In a recent employee recruitment campaign, we found that a signing bonus did not improve the performance of help-wanted ads.

In October 2018, Brazzell Marketing Agency ran a Facebook Employee Recruitment campaign to help a practice reach physical therapists. The campaign used four different ad designs, and two versions of each ad, for eight ads total. Half of the ads did not mention a signing bonus, while the other half offered a $3,000 signing bonus. The practice invested $289 total in the campaign, and physical therapists in targeted geographic areas saw the ads 9,580 times. The help-wanted ads without signing bonuses accomplished the same click-through rate as the ads with the signing bonuses.

Of course, this experiment does not reflect how a signing bonus may or may not affect other conversion points in the employee recruitment funnel. For instance, maybe a signing bonus would be influential in the interview process when trying to convince an applicant to take a job. Another limitation of this data is that this particular campaign focused on physical therapists, who are higher-income professionals. Workers with income under $50,000 per year may be more influenced by small differences in compensation.  

One of the great advantages of Facebook Employee Recruitment is that the Facebook platform makes it easy for advertisers to put help-wanted ads in competition with each other. Employers can then draw conclusions about what messages, photos, and offers work best, and use that knowledge to make ads published elsewhere more effective.