Recruitment ad agencies are a driving force in the job advertising market. Over the years, agencies have pioneered “how to” approaches in the world of recruitment marketing, such as measuring the performance of referral programs, providing transparency to media buying, fine-tuning analytics programs, and innovating career-site conversion tactics.
When it comes to advertising your jobs, a recruitment ad agency helps ensure you’re getting the most from your budget. Job advertising and recruiting is what they live and breathe every day… they are a team of experts. They have the time and resources to vet through and analyze the vast landscape of job ad vendors, track performance through the funnel, and ultimately to the hire. As a result, when working with a recruitment ad agency, you can sleep at night knowing that your advertising budget is flowing to the right sources for the right jobs that you need to fill.
It’s clear that these agencies have played a major role in shaping the way we approach recruitment advertising today. And there’s a lot that employers can learn from their best practices to drive the right candidates to the right jobs, at exactly the right time.
There are two types of people in this world: those that clean their own gutters and those that hire someone to do it for them. To optimize your job advertising strategy, here are the key takeaways to put into practice, regardless of your penchant to climb the ladder yourself.
- Know your market.
Do you have specialty functions, industries or jobs where you should be working with specific job sites outside of your major sources? Expand your job advertising strategy by adding in new sources; test niche and social sites to understand where you get the best ROI. - Buy job ad media like a modern agency.
Agencies now purchase advertising in a pay-for-performance environment, where you only pay after your job has received a “click,” an “apply click” or an “apply.” Paying only for performance mitigates your risk as an advertiser, ensuring a better return. - Grow by hiring a recruitment marketer.
Your company likely has a team of marketers to help promote your products or services. These marketers have tested their methods and now use data to make the best advertising decisions to best find their consumers. Recruitment marketing and promoting your jobs should have the same measured approach. If you know that recruiting will continue to grow in your organization, you may want to invest in a person who understands advertising technology and can help optimize every dollar you spend. - Track your results & metrics.
Establish KPIs for your job ads through your entire recruiting funnel: impressions, clicks, apply starts, number of applies, quality candidate measures, and hires. Hold your traffic sources accountable for their performance. Pro tip: sharing performance data with your media partners will allow them to optimize your campaigns, resulting in an even better ROI. - Normalize your KPIs & data.
Ensure you are not overspending on what it takes to generate applicants from your job ads; pay market rates based on your job functions and locations on a cost-per-click or cost-per-apply basis, and leverage automation technology to control your spend safely.
Regardless of whether or not you choose to work with an agency, we all agree on one fact: recruiters have a difficult job. It’s part sales, part marketing, part HR, and generally a 24/7 operation. Recruitment advertising agencies have been able to separate out the various tasks a recruiter faces and focus on key pieces of the puzzle: data analysis and job ad optimization. They have fine-tuned their operation to spend time on the actual analysis, removing the other work recruiters face, and truly making job advertising performance their specialty.
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