As it becomes more important to attract high-quality talent without breaking the budget, HR and talent acquisition teams everywhere are looking for ways to better utilize their job data and analytics to make smarter decisions and to use their recruitment budgets more wisely.
The emergence of performance-based advertising models, like pay-per-click and pay-per-applicant job aggregators, have certainly helped make recruitment marketing strategies more efficient. However, true optimization and cost savings requires a deep understanding of job analytics and performance.
Here are three data-driven optimizations that you can make to your performance-based PPC advertising campaigns that will allow you to utilize your recruitment marketing budget more efficiently:
- Stop wasting clicks: Only paying for actual clicks on your jobs is good, but only paying for the clicks you need is where true savings can occur. With PPC campaigns on job aggregators like Indeed, Jobs2Careers and the like, if you’re wasting clicks, you’re wasting money. In order to stop wasting clicks, you’ll first need to understand your jobs’ conversion rates to identify how many clicks are needed to achieve your goal number of applicants. You’ll then want to stop spending on your jobs the second that you receive enough clicks. For instance, if you know it takes 100 clicks to yield 10 applications on an engineering job, and out of 10 applications you’ll be able to make a hire, then you’ll only want to provide that job with enough budget to reach 100 clicks. Failure to do so could mean that this job receives 200 clicks, taking 100 clicks (and important budget dollars) away from other jobs that might need those clicks to produce applicants.
- Only pay for as many applications as you need: As stated above, the key to optimizing your PPC budget and getting more quality applicants for your budget is by eliminating overspending. Just as you don’t want to spend your budget on unnecessary clicks, you also want to avoid spending too much of your budget on applications you don’t need. Here, it’s most helpful to know exactly how many applications, on average, it takes for you to fill a particular position. For instance, if on average it takes 20 applications to hire a nurse, then you should stop spending on your nursing jobs the moment those jobs hit 20 applications each. Doing so will allow you to utilize your recruitment budget more efficiently, ensuring that your jobs get only the number of applications needed to make hires, and no more.
- Focus on hard-to-fill or immediate-need jobs: Hard-to-fill (HTF) jobs and jobs that need to be filled immediately will naturally require more traffic in a shorter timeframe to get applicants and make hires. Because these types of jobs often have high competition, and due to the timeframe given to fill them, these should be your top priority jobs that receive a good portion of your budget and more competitive CPC bids. In order to give these jobs the attention and resources they require to make the necessary hires in the given timeframe, it’s even more important to understand you job-level analytics and to optimize your non-HTF jobs using the techniques above, and divert the cost savings to higher priority jobs.
When it comes down to optimizing your PPC spend and getting more quality applicants for your money, it all comes down to your ability to focus your budget on the jobs that need support the most and cutting spend as much as possible on the jobs that don’t. Avoiding click waste, only paying for applications you need and focusing resources on your highest priority jobs are three of the easiest ways to hire quality talent within your budget. But in order to achieve this, you’ll need a good understanding of how each of your jobs perform so you can make smarter, data-driven decisions.
If you don’t have access to your performance data and analytics for your jobs, or if you don’t know how to take action on these campaign optimizations, contact us today to learn more.
