Never Post A Job Again
Billboard Theory
Posting a job opening is like buying space on a billboard that moves around your town over a period of time. When you first post your job, it’s like having a prime spot on main street or the nearest freeway. Lots of people drive by and everybody sees it.
As time goes on, your billboard moves to a less than prime spot on a county road. A good number of people still drive by, but not as many as when it was near the freeway. They also are quite as attentive, because the billboards on that road don’t change as often and they’re kind of used to them.
Give it a little longer and your billboard moves to a shabby spot in a cornfield way out in the boonies. By this time hardly anyone drives by but locals and the farmer who owns the field. And he see it every day, so he really doesn’t care, he’s just happy to collect rent from the billboard company.
Gimmie Some Credit
Now, you put a lot of hard work and creativity into that billboard. The problem is that you only get credit for the people who saw it, applied for the job, and ultimately got hired.
That’s the cold cruel world of job posting, my friend. You might help yourself by paying for your billboard to remain by the highway a little longer. You also might be able to take it down when it moves to the country and put up a new version of it near the freeway, but you have to watch it constantly and act fast when it moves.
What If…
Now, what if you not only got credit for all of the hires, but also for the applications? What if you got credit for everyone who wrote down the phone number or email address you listed in the posting? In fact, what if you got credit for everyone who just read the whole billboard?
This is the beauty of digital marketing. By applying digital marketing principles to your job posting, you can turn a tiny stream of hires into a fat stream of leads. Then through the magic of remarketing, you can turn a portion of those leads into more applicants and eventually more hires.
Talk about increasing the value of your ad spend!
Four Ways To Never Post A Job Again
1. Write Compelling Ads – Not Posts
Traditional ads that begin with a bunch of information about your company and contain a lot of industry jargon just don’t work as well as advertisements.
There’s a reason why companies don’t pay millions of dollars for super bowl ads that say, “XYZ Company has been serving the tri-state area for 50 years providing the very best in quality widgetnomics. We offer low prices on the best widgets every day. We employ bunches of people. We do lots of stuff and blah, blah, blah…”
That reason is because nobody cares.
Great ads are written with the sole purpose of compelling people to action – not pleasing executives who like to hear how cool they are. Your jobs deserve the same treatment.
2. Target The Right People
Ads also depend on reaching the right people. That’s why they only run after there has been exhaustive research into where those people are and how to get the message in front of them.
It doesn’t do you any good to post your job opening for the whole world to look at. You’re not trying to hire the whole world, and you certainly don’t want to pay what it will cost to show your ad to the whole world. You need to find out where your people are hanging out online and show your ad to them.
Proper targeting is essential to any ad’s success whether for marketing or recruiting.
3. Use Ads To Build Audiences
In order to get the most out of your recruiting budget, you need to be able to capture all of the leads generated by your ad. This is why platforms like Facebook and Google are so powerful. They allow you to build audiences of leads who didn’t apply, but also didn’t say, “No.”
Once you have those people in an audience you can return to them again and again until they do say, “No.” This allows you to invite them to hiring events, send them information that will help them as they search for work, and provide value on multiple levels.
By providing value to your collected audiences, you will develop a relationship with them and, ultimately, hire more of them.
4. Remarket To All Your Leads
Once you have created your audiences, you have to return to them. This may be as simple as showing them another ad. It may be inviting them to some kind of event.
Often times, remarketing is nothing more than a system of providing value and making compelling offers in various places around the internet until your audience responds.
In the end, you have to think of recruiting the same way that you think about marketing. It’s just that you’re selling employment opportunities instead of products or services.
Things like branding, message and media matter. This is what we’ve found as we’ve helped lots of businesses hire lots of people across lots of different industries. Hopefully this helps you as well.