I feel the market is changing, yet again. Recruitment advertising goes back and forth, and you can track the potted history of recruitment advertising through my various blogs over recent months and years.
This blog is actually an alternative view from what I’ve previously written about. It’s more a debate rather than a definitive view. I don’t think it’s realistic but sometimes it’s worth thinking through these ideologies! So, bear with me on this. I’ve had a lot of coffee over the last couple of days…
So, best practice as I normally suggest for a sourcing model is a blended and balanced strategy of attraction practices from job boards, printed press, social media, SEO, PPC and more recently programmatic advertising. This means you attract a variety of candidates from a number of areas, skill sets and locations. All pretty sensible so far.
Now throw that idea away. What? Yes, ditch that idea. Why on earth would you do that and where do the candidates come from now, I hear you cry dramatically.
I’ll explain why and where this idea comes from. Firstly, the cost and resource required for this is quite extensive. You need to hire recruiters to do the sourcing of candidates. You need to train them in social media management – or hire a company to do it for you. SEO wise you need again to hire a company to do that in order to drive your search results higher. You need someone usually in HR or marketing to deal with the various job boards and typically you would use numerous media for different roles. Then there is the dealing with connecting the ATS to the multiposting tool and the boards. And of course all the LinkedIn recruiting you do too. All of this takes time and resource for you to deal with it. And once you’ve done all that you get underway with your attraction. Great! Except it’s not.
The job boards advertising don’t provide all the candidates you wanted, you’ve no idea how many people responded to your press ad. The social media campaign has created 15 new likes but no applications, and you’ve grown tired of thinking of new things to tweet about, so resorted to just tweeting your jobs. The SEO company keep demanding you change the career site and update the content which you’ve not got around to writing yet. Google’s new update has meant your listings have gone down. And you’re getting through your PPC budget but just not sure what its supposed to do, you watched the videos, used your free #50 voucher and a few hundred quid since. Apparently 2450 people clicked on the ad, but you’re left wondering where the candidates are. Oh and it’s 7pm on a Friday night and everyone’s left the office and you’re about to start the day job – which is studying the applications you do have.
So where do the candidates come from then if you get off this multi-level hamster wheel? You didn’t get the approval to outsource recruitment to the glut of RPO companies that will apparently do all this for you, and you desperately don’t want to increase your dependence on agencies.
Well the solution to this is you pass the problem on. And the number one person to do that to is either the advertising agency (link to the wave-digital), or the job board. See job boards are quite clever these days, well some of them, and they have realised that they need to go beyond the boundaries of their own web pages to get the candidates back to the job board to apply for your job. This way you keep advertising on the job board and more importantly to them on their job board. So think about this – what if you gave 90% of your entire budget to one of the job boards, set the KPIs that they need to generate a certain number of applications and let them do the leg work?
So the benefits are, you will save a serious amount of time. Results will improve and if for whatever reason they don’t you can always link a few KPIs back in there to protect risk of overspending. The agency or job board get more of your budget so they will work that much harder. Most job boards recommend that you don’t rely on job postings only, but in the past as you spread your budget around you’ve probably been able to afford little else. By getting the job boards to do the work for you you’ll see an improvement of your brand online and it will also enable you to set clear goals and tracking – which is the desire of many a job board. And more importantly you don’t need to constantly stay on top of the latest trends to attract candidates, saving you and your team an invaluable amount of time.
I’m generally a little risk adverse so can appreciate the reluctance around putting most of your eggs in one basket, but don’t immediately dismiss it out of hand. Advertise in less places, but advertise better. Interesting concept huh.
