Background:
When creating a job advertising structure and strategy, it is important to always keep the desired outcome in mind. Of course, you can just take $5,000 a month, post all of your openings on Indeed, and pray that your highest priority openings get great results (Job board reps will almost always say “Of course, we can help” to anyone willing to spend money with them!). The issue with this strategy is you don’t have control over how much budget is pushed behind certain jobs. Do you want to spend the same amount of budget on a low-priority role looking for one candidate as you would spend on a high-priority posting that has multiple openings? The answer to this question should always be NO!
The Challenge:
Having a good campaign structure with job postings segmented based on your staffing agency’s goals and priorities is essential when it comes to getting the best results on job boards or job aggregators.
When one of our current clients first came to us, they had the goal of bringing in more applications overall, as well as increasing the number of applications for their direct hire positions. During each month of sponsoring positions on its own, this staffing agency always received a plethora of applications for its temp-to-hire positions, while its direct-hire positions struggled to gain traction and drive in a lot of applications.
The Solution:
We knew that splitting up direct-hire positions and temp-to-hire positions into two different campaigns was the best way to improve their results. That allowed our team to allocate a specific budget to each type of job and also to compare the cost per application. We split the campaigns in February with slightly more budget behind direct hire positions. After some benchmarking, we would use our knowledge to make adjustments.
During the next few months, we slowly adjusted budget allocation based on the general volume of applications the company was receiving, and if it was meeting the goal. We slowly increased the amount of budget behind direct hire positions until we reached the goal.
The Results:
The chart below shows how much budget we had per job in February, at the start of Haley Marketing managing the recruitment spend, compared to May, when we had a better budget allocation in place for the business goals.
| February | ||
| Job Type | Spend / Job | # of Apps / Job |
| Direct Hire | $35.07 | 7 |
| Temp to Hire | $32.50 | 26 |
| May | ||
| Job Type | Spend / Job | # of Apps / Job |
| Direct Hire | $39.60 | 10 |
| Temp to Hire | $28.28 | 21 |
We saw a 43% increase in the average number of applications that each direct hire posting received! We also were able to decrease the cost per application on the temp-to-hire by 13%!
Our takeaway – segmenting out postings based on your goals allows you to adjust budget allocation and make changes to help your team reach these goals. Keeping all of your job postings in one campaign and hoping that specific jobs will get more spend is the equivalent of posting and praying for a specific outcome. By using a data-driven approach, like the one above, this strategy allocated money specifically to the type of jobs – all based on the company’s business goals.
The recruitment marketing team at Haley Marketing manages the job spend for dozens of clients and accounts for millions of dollars of budget for companies in the staffing industry while maintaining a monthly retention rate of over 95%. We are here to help your business reach its goals, ensure the budget is being spent efficiently and effectively, and increase your return on ad spend. Contact our team today to learn more about how we can help with your recruitment marketing budget!
