Curious to find out more, we reached out to Gray to ask him about his unemployment, his ad, and if there was any benefit to advertising on Facebook to get a job. And if so, should every unemployed person do it?

Why Put An Ad On Facebook?

The obvious answer might be to find a job, but Gray shared that he’s had a lot of experience creating and managing ads professionally. “I've been working in agencies for the last 7 years, and a lot of the work I did got turned into ads.

“I'm also very familiar with campaign planning. Plus, I already have an ad account that I use to promote my personal projects: kakitabletop.com and wearemovic.com,” he said.

We asked him why the need to resort to Facebook since there are plenty of job websites out there. He said:

“I [was] suddenly let go by a startup in Singapore after working remotely for two months. In addition to applying on LinkedIn and passively waiting, I thought of utilising my skills to get the word out.

"Targeting anyone in the Klang Valley around my age and above who have an interest in some kind of marketing or publishing agency or otherwise. I'm using my personal social media, which I have some public content as I'm very occasionally engaged as a micro-influencer.”

Has it been effective?

He shared that he’s averaged one interview a day since he started the Facebook ad in the beginning of March—which we think is actually quite good!

While there's an ad out there working for him to get a job, he’s also still actively using LinkedIn for jobs and applies to “hundreds of jobs” he shared which bring him a "handful of responses".

Now in April (one month later), he’s had 20+ interviews and at the time of writing, is doing a second round of interviews with one interested employer, so we're crossing our fingers for him.

As an ad man, he’s also given us the results for his little “Hire Gray campaign” if you’re interested below:

Reach: 7,086 Impressions: 10,609 Results: 235 clicks; 174 page landing. Total spent: RM54.43; cost per landing: RM0.31

Any senior marketers want to weigh in on his results?

Is the job market really that bad?

According to the latest findings by the Department of Statistics, as of November 2021, less than 700,000 people were unemployed with 15.61 million people being employed. This decrease in unemployment might look positive but there's another metric we have to look at.

The employment-to-population ratio (the ability of an economy to create jobs) increased month on month sitting at 66%. That’s two out of five people finding a job on average with three people not being able to find a job. Those are not encouraging numbers for job seekers so maybe we really do need to invest in advertising ourselves for a job.