So, you’ve invested time and resources into building a strong employer brand for your organization.
Maybe you’ve developed your employee value proposition or have plans to do so soon. Maybe you’ve created some great content and updated your careers site to better reflect all of the information that a candidate needs to know before applying.
All of this is awesome (and congrats on the great work!), but ultimately if you don’t have a strong job advertising strategy you’re missing out on a key piece of the puzzle.
Why? Because—
Media is the vehicle that brings talent to your candidate experience.
This is what John Farelli, Product Manager at Symphony Talent, shared with us in a recent webinar on 2019 Job Advertising Trends Not to Miss.
In other words, if you don’t have a strong strategy in place for advertising your jobs and career opportunities to candidates through different media channels, then candidates won’t be able to find you.
If they can’t find you, they’ll never witness your stand-out employer brand and the thoughtful candidate experience you’ve developed.
So, how do we fix this to make sure candidates flock to your careers site or job ads to learn all about you? By developing a strong job adverting strategy, informed by the latest trends and technologies.
Here are 4 ways to improve your Job Advertising strategy.
1) Diversify the media channels you use to advertise your jobs
If you’re only posting your jobs on a couple of job boards, you may be missing out on the opportunity to reach your candidates through new channels.
It makes sense to use a diverse mix of media channels because certain job boards might perform better than others over time. This approach also allows you to track what media channels are working best for the different talent groups that you need to target.
Media channels that work great for Sales talent in Austin may not work as well for Engineering talent in San Francisco. Expanding your mix can give you the chance to connect with candidates who may not be hanging out on job boards.
John shared an employer example using this diversification approach. Bath & Beyond improved their job advertising strategy by branching out from just relying on Indeed for their job ads. Today, they also use Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter, Linkup, Nexxt, Monster and Talroo to advertise jobs to candidates.
2) Think about non-traditional and face-to-face channels where you can advertise your jobs
Job boards aren’t the only way to advertise your jobs to candidates today! You can improve your job ad strategy by also considering non-traditional and face-to-face channels.
Some of the non-traditional channels to consider include: Google AdWords, retargeting ads, text messaging or email marketing campaigns, social media ads, and podcast or radio ads.
You can also consider face-to-face and non-digital channels that might work, like open houses at your office and university or professional association events.
A lot of companies today underestimate the power that in-person events can hold—they are a great way to get candidates acquainted with your employer brand and show the jobs you have open.
3) Consider investing in a technology platform that automates your job advertising based on performance
Another way you can drastically level up your job advertising approach is to consider investing in a technology platform that automates and optimizes your job ad bidding and buying process.
This type of technology is referred to as programmatic job advertising and has been used in the consumer marketing space for a number of years. This approach is newer to Recruitment Marketing, but forward-thinking companies are seeing some great results.
Programmatic job ad platforms will automatically distribute your ads to different media channels and adjust the spend based on performance. You set one budget for a campaign (or group of jobs) and the platform distributes that spend in the optimal way to maximize your results.
Programmatic job ad platforms save you the time of having to manually check in and monitor all of your job ads. They also adapt on the spot to your job’s performance, ensuring that you don’t waste money sponsoring a job on a platform that’s not delivering results or sponsoring a job longer than you need to if you are attracting enough applicants already.
If interested in looking into the software, some programmatic job ad platforms include: Appcast, PandoIQ, Recruitics Action, Symphony Talent M Cloud, TalentAds and Wonderkind.
4) Use the data to test and adjust your approach
Something that Rally Founder Lori Sylvia has driven home recently is that in Recruitment Marketing, we often don’t test tactics and channels as much as our Marketing peers do.
In Marketing, testing is seen as normal, and part of the process of executing on a successful campaign or initiative. You launch something, monitor the data and if it’s not working you adjust it.
When something doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean it’s a failure! It means that you tested and learned that you should adjust your strategy in a different direction to achieve your desired results.
This is a great lesson for us to apply to Recruitment Marketing—and job advertising specifically.
If something isn’t working well, why continue to invest in it? If something is working extremely well, maybe you don’t need as much budget as you thought you did. Perhaps you could see the results you were looking for with half the spend on that platform.
The important thing here is to stay close to your data and don’t be afraid to test and fail in order to improve your job ad strategy over time.
I hope this information proves helpful as you solidify your job advertising approach this year.
If you want to learn more about the latest trends in job advertising, check out our webinar on demand, 2019 Job Advertising Trends Not to Miss.
