Employment Advertising Policy Needs Reform… 🧑⚖️
By Toby Rice, Founder, SocialJobs.
Employment Advertising, Especially on Social Media, Needs Policy Reform
Policy enacted in 2019 has been hurting employers and job seekers ever since. It’s time for a change.
For example, whether intentionally or otherwise, Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and Reddit, Inc. actively prohibit running career ads to Veterans.
Reddit classifies Veterans as a ‘sensitive group’ restricted from targeting any ads, not just employment advertising.
Meta disables all Veteran targeting options but only for Employment ads.
You can sell Veterans your company’s product via Facebook, but you can’t promote your careers to them specifically.
In what way does this serve or protect Veterans?
If a company has made hiring and training Veterans a priority to resolve skill gaps, why are social media platforms denying them the ability to leverage the power of social media to connect with Veterans?
This issue of overly restrictive employment advertising policy affects almost all people in all career fields. A change will benefit every employer and job seeker in the country.
How Did We Get Here?
In 2019, the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the Communication Workers of America (CWA) filed a lawsuit against Facebook demanding stronger protections against discrimination in advertising.
While the move was well-intentioned and addressed some legitimate concerns, it scared Facebook into moving too far in the other direction, placing overly restrictive policies on employment advertising.
The knock-on effect? Running a job ad across Meta targeted at Nurses requires an audience definition that is so broad that your ad reaches half the population. 50% of people are not nurses, and they don’t need or want to see ads for nursing careers.
This highlights the unintended consequences of the lawsuit. And the behemoth that it is, the rest of the industry followed Facebook’s lead. 😮💨
Targetting =/= Exclusion
A simple way to understand the current policies used by most social media platforms is by using physical magazines – remember those? 📖
In days past, you might put an ad for your Nursing positions in the NursingTimes or the American Journal of Nursing. Similarly, an advertisement for an HVAC Technician position might appear in Contractor Magazine or HVAC & Refrigeration Insider.
The current policy, led through example by Meta, effectively requires you to place your Nurse ad in HVAC & Refrigeration Insider in addition to the NursingTimes because of fear that anything less would be seen as discriminatory.
That’s only a slight exaggeration to highlight the technical limitations in place.
Clearly, this is madness 🤯 It cannot have been the intention of the lawsuit by the ACLU, etc.
Sure, the algorithms pick up a lot of slack, but current policy hurts both candidates and employers by making it harder than it should be to place jobs in front of the candidates most suitable for them.
When such a large group of people congregate on a small number of platforms, robust targeting is essential to ensure employers and candidates can connect effectively.
Who Can Bring Around Change?
I honestly don’t know. But I do know that where Meta goes, others follow.
X has reversed the limitations previously put in place at Twitter. Maybe that’s a sign of hope, especially as X and the current US Administration are generally aligned.
As far as I can tell, the current policies are in place because of an abundance of caution and not because effective targeting is illegal.
It’s not illegal for Facebook to re-enable the targeting of people with a bachelor’s degree in nursing with ads for nursing jobs or enable the specific promotion of Veterans-friendly jobs to Veterans.
So, Mark Zuckerberg, can we please have detailed targeting options back for employment ads.
