How do you get more eyeballs on your clients’ jobs – without blowing your budget?
It’s a question we get all the time at Haley Marketing. Staffing firms want to know:
- How to drive more job seekers to their open jobs.
- How to reduce the cost of job advertising.
- How to increase job distribution, so they show up where job seekers are searching.
To get more people to your jobs…and more importantly, more people applying…I suggest a variety of tactics:
1) Fix/improve “the last mile”: your apply process.
When a job seeker views jobs on your site and then clicks the Apply button, what happens? Make sure you’re giving the options they need – and not unintentionally creating friction and driving them away. For example, if your Apply button directs job seekers to a page where their only option is to upload a resume, you’re deterring anyone who doesn’t have an up-to-date, properly formatted resume from applying.
I recommend:
- Adding one-click apply options, such as Apply with Indeed and (assuming you are using LinkedIn Recruiter), Apply with LinkedIn.
- Creating a “Skip the Search” option for people who just want to send you a resume and let you recommend the right job.
2) Don’t lose people who view your jobs.
Some people (a lot actually) will view your jobs, but not be ready to apply. To avoid losing them to the ether, there are a couple of things you can add:
- Exit intent pop-up. Create a pop-up that only appears when someone leaves a job without applying. The pop-up could invite the candidate to opt-in for job alerts or download some piece of useful content. The goal is to get the person’s email address and/or cell phone number, so that you can continue to nurture relationships with that individual – and ultimately get them to come back to your site when they’re ready to apply.
- Job alert sign-up. This offers candidates the ability to sign-up for job alerts that match their preferences. If your Career Portal software doesn’t offer this feature, you may want to get one that does.
3) Drive more of your website visitors to your jobs.
If you have “Jobs” in your website’s main navigation, you’re off to a good start! But you can do even more to drive job seekers to your career site, by:
- Adding a job search widget to the top of the Home page and top of your Candidates page. Allow people to initiate a search right from this prime site real estate. If your Career Portal doesn’t offer a job search widget, add a Search Jobs button that links to your jobs page.
- Adding a fly-in or welcome mat pop-up. Yes, these are intrusive and obnoxious. But they work. Having something that visually appears and directs visitors to your Jobs page or to immediately apply will increase response…in some cases, dramatically!
4) Do more to engage passive job seekers who visit your site.
A lot of people who come to your staffing agency website may be open to a new job, but not ready to apply. To capture more of the passive talent on your site, you could:
- Create offers for content that would appeal to your target candidate (e.g., salary survey, profiles of top employers in specific fields, job hunting advice for your target candidates, etc.). The idea is to offer something that gets passive candidates to opt in, so you get their contact information and start to nurture relationships.
- Do more with Thank You pages. When someone fills out a form on your website, what do they see? The page that appears after a form entry is called a Thank You page, and this would be a great place to promote content to passive talent and drive active job seekers back to your career portal…before they leave your site.
5) Get people to come back to your website.
Years ago, we did a study of how candidates use staffing websites, and we found that a returning job seeker was 2x more likely to apply to a job. So when you spend money to get candidates to come to your site (i.e., via job ads, SEO, paid ads social media, etc.), you need a plan to get these people to return.
Here are a few things you could do:
- Job alerts via email or text. Send customized lists of jobs that match each job seeker’s preferences.
- Retargeting PPC advertising. These are ads that appear on Google’s Display Network, Facebook, or LinkedIn after someone has visited the Career Portal section of your site. These ads effectively follow people after they have left your website to encourage them to come back.
- Marketing automation. If you are using a tool like HubSpot or ActiveCampaign, you can use automations to email and/or text website visitors (these would be triggered after someone completes a Contact form, so you have information you can use to reach out).
6) Get more distribution for your jobs.
There are lots of ways to get your jobs to more places, including numerous paid and free job sites. And there are companies that provide software to automatically distribute your jobs to these sites.
Our Career Portal software pushes to about a dozen free aggregators. Then there are multi-poster tools like Broadbean, Ibidu, and Logic Mellon (which appears to be more of an ATS now than when I last looked at it) that will automate posting your jobs to both paid and free sites.
Beyond job aggregators, here are a few recommendations to try:
- Google for Jobs. Add the schema mark-up that Google needs to know your jobs are job posts.
- Google Cloud API. You can further accelerate/improve job discoverability by using the Google Cloud API (which speeds indexing of your jobs).
- Scrutinize job titles. Please note that with Google for Jobs, relevancy matters (like all things with Google), so you want to ensure your job titles match the job titles your ideal candidates would be searching.
- Refresh job postings. Newer jobs tend to rank higher on Google for Jobs than older ones.
Another way to get distribution for your jobs is via organic sharing on social media. This can be done manually by your recruiters or you can automate it. We built a software product called NetSocial to make it easy to automate jobs, blogs, and other content for recruiters and staffing salespeople (our tool was specifically built for team-based sharing). You can also use tools like Buffer to automate sharing to your company social pages.
7) Generate more traffic to your website.
As you know, about 20% of job seekers are active and 80% are passive. So in addition to increasing distribution for your jobs, you need to increase visibility for your company and your website. This is where digital marketing comes into play:
- PPC advertising on Google, Bing and social media. This needs to be an ongoing process that can include optimizing your current pages, adding Specialty pages and Location pages, creating pages to promote jobs for specific vertical markets, job disciplines, and each of your recruiters, and writing blogs that address the most common questions your candidates ask (and pain points in their job search).
- Email marketing. From automated job alerts to monthly newsletters, email is a low-cost way to nurture relationships, re-engage talent, and bring people back to your website.
- SMS marketing. Text messaging can do everything email can do, and it gets higher response rates. The biggest challenge is giving someone a really good reason to give you their mobile number and permission to send text messages!
- Social media. While we’re seeing declining response to organic content on social media, the companies with the best social strategies are getting all of their team members to be active in sharing company content (including relevant jobs). What’s more, they are finding ways to make the content they share more engaging (think bold images and even better, video here!). Finally, they are actively building their connections on social sites to maximize their reach and impact.
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8) Get creative.
How else can you get people to find your jobs? Can you provide referral incentives to your current candidates (and promote those incentives on your career site)? Are there other individuals or organizations that would be good referral sources where you can share your jobs? Can you do other marketing to build your brand as an ideal career partner to people in the skill disciplines you place, so more people are coming to you for advice and assistance? Brainstorm with your team and see what other ideas you can come up with.
Where do you go from here?
While there’s no single “silver bullet” to getting more job seekers to view and apply to your job postings, I hope these ideas help! And if you’d like specific recommendations for your staffing firm to implement, or need help with marketing strategy or execution, get in touch.
More resources:
Get a free Website Performance Review: Learn how to improve response from the job seekers (and employers) who visit your site.
Visit Staffing Brain Fuel: Discover ideas to improve recruiting, drive sales, and help your company prepare for anything!
