17 Recruitment Marketing Optimizations for 2017

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If you have to set one recruitment marketing goal for the new year, it should be to optimize your recruitment marketing strategy in order to produce more applicants while simultaneously lowering the cost associated with obtaining those applicants.

When we talk about optimizing your recruitment marketing strategy, we’re talking about identifying deficiencies by measuring and analyzing the right recruitment analytics, and then eliminating those deficiencies either manually or through the use of automated programmatic buying technology.

Regardless of whether you’ve decided to roll up your sleeves and do the hard work of manually managing your online job advertisements, or if your organization has decided to invest in leading platforms to automate them, these are 17 recruitment marketing optimizations you should consider in 2017.

17 Ways to Optimize Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy in 2017

1. Make your Cost-Per-Click (CPC) campaigns more competitive by increasing bids on your sponsored jobs appropriately
2. Refresh jobs that have been active the longest in your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to ensure the old age of jobs doesn’t negatively affect their performance on job boards, job aggregators and other employment sites
3. Implement an in-depth recruitment analytics platform that can provide you with job- and source-level data with spend so you can see the performance behind every job that you advertise and so you can make better data-driven decisions moving forward
4. Leverage programmatic job advertising technology to automate the management and optimization of your recruitment marketing efforts through rules-based algorithms against your specific recruitment goals
5. Diversify your media and find the right media mix beyond just one main job board or aggregator
6. Test performance of your jobs on generalist job sites, like Monster and CareerBuilder for broad reach
7. Also test performance of your jobs on niche job sites, like JobsinLogistics and DICE, in order to better target specific audiences for harder to fill roles
8. If you have part-time, hourly, temp or contractor roles open, test the performance of your jobs on sites which focus primarily on this audience--such as SnagAJob and Jobcase--to better target these types of candidates
9. Ensure you’re utilizing a variety of media channels available, including performance-based media such as CPC and Cost-Per-Applicant (CPA) models, job slots, job postings and social media
10. Use Job Slot Optimization to automate the management and distribution of your jobs into your slot inventory, ensuring you don't leave any old or expired jobs occupying your slots
11. Maximize the exposure of your jobs on employment sites by increasing your budgets accordingly
12. A/B test and optimize your job titles in order to improve your click-through rates
13. A/B test and improve your job descriptions and job landing pages to increase conversion rates
14. Make your application process quicker and easier by enabling social integrations that allow candidates to apply using their LinkedIn or Facebook accounts in order to increase conversion rates
15. Ensure your application process is mobile-optimized to allow mobile job seekers to easily apply for your jobs from anywhere in order to increase conversion rates
16. Simplify your job application process to decrease applicant drop-off rates
17. Connect top- and bottom-funnel recruitment metrics through integrated End-to-End Analytics tools in order to tie important cost data together and unearth important insights such as cost-per-quality applicant (CPQA) and cost-per-hire (CPH) for every job and for every source

As you can see, there are a number of opportunities to optimize your strategy here, but HR and talent acquisition professionals should remember that optimizations must be done deliberately and with a solid strategy in place.

But, blindly adding optimization tactics to your strategy can have a negative affect, as we discussed in our blog on How to Avoid Optimizing Your PPC Strategy to Death.

If you’re worried that you might “over optimize,” or if you’d like to speak with a recruitment marketing expert who can provide you with guidance and advice in your strategy, we’re here to help.