general careers page. Someone coming from the feed is looking for one job and finds a list. A dedicated landing page per job or job group is a must.
2. The CV is a mandatory field. On a phone, a large share of passive candidates drop out here.
3. No salary in the ad. In Austria, this is not only mandatory, it is also one of the strongest reasons to click.
4. Stock photos instead of real people. They look interchangeable and do not filter.
5. Follow-up after days instead of hours. Someone who applied in passing has forgotten where after three days. Social media applications cool off quickly.
6. Success is measured by clicks. Cheap clicks from people who do not fit are expensive.
7. No coordination with HR. If HR does not know a campaign is running, applications land in the wrong inbox.
8. All jobs in one ad. An ad looking for care, kitchen and administration staff at the same time speaks to nobody in particular.

How we work at ad.boutique

We are a team covering strategy, performance, creative, video and web, based in Vienna and Zurich, and have so far managed €16.7m in ad budget for our clients. For social recruiting, we work in four steps.

1. Position check. Which positions, which region, which must-have criteria, what time pressure. If a headhunter is a better fit for a role, we say so.
2. Setup. Careers landing page, quiz with pre-qualification, short application and applicant dashboard. Plus a full or half filming day with your team for the creatives. We build the building blocks of the funnel as landing pages and funnels.
3. Campaigns. Launch on Meta and, depending on search volume, on Google. Every Monday, we read the numbers, reallocate budget and fill the testing pipeline with new creatives.
4. Handover to HR. HR sees suitable applications live and reports back who was invited. We send this feedback back to the platforms.

For recruiting, we deliberately do not show client figures, because we have not yet published a case for it. What we can show is the process, and we lay it open before launch: which metric counts as success, what we test and when we decide. More on setup and our way of working in recruiting on our page Social recruiting agency.

When we advise against it

Social recruiting is not a cure-all. We advise against it if the position is extremely rare, if the salary is well below market and not negotiable, or if nobody in the company can process applications within one working day. In these cases, more reach does not help; it only makes the problem more visible.

Further reading

• No applications? 7 reasons and what you can change today
• Headhunter, job platform or social recruiting? The comparison
• Recruiting funnel: pre-qualify applicants before HR reads a single CV
• Hiring with Meta ads: the setup for recruiting campaigns
• Job ads in Austria: mandatory information for social ads too