Attracting candidates to your advertised vacancy is becoming a more challenging task. According to data from WaveTrackR, a job distribution tool, in 2018 there is a significant drop in the number of received applications. One of these reasons is that there are fewer active job seekers in the market which are regularly searching for new jobs opportunities. That’s why as a recruiter or an employer you need to put more effort into your recruiting strategy to reach the right talent for your role. Buying recruitment media credits on multiple job boards is an excellent way of spreading your job offer. However, if you just rely on this form of recruitment marketing then you might not get the candidates you need.
Why choose PPC for job advertising?
Sometimes traditional job board advertising is not efficient enough for recruiters. Even when you have to pay for a job listing on a job board, there is no guarantee that candidates will view your job. That’s why Pay Per Click (PPC) is a more effective way of increasing jobs visibility online with control of your budget. In the organic job board listing, you spend a certain amount of money, regardless of whether your job got any views or other interactions from candidates. Although the PPC campaign, might look more expensive, it could be a cost-effective investment because you only pay when someone clicks on your adverts.
Job Adverts on Google
There are over 4 million ‘jobs’ related searches on Google each month (see the graph below). It could indicate the opportunity for recruiters who might want to include Google platform in their recruitment strategy. Having a recruitment website optimised for Google For Jobs is one of the aspects to consider. However, getting jobseekers on your site organically needs a little bit of investment in your recruitment web development to make sure it’s easily found by the search engine.
A positive impact of Google For Jobs on the job site has been already described in one of our previous article “Google For Jobs… A month after release in the UK”, where we explained how thanks to optimisation for Google For Job, organic traffic increased by 25% and visits from new Google job search feature brought 29% conversions in the form of job applications submissions.
Investing in PPC on Google
However, if you want to get more candidates, you can start running a Google PPC campaign. It will help you to reach more good quality candidates who are looking for specific jobs matching their criteria. For example, when a user searches for ‘PHP developer jobs in London’ you can set a bid for this keyword and then a link to your website will be displayed on top of other organic results.
Apart from targeting search queries, there is the other type of Google advertising, which allows following job seekers on their web browsing journey. As they visit other sites, your adverts for the specific jobs or job category can be displayed to a user. You can select and customise the audience type for your advertising, whether they are going to be new users who never heard about your brand before or retargeting campaign to bring them back to your site. Ideally, you could use a combination of those two.
Advantages of Google job advertising:
- Allows you to reach a more comprehensive online audience.
- It has many options to customise targeted audience such as searched keywords, location, interest, behaviour on your website and many more.
Disadvantages of Google job advertising:
- It needs constant maintenance and monitoring.
- It can be complicated if you are not familiar with the Google Ads tool.
Summary
Although described forms of Google PPC campaigns have their advantages and disadvantages, if done right, it should help you to reach good quality candidates matching your job criteria.
To remember that regardless of whether you promote your jobs on Social Media or Google, make sure you can track them and measure their performance. If you drive users to your recruitment website, make sure it has Google Analytics set up, you monitor your application process, and each campaign is recorded in Google Analytics. Only then, you will be able to see the picture of the PPC performance fully.
Don’t forget that a PPC campaign is only a part of the recruitment marketing strategy and you shouldn’t replace it with a traditional job board listing. If you struggle to get the right media plan, some agencies can help you to choose a job board and media schedule suitable for your recruitment. And if you post your job on multiple job boards, a job distribution tool like WaveTrackR can give you recommendations on which job board you should spend money on to get more applications and hires.
