As a global platform for sharing information with family, friends, co-workers, and the occasional random contact, Facebook isn’t the simplest service for recruiters to make use of. But it offers some of the best opportunities for finding new talent. Why? With 350 million people, Facebook is much larger than any other social service on the web, and, it offers an increasing number of features that recruiters can use to find the hires they want.

Certainly, some recruiters have been making use of Facebook for years. But given the near-constant upgrades that Facebook gives features like its news feed and Pages, it’s important to stay current with the best practices currently available. Here’s our list, organized by feature type.

Add Industry Colleagues as Friends and Use Them to Find More Prospective Hires

Here are a few pointers for how to make basic site features more useful in hunting heads.

1. Your personal profile: Most people on Facebook use the site to only be friends with people they’ve met in real life. But there is still a lot of overlap with business connections in any industry; go to an industry trade show, for example, and you’ll probably get a friend request or two from people you got to know there. A recruiter can tap into these sorts of connections by actively adding others in their industry as friends (recruiters should make sure their own Facebook profiles are work-safe before doing this). Once you have some industry friends, you can use the “mutual friends” feature that Facebook provides anyone who is signed in to the site. You can see it any time you visit another user’s personal profile, or when they request to add you as a friend. Take the time to look at the mutual friends you already have with your existing Facebook friends, as you may discover connections you didn’t know you had. People who are friends with your friends will be more likely to trust you, because that simple connection increases your legitimacy.

2. Other people’s profiles: There have been plenty of stories about prospective employees who got job offers pulled because the employer saw questionable content on their Facebook profiles. These users typically do not realize just how much of their Facebook profiles they’re sharing with people they friend on the site (those users should take a close look at Facebook’s privacy settings). However, anything they make available through their privacy settings is fair game, and worth taking a look at in terms of trying to figure out how valuable the prospective employee might be. While the basic profile information — education, work, etc. — is obviously of interest, what they say and do on their walls can tell much more about what they’re like, day to day. (Again, for people who are considering being friends with recruiters, make sure that you’re comfortable sharing this sort of information with them.)

3. Engagement: Recruiters aren’t typically in the role of publicly promoting the companies they work for, so be careful about engaging with the things other people share. The focus should be on mining your friends engagement for new connections. Lets say you’re a recruiter and you’re friends with a thought leader in your industry — watch to see who likes and comments on the items they share, or who they get into discussions with in other people’s items. Then, check out what you can on those people’s profiles and consider getting in touch with them. However, actively engaging could also help recruiters become better real-life friends with potential candidates, as this example shows, leading to more long-term business.

Look for Relevant Pages, Groups and Status Updates

Facebook actually makes much of its site public, you just need to know where to look.

4. Pages: First off, employers looking for new hires should have an active Facebook Page. Regularly posting about the company and discussing it with users will, in part, attract people who want to work at the company. If the company does this, the Page can be a valuable place for any recruiter to look for leads.The company can do additional things like sending out status updates about hiring — fans will see these updates in their news feeds, and potentially respond. Also, page owners should be sure to provide contact information, at least, about career opportunities — if not a tab called something like “career opportunities” featuring more details as well as links to the employment section of the company site and any other resources. For larger recruiting outfits, it may be useful to have a separate Page, to use specifically for sharing employment opportunities. Recruiters should use Facebook Search to look for the Pages of competitors, and then check out the users who engage there.

5. Groups: Facebook intends groups to be non-commercial, more as places where people with similar interests can freely collect and discuss whatever matters to them. So there are almost certainly groups on Facebook related to any type of job that a recruiter is trying to fill. As with Pages, use Facebook Search to find groups about a particular topic, then examine the users who are active in those groups. You can also create a group about a topic related to an industry, but this requires more community engagement than you may have the time and inclination to do.

6. Search: Besides Pages and Groups, Facebook Search also shows you public status updates from users and from Pages. Look at these to find potential people or Pages that you hadn’t otherwise thought to look at, that are on-topic for the types of recruits you want to find.

Target Multiple Types of Hires with Facebook Ads

This single, self-serve product (here) lets you target ads based in all sorts of information, which lets you use it for more than one type of ad.

7. Companies and connections: The ad tool lets you select ads for people within specific companies, based on what workplace networks they’ve joined, and what companies they list in their personal profiles. Use this information to go after the employees of your client’s competitors. You can also target ads based to people who are connected to your Page, group, event or application (or, conversely, to the people who are not connected to any of these features). You can also broaden the previous options to friends of people who are (or are not) connected to your Page or to other features. Think of this sort of ad as being focused on users who have already expressed some sort of interest in your company or your general industry. Target the content in this type of ad specifically to what interested and informed people will be thinking, anyway. We go into more detail, here: 10 Powerful Ways to Target Facebook Ads That Every Performance Advertiser Should Know.

8. Demographic data: Facebook’s ad tool also lets you select by all sorts other options, like country, age, gender, school, college major, etc. As opposed to the campaigns, mentioned above, that target interested types of people, think about about demographic-type campaigns as being a broad sweep of Facebook. Engineering majors at colleges in the US, for example, may have no clue that they’d be interested in working at a hot new cleantech startup, nor might they have a clue that they might want to work at a big company working in the same area. So, make sure these ads capture the high-level points about the job, rather than pushing industry lingo and details.

Overall, you should test out a variety of Facebook ads that target different types of people you’re trying to recruit. Be sure to test specific criteria for each type of ad — try testing by certain states or cities, for example, or by other factors like the length of the campaign. You will probably not run the optimal Facebook ad campaign the first time around, but you probably will if you keep testing against the return on investment that you’re aiming for.

More In-Depth Resources from Inside Network:

• The Facebook Marketing Bible: 50+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook
• Inside Facebook’s Best & Worst Facebook Marketing 2009
• The Facebook Global Monitor: Tracking Facebook in Global Markets
• Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010