Job slots are just one of the most common ways to advertise jobs online.
As we discussed in our recent blog post (Job Postings or Job Slots: Which is Better), job slots are a more flexible form of the traditional job postings; a flexibility which allows for optimization and can provide HR and talent acquisitions professionals with a better return on investment.
That’s because with job slots--unlike job postings--you’re purchasing digital real estate for your jobs to live on over the course of your agreed upon contract, rather than buying individual advertisements for each open position. This makes job slots a lot like monthly parking spaces. While you can only park one car in the space at a time, regardless of how often your car is parked there, or which car you choose to park there, the cost of the parking space remains the same.
So then, how can you optimize a job slot? Well, as it turns out, although job slots provide greater flexibility to recruiters, they also present some difficulties in their management. For one, jobs must be monitored to determine when it’s time to swap an old job for a new one, and then once that determination has been made, they must be manually swapped out.
While this might not seem like a tremendous amount of work, when responsible for monitoring and managing many--hundreds, or even thousands--of slots at once, this task immediately becomes time consuming, and fitting of a full-time professional.
With that said, there are three ways to optimize job slots for a greater ROI, that every HR and talent acquisition professional must consider:
- Eliminate empty slots: The essential first step in optimizing job slots lies within ensuring all of your slots are filled with current, open positions. Because job slots are purchased for a fixed fee over a contracted period of time, any time that a slot is empty is a waste of your budget. Therefore, by simply checking that you have full utilization of all your slots, and in eliminating any empty slots by filling them with new and open jobs, you’ll have taken the first step toward job slot optimization and toward generating a greater ROI.
- Swap out under-performers: Each job placed in a job slot should come with defined goals (you can read about how to define recruitment marketing goals here). In understanding your goals for each open position posted to a job slot, you’ll be able to define exactly when that job is ready to be swapped out: Jobs that have hit their goals should be taken out immediately, jobs that are struggling to, or cannot hit their goals should be swapped. Since job slots are purchased over a specified period of time, under-performing jobs within your slots produce a similar effect to leaving the slot empty. Essentially, they’re taking up valuable space--and more importantly time--that could be used to give a different position visibility. By leaving in old, under-performing or simply outdated/closed positions, you’re creating waste in your job slot and therefore minimizing the return you could be generating on your investment.
- Automate slot management: Taking advantage of these first two optimizations are non-negotiable when it comes to getting the most out of your job slots. With that said, executing against these first two optimizations may be difficult and, above all else, time consuming. As an HR or talent acquisition professional, you have a lot on your plate today and, while you cannot ignore slot optimization, paying close attention to the management of your job slots as detailed above could cause your other duties and responsibilities to fall by the wayside. To combat this, consider automating your job slot optimization efforts. Using a recruitment marketing analytics and automation platform, like Recruitics Action, can help you do just that. With this type of platform, you can get a detailed look at how each job is performing in your slots. Most importantly, a platform like Recruitics Action can automatically swap out old, or under-performing jobs for new ones based on a set of rules you’ve established yourself..
Job slots continue to be a leading method for advertising open positions on job boards like LinkedIn and Dice. However, to get the greatest return on investment, HR and talent acquisition professionals need to know how to, and have the proper technology to, optimize and automate the use and management of their slots.
To learn about how Recruitics Action can help you better manage and optimize your jobs slots, sign up for a demo today.
