To egregiously misquote Charli XCX: I think the job board is dead, so now we’re advertising on s-o-o-o-o-o-cial media.

The job market is a nightmare. Many employers are overwhelmed by endless AI-written and submitted job applications, and job seekers are frustrated by endless ghost jobs. Now, some employers are questioning the value of job boards, looking for other ways to reach top candidates.

Enter social media. At least half of US adults visited social media sites including YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram in 2025, according to Pew Research Center. These platforms’ reach, coupled with their efforts to purge bots from their sites, seems to have appealed to some employers. In recent years, they’ve increasingly turned to social media to get their jobs in front of real humans.

“We’re all in on social really being the dominant recruitment media in the next few years, and a lot of that actually ties to where we see active job search moving, which is away from humans on job boards and really to agent-led job searches,” Adam Stafford, CEO of AI-powered talent acquisition platform Recruitics, told HR Brew.

Cause for restraint. Employers have long used social media to increase brand awareness, according to Sean Worden, CEO and co-founder of Reelist, a tech firm that helps employers hire for frontline and skilled trade roles on social media. Using it to advertise specific jobs has been less common, due to compliance and cost challenges.

Employers have to navigate a minefield of state and federal regulations regarding hiring, which extend to social media. The former may include anti-discriminatory hiring laws, pay transparency laws, and emerging laws related to AI use in hiring and employment decisions, such as that in California.

At the federal level, employers must comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment decisions based on protected statuses including race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. In 2019, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a series of rulings that found seven companies—including Capital One, Edward Jones, and Enterprise Holdings—violated Title VII by using Facebook’s ads to target direct job postings to younger, male workers (excluding women and older workers).

Employers cannot target users based on demographic information or use language or filter information that might indicate a preference for applicants of a certain protected status. For example, ad copy encouraging “digital natives” to apply, signaling preference for millennial or Gen Z workers, or targeting candidates based on zip code. They also can’t use lead forms—typically used in e-commerce to gather information about potential customers—to ask EEO questions.

Advertising jobs on social media can also be cumbersome and expensive.

Job ads are typically text-based and static, but posts that are visual and dynamic are king on social media. There are also different rules associated with advertising on social media vs. job boards. Employers looking to attract applicants on social media typically need to hire a marketing or production agency to create a campaign to advertise their job, a process that typically takes weeks, not to mention the investment on top of the cost of the ad space.

“When you thought about advertising on social media, you had to think, ‘I’m not just paying for the cost of the ad space; I’m also paying for all of the content production,’ which ultimately made social media a much more expensive way to generate inbound applicants than job boards and other options,” Stafford said.

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