Recruitment advertising is a proactive talent acquisition strategy to market your organization to potential job candidates and build a talent pipeline. The main idea is that you lay the groundwork to cull talent and develop connections, as well as promote your organization’s brand—even before you have an open position. Then, when you need to hire, the process from start to finish is way more efficient, with established connections set in place.
Recruitment advertising can target both active job seekers and passive candidates (meaning those not necessarily looking for a job but who may be a future candidate). This way, it operates as a forward-looking strategy to engage more potential candidates for future positions. This type of advertising often reaches people through social media or where they are already searching online.
The Ability To Track Performance Means Smarter And Stronger Ads
Sure, traditional advertising through sources like newspapers still exists, but it is less desirable, as it is more difficult for employers to track a print advertisement’s effectiveness. Unlike an online ad, you simply can’t tell if someone marked your ad in the newspaper to come back to later. Online platforms, however, provide trackable metrics, like site traffic or the number of clicks on an ad, which are useful for talent acquisition teams to determine the effectiveness of their advertising, as well as to target their most effective sources. As millennials make up a substantial chunk of the workforce, available recruitment advertising tools have to meet this tech-savvy generation where they are: online.
Strategic Placement Yields Quicker Results
As computer use has increased exponentially in daily life, so has the complexity of recruitment advertising. Digital job advertising can run the gamut from social media ads, to posts on an employer’s website, or to placements on niche job websites that target specific industries. But it gets more complex—there are aggregators that assemble job postings from multiple sources all in one website; ad exchanges, which are a digital marketplace where advertisers can “bid” on ad space; and job distribution software, which enables employers to post advertisements on several job boards. There are even recruitment marketing platforms like
You Can Customize The Best Plan For Your Organization
When considering developing a job advertisement campaign there are options for ads at different price points and varying modes of visibility to users. Ad tech is complex, but there are a variety of models that allow you to compete for space on websites to reach the right candidates. For example, duration-based ads establish a set time period, generally for a set monthly fee. Ad exchanges require bidding on website space and software platforms that can perform “dynamic” bidding for you based on your budget. There are also a variety of payment models based on the candidate interaction with your ad; one of the most common types is the cost-per-click model, where you only pay for the ad when someone clicks on your ad.
When it comes time to actually post job ads for open positions, more complex modes of payment have developed to make sure you are paying for more serious job searches and not just casual browsers that lead nowhere. These come in different variations, such as the cost-per-apply-click, cost-per-application (payment based on the number of times a full application is completed for a job), and cost-per-quality-applicant (payment based on the number of applications that meet a set of pre-screen criteria).
Whatever model works best for your organization, establishing a robust recruitment advertising strategy can help you find candidates faster, target better sources of hire, and ultimately compete for top talent that best meshes with your company’s needs.