The How and Where of Effective Recruitment Advertising

 Yair Riemer, vice president of Global Marketing at CareerArc Group, says that employers in 2014 are looking to leverage big data when it comes to recruitment advertising. The following are his thoughts: Gone are the days when a simple job posting will suffice for companies looking to recruit in highly competitive sectors like science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Specifically for entry-level graduates and interns, organizations are reaching out to us at Internships.com and looking to target candidates by such factors as major, minor, university, location, GPA and even extra curricular activities and skills. This highly targeted data is providing quality over quantity in recruitment advertising for employers in highly competitive sectors, and we believe companies across all industries will look to leverage our population of millions of active college students and recent graduates for their recruitment advertising initiatives in 2014. An employer posting an internship or job listing for that entry-level electrical engineer is nice, but it’s 10x more powerful if you can target that electrical engineer by his major/minor and skills.

Paul Harty, president of Seven Step RPO, also believes highly targeted data is effective in recruitment advertising, and more specifically, this method helps recruiters determine where to advertise their vacant positions. Harty says:

Recruitment advertising has drastically evolved over the years from posting to job boards, to setting email notifications that are custom to the candidate’s profile. How will this area of recruitment continue to develop? In order to ensure that the job boards we utilize are producing both the quantity and quality we need, we leverage applicant source tracking and cross reference this with our source of hire. By utilizing this data we are able to get insights on what job boards to invest in, as well as which have the best ROI for our customers. From these data results, we have made the decision to move from traditional job boards to Pay-Per-Click campaigns for most of our customers. PPC campaigns have generated a higher amount of visitors, as well as increased rate of hires. This year we will continue to see companies make the decision to move from traditional job boards to this type of Pay-Per-Click advertising.

Additionally, we have begun to utilize our candidate databases to market to candidates in a whole new way. Our clients look to us for ways to drive the overall candidate response rate. As a solution, we market to candidates in specific workflow steps. For example, when a recruiter is unable to get a candidate on the phone we send campaigns a few days after the missed call, which we have named “Sorry We Missed You” campaigns. These campaigns lead the candidate to the job description on the career site and directs them back to the recruiter. For one of our clients, these campaigns have driven a 23% click through rate, year to date. With the tools and data that we are able to leverage today, the recruitment industry is becoming smarter and more creative in developing a variety of advertisement ideas.

Harty says his firm has designed a brand new way to market to candidates. And according to Sabrina Balmick, marketing manager at ACA Talent, the RPO firm has also witnessed companies developing new approaches when it comes to recruitment advertising…yet these new tactics focus more on the “where” versus the “how.” Balmick explains:

One of the major trends we’re seeing for 2014 is how companies are capitalizing on mobile’s ubiquity and working to improve the candidate experience. We’ve found that companies with high volume sales openings generally require large talent pipelines. This is where the application makes or breaks the recruiting process, since it’s the first layer of the recruiting funnel. As mobile adoption increases, more candidates are applying to jobs using their phones. According to LinkedIn, 72 percent of active candidates are viewing company career sites via mobile, with 45 percent applying for a job. In contrast, just 20 percent of employers have mobile-optimized career sites. A company lacking a mobile presence will likely miss out on candidates who are browsing via a smartphone or tablet, especially as mobile usage rises and PC usage declines.