Director of recruitment marketing, Matt Lozar, answers your toughest job advertising questions.
Here Are The Answers To Common Questions Recruiters Ask:
Which Job Boards Should I Be Advertising On?
It sounds like a simple question until you consider all the options. Indeed, and ZipRecruiter are the two big ones right now. CareerBuilder and Monster are two traditional older job boards. Facebook has also come into place. Google for jobs can be helpful. What about new ones, like Nexxt, Upward, Talroo, Talent.com. On top of all the local and regional job boards, those niche job boards, how do you determine what should be part of your budget?
Consider Where Your Audience Is Spending Time
Are you recruiting for information technology? For healthcare, industrial, or call center jobs? Each will be different. Take into account your geography — whether you’re advertising in Seattle, Miami, or Boston, or Phoenix. Then think about the application format as well. All of these factors can come into play.
What Is The Difference Between Pay-Per-Click And Job Slots?
Job slots are the traditional format like a classified ad. You’re paying for the presence of your job postings. You’re paying the same amount of money, regardless of the results. Your cost is going to be the same if you receive one application or 10,000 applications. You’re paying for ten spots, 20 spots on those job boards, and manually swap jobs in and out each month. With the pay-per-click model, you pay for performance.
Strengths And Weaknesses Of Job Slots
You have guaranteed costs. You know what it’s going to cost you every month for those slots. There is potential for a lot of applications at a low cost. So, you could get an excellent return on investment. But maybe you have 20 job slots, but a really low number of applications that month—your cost per application skyrockets. There’s low automation potential, a lot of manual swapping in and out of jobs for job slots. Your contract flexibility is eliminated. You’re stuck in a 12-month contract.
Strengths And Weaknesses Of Pay-Per-Click
You pay for the performance, you’re only paying for those applications you receive, whether it’s 10, 100, 1000, your budget can stay flexible. If you have a rush of job orders in December, and a decline in job orders in February, adjust your budget quickly. There’s a lot of automation benefits to how jobs get posted to the job boards and how your budget can be allocated.
The downside is there is no set budget. It can be challenging for some companies to budget if they don’t know if they want to spend $5,000 a month or $2000 in one month. You can control that budget, but you don’t have an easy way to have a long-term budget in your plan. There’s a lot of posting and praying — praying people find your jobs, click on them and apply.
Do I need a year-long contract?
Absolutely not. If there’s one thing to take away from this article, it’s to keep control of the budget on your side. Don’t let the job boards dictate your budget, your terms, your long-term flexibility. Make sure that flexibility stays on your side. How do I know if it’s working?
That depends on your goals. For many staffing companies, it’s to get as many applications as possible, so you want to focus on reducing and lowering that cost per application to as low as it can be in your market. What’s the conversion rate? How many times does someone click on a job and then apply for your job? You want that to be high because you don’t want wasted clicks from someone who clicks on your job and doesn’t apply for it. How many quality candidates are going into your database? Because in staffing, you could get 20 applications for a call center, and you only have one opening today, but you may have another opening next week or in a couple of weeks. You can keep that pipeline open because you have quality candidates, and we know speed wins so often in staffing and recruiting.
What’s the actual return on your investment?
Consider your job board spend — what you’re putting into those sponsored jobs, and what tangible ROI dollars and cents are you getting back from your placements?
How can staffing agencies get more ROI out of that recruitment budget?
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Automation
Eliminate manual posting to multiple job boards. Often, clients post to multiple job boards at once, swapping jobs in and out from job boards. It’s a pain. It’s a lot of time. It’s wasted time for your team. Give them more time to talk to the people who want to work for you. Make data-driven decisions, create a system to where if you know that jobs are performing better in job board A than job board B, have software that can help shift that money around as quick as possible.
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Source tracking
Do you have a system in place to know which job boards are the sources of your applicants? Do you know where they’re coming from in your ATS, in your candidate database, or another tracking system? Do you know where those quality candidates are coming from? How do you make those future decisions based on the data that’s unique to your company? If you know that job board C is bringing in many applications, a lot of quality applications, shift money there quickly to take advantage of it.
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Haley Marketing
We have the technology, we work with programmatic job ad software to take all of this time and tactics off your team’s plate, and we can take care of that, right? Think about how companies outsource their hiring to you, there’s a lot of companies that outsource their job board management to us. That’s where our expertise and our testing come into play, where we work with our clients to manage their recruitment spend and get more ROI from that budget.
Do you need a more strategi approach to job board spend management?
Find out during a free, no-obligation 30-minute recruitment marketing focus call.
During the call our experts will review your recruitment advertising strategy, social recruiting tactics and employer branding. After the call, we’ll provide a complimentary audit of your recruitment marketing strategy, evaluating your challenges and sharing relevant best practices.
If you are spending $2,000 a month or more on job ads, let’s talk.
