Seriously. By the end of this article, you’ll be saying, “my job board rep hates him!”.
What is that one simple trick? It’s digital advertising.
WAIT! Don’t close your browser yet. It’s much more than just social media or PPC ads. Hear me out on this.
We all know the unemployment rate is hovering around 4 percent (and much lower for our IT/medical clients). This means your active candidate marketing is razor thin. Plus, how likely are the remaining unemployed going to have all the skills your clients are asking for in a new hire? Would you be happy if you hired a company to find your next amazing hire, and all they did was advertise job postings to less than 4 percent of the workforce?
NO! You’d find someone else that can do it. And that’s what I’m here to teach you today.
Okay! Let’s get started. First thing I need you to do is create stellar content for your industry. I’m talking about forward-thinking articles that showcase future technology in your space, major pain points for your clients, and industry trends that will vastly change their space within the next few years. It’s all right to continue posting the “resume tips” and “interview tips” you’ve been writing, but let’s add some variety that really showcases how well you know the industry you place in every day. And here’s the tricky part: You want to write content about how great it is to work for a company that does their industry really well – and how bad it is to work for one that doesn’t.
If you’re doing this already, that’s fantastic. Keep going. Double your blog output each month. Write even more content! The goal here is to get candidates consuming your content and realizing they could have it better elsewhere. That’s right! You’re going to expand your active candidate job market by using your industry experience to convince happy workers to find a new job.
But that’s not it. Not by a long shot.
Let’s take a look at your blog once they read your content. We need to remove all of your calls-to-action on that blog page that send them anywhere else EXCEPT for your search jobs page. We want to create a very clear funnel for these candidates to fall down. After all, isn’t the goal now to get them to view a job? Let’s make it really easy for them to find their way to the career page on your site.
We also need to consider that not everyone is going to want to view your jobs page at that moment, or your single piece of content is enough to convince them to leave their current job. It’s time to get your brand in front of them everywhere they go! Pay-per-click advertising is a fantastic tool that allows you to “follow” your website visitors around the internet (Yes, Facebook and Google’s Ad Network) so the candidate is seeing your staffing company every time they look at their phone. We’ve crunched the data, and returning visitors are 2x as likely to apply to a job, so let’s use that math to our advantage in a tight labor market.
What if the candidate made it to your job board and looked at a job? Is your career site set up to allow them to get notifications when a new job becomes available? If not, why not? And if they apply, is your application easy (and quick) enough to use so they don’t abandon the application? Or worse yet, second guess if they really want a new job? Keep the application short, mobile friendly, and consistent with the information you need for your recruiters to reach out ASAP!
Wait, we’ve skipped something pretty big here. We need to talk about your social sharing strategy. Cute puppy pictures for National Puppy Day and shots of your office holding up an award may get you a lot of likes, but don’t forget what the end goal is here. You want candidates to see your content, engage with it, and apply for a job. This means creating visually stunning social graphics (branded to your company!) that are easily distinguishable in the noise that is social media. Don’t forget, you’re competing against their friends’ vacation pictures and funny cat gifs. This means you also want to consider branching out beyond general postings, and find groups that these professionals engage in regularly and share your helpful content there, to further separate you from the noise of social media. You’ll also want to consider the sites you post to, as Facebook and LinkedIn can provide vastly different results if you’re looking between light industrial, medical, and C-suite staffing.
And that’s it! Okay, I’ll admit this one simple trick is actually a lot of moving parts that work together really well. And that’s the point! It’s time to leverage how much you know about your industry to find candidates that could be convinced they need a new job, if only they’d see the right piece of content and the right job posting at the right time.
Best of all? You’re creating your own candidate funnel that will provide you returns moving forward without relying on active candidates from job boards. Even better, be the hero to your client when you fill that hard-to-fill position and solidify your relationship with them. All from this one simple trick.
If you think this is a great idea but a little too much to do on your own, don’t worry! The experts at Haley Marketing are here to help. Reach out to our experienced Marketing Consultants and have them put together a strategy that will increase the quantity and quality of your applications.
