If you’re someone who looks at advertising jobs online as a means to an end--”I have an open job I need to fill, and I’ll post it online to make a hire”--then you’re missing out on a tremendous amount of value these job advertisements provide.
Now, that may sound perplexing. You might ask, “if the point of advertising jobs online isn’t to make hires, then what exactly am I advertising them online for?”
That’s a great question, and one we would encourage more HR and talent acquisition professionals to ask themselves. Of course, one of the goals in advertising jobs online is to attract qualified talent so you can ultimately make a hire, but your job advertisements provide much more value to your businesses than just a new source of candidates.
And, only by looking at job advertisements differently, can you understand the true value recruitment marketing brings to the table.
With that said, let’s examine three underlying benefits of posting jobs online. Or, rather, let’s look at online job advertisements differently:
- Employer Brand Exposure: The way candidates search for jobs has dramatically changed over the last 20 years, and these changes go far beyond where they’re looking for work (online rather than in print). In the past, the job seeker mentality was to find any decent job, put in the time, and work your way up the corporate ladder. Today, job seekers won’t even nibble at an opportunity if they don’t believe in your company, its mission and its culture. Those three elements combined make up your employer brand--it’s the way you and your organization present yourselves to the outside world of candidates. Online job advertisements, then, should be considered a prime opportunity to highlight and promote your employer brand. Consider this: For any job advertisement, only a fraction of candidates who click on your open positions will actually apply. While it may seem as if candidates who don’t apply to your jobs are a waste of traffic, they actually present an employer branding opportunity. Therefore, by properly promoting your employer brand in your online job advertisements, you’re able to effectively capitalize on this opportunity and build employer brand awareness. And, in doing so, you’ll be keeping your business top of mind for qualified job seekers when future positions become available or for when their career status changes.
- PPC Referral Traffic: When marketers think of pay-per-click (PPC) referral traffic, their minds often wander to AdWords, social media and display advertising campaigns. Referral traffic, of course, is traffic that’s sent to your website from an external site through backlinking. Consider this: When you’re posting open positions to sites like Indeed, Monster, or LinkedIn, the job advertisement might live on those sites, but the description lives on your own. Therefore, online job advertisements serve as yet another means of directing traffic back to your domain. In using job descriptions to bolster your brand and company culture, you can effectively get twice the value out of your job advertisements: Serving as a recruitment tool as well as a traditional online advertising.
- Building Talent Pipelines: For seasoned recruitment marketers, establishing a talent pipeline is always top of mind. That’s because recruitment is first and foremost a proactive endeavor that drives business. A talent pipeline is best described as a network of qualified candidates who currently cannot fill your open rolls, but remain connected to your brand out of interest for future employment opportunities. However, similar to the two bullets above, it’s difficult to establish a talent pipeline unless you’re gearing your job descriptions for just that. When a job description seems like a one-off piece of content, it may pique a few qualified candidates' interest, but again will miss out on promoting your organization’s brand to all of the job seekers who did not apply. Rather, in targeting job seekers who might be right for current and future employment opportunities, you can build a talent pipeline and expedite future recruitment efforts--saving you time and money.
If we only look at job descriptions as a means to an end, then we’re bound to overlook the inherent value that they bring to our companies, outside of hiring. However, by changing our perspective and looking at them from a fresh angle, we can see that online job postings provide an opportunity to spread brand awareness, increase site traffic and reduce the difficulty associated with future recruiting efforts.
Learn more about how you can improve your online job postings to better take advantage of their inherent value in the articles below:
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