Facebook simply has too many eyes watching and thumbs typing every day. With a potential audience of 200 million users daily (total Facebook users nerly 500 million and half of them visit the site daily), a presence on Facebook is just too good an opportunity to pass up.

Using Facebook for social recruiting isn’t about sponsoring ads and posting help wanted ads as status updates. It’s about letting your network know that you have an opportunity for someone they might know. Social networking – more specifically social recruiting – is about word-of-mouth marketing. Recruiting on Facebook isn’t about just word-of-mouth but as Erik Qualman says, it’s “world of mouth.”

To get started recruiting on Facebook, it takes a simple 3-step strategy:

1. Create a Facebook business page for your company. A business page, unlike your personal page, is a public profile, searchable by the likes of Google, Bing and other search engines. In effect, a Facebook business page is like having a free website on the most popular networking site in the world. Even non-Facebook users can find and view your site when searching for a job.

2. Engage candidates on your Wall. Good candidates are looking for the right place to work just as much as employers are seeking the right candidates to hire. Before they apply, they want to know what it’s like to work for your company. What’s management like? What are the employees like? Getting employees to post updates about their daily activities gives candidates an honest, inside look at the job. Having employees respond to questions posted by candidates is an excellent way to engage them at the front-line and differentiate your company from the competition.

3. Post video clips of what it’s like to work at your company. Record interviews with employees. Give a tour of your facility. Demonstrate what a new hire might expect on his or her first day. You can also run contests to encourage employee participation in monitoring and posting updates to the site as well as referrals. The more activity on the site, the more likely your Facebook Business Pages rank will increase in the search engines and the more likely candidates will find you.

What happens when a hot headed manager fires an employee on the spot, without taking the time to consider any future ramifications for the company? If you are an HR professional, the file probably ends up on your desk and it’s up to you to perform damage control for the sake of both the company and the individual employee who was let go.

While it is not uncommon for outplacement services to be offered in a standard personnel outplacement, it can be a very important tool in your tool box to consider in other cases as well. Out placement services are often composed of support processes that will assist the outplaced employee in finding new employment. Resume’ writing, interview tips and money management between jobs are just a few of the more common offerings.

It is also fair to consider the emotional impact that outplacement has on the employee. It can be extremely demoralizing to be let go or laid off for any reason. The affected employee can understand cognitively that the action is tied to a legitimate business decision, but emotionally, it is very painful and cultivates a type of fear that we can all relate to.

Fear is the number one stumbling block for out of work employees and fear along with feelings of self-doubt is an emotional response that can be supported through an outplacement resource offering you may not have considered, life coaching.

Life coaching is a great resource for you to consider and it offers real value to an outplaced employee because they have many emotions and are not sure what to do with them. After fear and self-doubt, anger is the second most powerful response that leads to bad will toward the company. Anger and blame directed toward the company ultimately becomes a great excuse for the employee to stay stuck. They feel somehow victimized and justified emotionally for not moving on. It is arguable that focused life coaching can serve as a highly successful strategy to calm the waters under tense circumstances.

Coaching with a professional who is focused on working with outplaced employees can be a very successful endeavor that is a win-win in an otherwise sticky situation. When an outplaced employee has resources to help them find what is good in themselves at a time when they might be feeling worthless is the most powerful support that an organization can offer. It offers true support for where the employee is now and helps them look to the future with a sense of self-worth that will actually make a difference.

Offering life coaching to outplaced employees also sends a powerful message to the work force. That message is that the company cares about its employees and sees them a people in whom they want to invest, even if it is an outplaced employee. It can be viewed as a pay it forward action from an employer that is a good corporate citizen.