Recruitment guideRead at source and checked in the product, 9 September 2026

How to Post a Job on Facebook: Local Jobs, Pages, Groups and Ads

There are four ways to put a job in front of someone on Facebook, and only one of them reaches people who are not already looking. Local Jobs — the free listing Meta brought back on 13 October 2025 — puts your opening in a Jobs tab inside Facebook Marketplace, and is aimed squarely at entry-level, trade and service roles. A Page post reaches your followers. A Group post reaches that group's members, if the admins allow it. All three are pull: they wait for someone to come looking. A paid job ad in Meta Ads Manager is the only one that pushes the role into the feed of a qualified person who was not job hunting today — which is why it costs money and why it is the one that fills hard roles. Post the free listing, then run the ad. Across 891 managed campaigns, the median cost was $13.88 per applicant.

The four ways, side by side

The distinction that matters is not free versus paid. It is pull versus push. Local Jobs, Page posts and Group posts all sit still and wait to be found, which is the same model a job board uses, with a small fraction of a job board's traffic. A paid ad interrupts. Roughly three-quarters of the workforce is employed and not searching, and that is the group a frontline employer usually needs, because the people actively searching have already applied to everyone.

Local Jobs: the free listing Meta brought back

Meta retired Jobs on Facebook outside the United States and Canada in 2022 and everywhere in early 2023. On 13 October 2025 it brought a version back under the name Local Jobs. In Meta's own words the product is aimed at "entry-level, trade, and service industry employment", which is an unusually direct statement of who it is for — and it happens to be the exact population frontline employers hire.

What it looks like in the product

Opened on 9 September 2026 from a United States account, the Jobs tab sits inside Marketplace with a Create job action in the left rail beside the ordinary Create new listing. Listings are filtered by distance from a set location, by job type — full time, part time, contract, internship or volunteer — and sorted by suggested, newest, nearest, or wage per hour high to low. Listings display an hourly or weekly wage on the card itself.

The category list is the tell. On that date it read:

• Animal Care
• Cleaning & Facilities Maintenance
• Construction & Trade
• Education
• Entertainment & Event Production
• Health Aide & Assistants
• Mechanics & Service Technicians
• Office & Administrative Support
• Personal Care & Wellness
• Restaurant & Food Service
• Retail
• Sales & Marketing
• Transportation

There is no category for software engineers, accountants or marketing directors. Meta has built a frontline hiring product and labelled it as one.

How to post one

• From Marketplace. Open the Jobs tab and choose Create job. This is the shortest path and the one most small employers will use.
• From your Page. Meta's announcement lists the Page as a creation point, and job posts surface across Groups and Pages as well as the Marketplace tab.
• From Meta Business Suite. The route for anyone already managing the Page there.

Candidates reach you through Messenger rather than an application form, to ask questions or set up an interview. Listings are public to adults 18 and over. Practically, that means the replies land in the same inbox as everything else, in no particular order, with no screening questions in front of them — so decide who is watching that inbox before you post, not after.

Posting from your Page, and in Groups

You can still write an ordinary post that says you are hiring. It reaches a share of your followers, which for most frontline employers is a few hundred people, many of them customers, former staff and competitors. It costs nothing and it is worth doing. It is not distribution.

Groups are more interesting and more work. Local trades, CDL, nursing and restaurant groups can be genuinely productive, because the members are exactly the audience and the recommendation carries weight. Three cautions. Most groups have explicit rules about job posts and admins remove violations without discussion. Posting the same opening across twenty groups in an afternoon is how accounts get flagged. And it does not scale: it is a person's time every week, forever, and it stops working the moment that person stops.

The paid route: a job ad in Meta Ads Manager

This is where the volume is, and it comes with one rule you cannot design around.

Employment ads are a Special Ad Category

Any United States advertiser, or advertiser targeting the United States, running an employment ad must self-identify the campaign as a Special Ad Category. Declaring it locks the audience: age is fixed to 18 through 65+, all genders must be included, ZIP-code targeting and location exclusions are removed, some detailed targeting and interest options disappear, lookalike audiences are unavailable, and any city or pin-drop location is widened to a minimum radius — 15 miles in the United States. Meta's definition of an employment ad is broader than a job post: it covers anything that "promotes or directly links to an employment opportunity", including job fairs and the promotion of company perks alongside openings. Get it wrong and the ad is rejected.

The practical consequence is that you cannot target your way to a qualified applicant. You cannot draw a ring around one plant. You cannot exclude a town. You cannot pick an age band for a physical role. Everything that used to be done with targeting now has to be done with the ad itself and with the form: say the pay, say the shift, say the location, and put two or three knockout questions in front of the applicant. The full rules, in Meta's wording, are on our Special Ad Category page.

What the ad should be

• A photo or short video of the actual crew and the actual equipment. Stock imagery reads as an agency and gets scrolled past. A phone video of the shop floor outperforms it consistently.
• The pay rate on the image. Not "competitive pay". The number. It is the single most effective qualifier available now that targeting is gone.
• The shift and the location in the first line. Someone who cannot work nights should self-select out before they cost you a click.
• An Instant Form, not a link to a careers site. Name, phone, and two or three knockout questions inside Facebook. Career-site redirects are where job-board applicants disappear.
• Two or three creative variants. Let delivery decide; it will, quickly.

What a Facebook job ad costs

Across 891 Boostpoint-managed campaigns on Meta in the 2026 Social Job Advertising Benchmark — 1,334 campaign-months of measured delivery — the distribution looked like this. These are what advertisers paid, management fee included, for advertising only.

By role the range runs from $2.71 for customer service to $74.62 for licensed therapy roles. The gap between the median campaign and the volume-weighted average is not a rounding artefact: it says that the campaigns spending the most money are the efficient ones, and that a lot of small campaigns run badly.

A five-step version

• Place the free Local Jobs listing. Four minutes, and decide who is watching Messenger.
• Post it on your Page and, if you have relationships there, in one or two groups whose rules allow it.
• Build the paid campaign in Ads Manager, declare the Employment Special Ad Category, and set a radius you can actually staff from.
• Put the pay rate and the shift in the creative, and use an Instant Form with two or three knockout questions.
• Answer inside the hour. Applicants arrive with a phone number; the employers who text back the same day hire from the same list that everyone else lets go cold.