Skip to content
Bfw has an array of business-to-business (B2B) clients who have relied on us for recruitment marketing strategies over the years. If there is one thing that we have found to be true, it’s that recruitment marketing is really no different than B2B or B2C marketing. Identify your audience’s needs, sell with your strengths, mitigate your weaknesses, and find the right balance between online and offline promotion. While this article is by no means a full tutorial for recruitment marketing, it will hopefully knock the good ideas in your brain loose and get you thinking the right way. Let’s begin.
List Salary On Job Postings
Financial compensation is the number one factor that job searchers look for when looking for new employment. Their time is valuable, and not offering salary or commission information is the quickest way to lose their interest. Think about it – what does it say about a company if they don’t say outright what they’ll pay you? Probably that the pay is not competitive.
Listing salary makes sense from a technical standpoint as well. 67% of job searchers want to see salary in a job listing. They will use job board filters to find jobs within a salary range. If you don’t include salary in a job listing then it will not appear for a large percentage of users.
Enhance Your Recruitment Marketing Initiative’s Digital Offerings with SEO
The search engine optimization (SEO) landscape of your website can do a lot for your recruitment marketing campaign’s success. Organizing employment opportunity pages in a way that fits with your company’s size, structure, number of locations, number of open positions, and number of positions that you anticipate might be open in the future can go a long way.
If you have a company with more than 100 employees, then it will be beneficial to have a site (or at least a sub-domain) that is completely dedicated to recruitment. This will help prevent clients or customers from accidentally landing on recruiting pages and becoming frustrated. A dedicated recruitment website will also give your recruitment marketing campaign a better chance of success because the site’s job postings will rank better for job searches on search engines because their bots prefer it when the purpose of a website is delineated in its URL structure.
If you have an existing recruiting site but are not seeing the volume of applicants you are looking for, make sure are following these best practices for recruitment marketing search engine optimization:
-
Create Job Pages on a Location and Title Basis
If you have multiple locations, then you can use your company’s size to your advantage. Pages that make specific mention of a job’s location and position within their page title, header, or sub-headers will rank better for individuals who search for jobs in or for the location in which you are looking to hire. Somebody who searches for “welder jobs in Tallahassee” will be more likely to find your welding job in that city because search engines prioritize pages with location-specific information in their make-up.
-
Implement Structured Data
Structured data markup is code on a web page that assigns meaning to certain elements by communicating directly to search engines using their own vocabulary. Sites marked up with structured data are more likely to have search engines and job sites display job information to users in a dynamic way like in the screenshot shown below.
Your job can appear in the blue box for relevant searches if you implement structured data
Implementing structured data can have a big impact on your recruitment marketing initiative’s ability to generate applications search engines and job boards because you are giving their robots exact what they are looking for. If you do not tell search engines the significance of keywords featured in your job posting, then search engine bots will have to assign meaning on their own. It is always a good idea to provide them with your exact meaning of the payment, hours, skills required so there is no uncertainty about how your job posting will be presented
Adding structured data to text that is already present on your page is simple. Visit this link, click ‘Job Posting’, and then paste the URL of your job page. Click on the words that you to assign significance to. When you are done, click ‘Create HTML’. Then, go to the top of the screen and click the box to the right of ‘Back to Tagging’ and make sure you have ‘JSON-LD’ selected. From there, simply copy the grey script that the generator produces and paste it into the <head> section of your job page. Test the newly-marked up page with Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.
-
Be Consistent in Your Job Page Markup
The last major SEO piece that will help your recruitment marketing initiatives is consistency in your use of page titles and subheadings. Search engines prefer sites that are predictable in this respect. Generally speaking, your H1 (the title of the page) should be the job title that you are hiring for. Your H2’s (subheadings) should include the job’s location, salary, responsibilities, experience requirements, benefits, hours, vacation time, and anything else that is a major topic of discussion. Keeping these subheadings consistent throughout your recruiting site so that search engines will reward you with higher rankings for job searches.
Post on All Job Boards
The more places that you post your job, the more views it’s eligible to receive. Not everybody will end up using the same job board, so maximize your recruitment marketing’s reach by posting jobs in as many places as possible. Make sure that you are cognizant of industry-specific job boards like CareerMD.com for the healthcare industry, Engineering.jobs for the engineering industry, and OneWire.com for the financial industry.
The more places you post, the more likely you are to reach the right candidate wherever they may be searching.
Google Search for Recruitment Marketing
Advertising on Google Search Network is a viable option for recruitment marketing campaigns. This gives you the ability to hit candidates with a message before they get to the job boards and enjoy visibility that is only rivaled by sponsored job board posts. However, you want to make sure you do not waste money by giving too much budget to the campaign.
Recruitment marketing on Google effectively is all about the details. If you aren’t confident that you can create an ad that reaches a high enough ad quality to appear on the front page consistently, then leave it to the professionals at bfw to attract you the candidates you need.
Google Search Network ads are a great way to earn visibility for recruiters.
If you want to try it yourself, the most important piece of the puzzle is to find a budget that agrees with the number of qualified candidates who search for jobs like yours on Google every month. To do this, create a Google Ads account and use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to forecast searches in your region. Make sure you only target the areas where you are hiring and enter job-related keywords you would likely build your campaign around. This should give you an idea of how much to spend on a campaign based on anticipated search volume.
Once this is done, create your campaign and leverage keyword research, ad copy variation, ad group organization, extension creation so that you have the best chance to appear high in the rankings. If you really want to take yourself to the next level, implement Google Tag Manager on your page and create conversions that can be linked to your campaign.
Pay Attention to Competitors’ Situations and Be Ready with Geotargeting Campaigns
Another tactic to consider for recruitment marketing is geotargeting devices of competitor employees.
Certain companies can draw polygonal zones around buildings and then place advertisements to users who have apps on their phones that belong to the company’s inventory of apps. Due to the size of these app lists, it is a virtual certainty that you will be able to advertise to your target audience based on the targeting parameters that you elect to use.
This is a tactic that is best suited to employers who are looking to hire for many different positions and who have competitors with large locations. As the campaign is a display banner tactic, you can’t be sure if there is any sort of level of intent to leave the competitor from whom you are trying to hire talent. Because of this, the click-through rates will be low, so to generate any level of hiring certainty will require large numbers of impressions (hence, large buildings with lots of targets).
However, the odds of success can be tilted heavily in your favor if you hear that your competitor is having a tough time or is looking to lay off employees. Placing ads with recruitment marketing messages that are geotargeted to competitor buildings at these times can provide you good visibility with an audience that is more likely to engage with your message.
Alternatively, if you are a very large company with perennial recruitment marketing activity, using this tactic as a background awareness tactic is viable because the CPMs are low enough for geotargeting that it makes sense to use it as another way saturate media outlets with your offerings. Pair geotargeting with advertising on smart TVs of the same targets and your recruitment marketing messages can follow them day and night until they decide it is time to find a new company. How about that!
Let’s Talk!
If you are looking for a b2b advertising partner who can also handle recruitment marketing initiatives, give us a call at 561-962-3300 or complete a contact form and let’s talk!