It seems like no matter where you’re going these days, you’re constantly seeing signs hanging in the windows or in the ground outside a business stating, “We’re Hiring” or “Apply Here” or “Join Our Team.” I’ve seen it everywhere; the grocery store, local restaurants, trucking companies, drug stores, and hair salons. Other avenues they might choose to look at for gaining new employees could be radio ads, TV ads, referral incentives with current employees, and digital ads.
There are many perks to using digital as the medium to reach future employees, and it also allows businesses to reach a targeted audience with diverse digital products using targeting strategies.
Now before you go diving into the digital realm and placing ads to fill open positions, it is important to make sure that you have a good foundation set in place so that when users see your ad, they are intrigued to learn more and continue to take that next step. For example:
89% of job seekers agree that an employer’s career website is important for finding key information
Job ads that include a salary range for the job role got 75% more engagement than the job ads that don’t
51% of job seekers are more attracted to an organization that had posted job listings with visual elements (such as images, videos, or both) than to others that didn’t
The first thing you want to make sure when advertising for positions within your company, is to never land a user on the homepage. Why? If I see an ad for a certain position and I click on it, I expect to be brought to that particular job listing/posting, or at least a careers page.
One thing to be cautious of, however, is you don’t want to lead people to then fill out an application and land them on a page that looks like this:
I clicked on the ad because you piqued my interest and now I want to know more. What are the qualifications of the job? What is the salary? What are the requirements? What shift is it? I am not ready to apply to this position that I just saw briefly in the ad; I now want more information and that’s what that landing page should be about.
The next things to consider are, what exactly is that information that a job seeker wants to see?
Talk about the company history, what makes you different than your competitors, what are your company values?
Almost 70% of workers want a career change and say they’d take a better work-life balance over higher pay. Mention the fringe benefits that you might offer such as health insurance, company car, vacation time, etc.
Show photos or videos of your staff in real work situations or even outside-of-work gatherings like an employee appreciation luncheon or a holiday party.
The candidate application rate goes up by 34% when a job post includes a video. Give a glimpse into what the real-life work culture is like.
What are the best things about your company? What awards for employee retention or workplace environment have you won? What do current employees say about working there?
Then last, but certainly not least, you want to have a very thorough job description of the open position(s) that you’re hiring for and explain what the hiring process is like so the applicant has an idea of what kind of timeline they are looking at.
This is all information that you want to include on that landing page so once someone sees the ad and clicks on it, this is what they are seeing. Here is an example of a solid landing page for recruitment from a company named TaskRabbit that lists all the elements that we just went through: https://www.taskrabbit.com/careers
Digital ad campaigns drive awareness, engagement, and strong applicant flow, so now that we have a solid foundation for when job seekers see the ad and click on it, let’s talk about the different types of digital advertising that works well for recruitment:
Facebook and Instagram
Social Mirror™
Mobile Conquesting™
Video Ads
Native Ads
Display Ads
Amazon
Online Audio
Google Pay-Per-Click
The goal of the campaign is going to help be a deciding factor when determining what product(s) are the best to use for that particular recruitment campaign. If the goal is to find part-time workers, college aged students, to fill entry level positions, or attract those with general skills, the two best products would be Facebook and Instagram, and Social Mirror™. These two products allow for a little more flexibility with how much text is allowed in those ads, and they also typically drive higher conversion rates.
Now, when we are looking at Facebook and Instagram for recruitment, you want to keep in mind that there are restrictions when it comes to how we are targeting job seekers. For example, if you are looking for a very highly specialized type of person like a mechanical engineer, you can’t target by that job description for recruitment. That is one reason we recommend using Facebook and Instagram for more general positions that have more mass appeal. Because of the restrictions in targeting specific job titles on Facebook or Instagram we recommend other digital products if you need to find someone highly specialized.
If the goal of a campaign is to target a highly specific type of worker or a certain type of profession, then you’ll want to look at running Video, Social Mirror™, Native, and/or Display Ads. All of these products have over 100,000 categories that we can target by, including B2B and Recruitment categories. With the recruitment specific categories, that allows us to target people of a certain skill, or by specific job titles. We can also utilize Keyword Targeting, Artificial Intelligence, and Retargeting with those products.
So for the example ad above we were able to target people who had job titles such as Security Guard, Police Officer, Corrections Officer.
Now maybe you’re a business that is trying to fill more blue-collar type positions or trying to reach Moms, fast food workers, or want to target employees at a competitor’s location. This is where you’ll want to utilize Mobile Conquesting™. This would include:
Targeting your ads by Online and Offline Behaviors
Geo-Fencing and Geo-Retargeting to reach potential employees at their current place of employment.
To increase Conversions on this strategy, consider adding in Cross Platform Targeting where we are now following people who have been served the mobile ads (whether they clicked on the ad or not), onto other ad platforms on ANY devices they use. Cross Platform ads can be Display, Native Display, Video Pre-Roll, Facebook and Instagram, and Social Mirror™ Ads.
If a company is looking to do a recruitment campaign that is tailored more towards driving traffic to their website or reaching a wide audience or increasing branding and awareness, some products to consider would be Amazon Targeting Ads, Online Audio, and/or Google Pay-Per-Click (aka Google Ads). These products would be good for a business that wants to get their name out there for reaching a large, vast audience.
Amazon ads target by behaviors, or a list of people that have applied for positions in the past. We can use that list and serve ads to people while they’re on Amazon.com, using Amazon-owned properties (IMDb.com, IMDb TV, Fire TV), and across Amazon Publishers.
Online Audio is a great way to reach individuals who are currently employed and not actively looking for a new job, These ads are heard when people stream music or podcasts
Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads are going to be a good fit for businesses that have a lot of brand recognition and a larger budget. Using PPC as a strategy for recruitment can get expensive because it can become a challenge to keep the cost per click low when using certain search terms like “new career”, “now hiring”, “recruitment”, and “job openings”.
As I stated earlier, there are a lot of businesses with open positions to fill these days in all different types of the workforce, but how do you make it so your ads capture someone’s attention and not your competitors? It is found that 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious, and reaching someone for job opportunities isn’t any different.