The Ideal Weekly Marketing Schedule for Recruiters

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word Everything on a To-Do list on a dry erase board  Recruiting within a busy recruitment agency or in-house HR department can at times be manic, and even crazy, as teams work to meet the often panicked, multifarious and competing demands of their client bases and internal teams. Most of them need top talent yesterday; many have unrealistic expectations. All this pressure can leave many sourcing teams in a spin, unable to see the wood for the trees and becoming reactive and inefficient.

As an attempt to help recruiting teams cut through the chaos, I have prepared the ideal marketing calendar (based on recent research), which sets out the most effective schedule/times for marketing jobs to candidates or for marketing your hiring services to companies into audience responsiveness.

The Best Time To Cold Call Employers

There is a 40-hour working week during which agency recruiters can market their services to employers, but all times are not equal. In order to get maximum return from your employer marketing efforts, cold call employers at times where research has shown you are most likely to make a positive contact.

For example, Dr. James Oldroyd from the Kellog School of Management analyzed the electronic logs of over 1 million cold sales calls across multiple sectors and found that Thursdays were the best day to cold call if you want to contact someone, followed by Tuesday and Wednesday. Friday was the worst day to cold call.

The study also showed the best times for cold calling were between 4pm and 6pm when you are looking to contact a lead (114 percent better than the worst time just after lunch). However, if you are looking to qualify a lead, or set an appointment with a prospect, then the best times to call are between 8-9am and 4-5pm. These times are 164 percent better than 1-2pm, which is the worst timeframe.

The best day of the week to post your job adverts to find candidates

Don’t just post job adverts at any time of the week. Research from eQuest, a global job distributor, suggests that Wednesday is the best day of the week to market to job hunters via jobs boards… as candidates are most active and most responsive on this day. In truth, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were the best days to reach out, because around 18 percent of candidate activity takes place on each one of these days. There was a significant drop on Thursday with just 16.8 percent of candidate activity taking place and a massive drop on Friday with just 12.3 percent of activity taking place. The best times to have your jobs actually hit the marketplace were between 11am and 1pm and 4pm to 5pm as this was peak job searching time.

More support for Wednesday being prime marketing day comes from a study reported on Mashable. It showed that Wednesday at 3pm is the best day and time to share your job links on Facebook, with 1pm and 4pm generally being the time when your Twitter and Facebook links will get most responses.

By Kazim Ladimeji