Lookalike audience

A lookalike audience works like this: you give the ad platform a source, for example a list of people you hired or everyone who applied, and it goes looking for other people who look similar based on everything it knows about them. In normal marketing that's one of the strongest tools there is.

For job ads it's a different story. If your campaign on Facebook or Instagram runs under the employment Special Ad Category, Meta's documentation says lookalike audiences aren't available. Meta used to offer a toned-down version called Special Ad Audiences, but that was removed too. The reason is pretty logical: if your past hires are mostly one age group or one gender, a lookalike of them would quietly repeat that, and that's exactly the kind of discrimination the rules are there to stop.

So a lot of older advice about "build a lookalike of your best hires" doesn't apply to recruitment on Meta anymore. What you can do is let the algorithm learn from results: optimize for finished applications, feed good signals back, and let the creative attract the right people.

Example

A recruitment agency wants to upload their list of placed candidates and create a lookalike for a new campaign. Because the campaign is marked as employment, the option isn't there. Instead they run broad targeting and put the role's real details in the ad, so the people it attracts sort themselves.