Update: Facebook shuttered Jobs on Facebook (February 2023) and Instant Articles (April 2023)

R-E-C-R-U-I-T- Find out how to do it dig-it-tal-ly! It seems like no matter where you’re going these days, you’re constantly seeing signs hanging in the windows or in the ground outside a business stating, “We’re Hiring” or “Apply Here” or “Join Our Team.”  I’ve seen it everywhere; the grocery store, local restaurants, trucking companies, drug stores, and hair salons. That is just one way that businesses are looking for help. Other avenues they might choose to look at for gaining new employees could be radio ads, TV ads, referral incentives with current employees, and digital ads. There are many perks to using digital as the medium to reach future employees, and it also allows businesses to reach a targeted audience with diverse digital products using targeting strategies.

Now before you go diving into the digital realm and placing ads to fill open positions, it is important to make sure that you have a good foundation set in place so that when users see your ad, they are intrigued to learn more and continue to take that next step. For example:

  • 89% of job seekers agree that an employer’s career website is important for finding key information
  • Job ads that include a salary range for the job role got 75% more engagement than the job ads that don’t
  • 51% of job seekers are more attracted to an organization that had posted job listings with visual elements (such as images, videos, or both) than to others that didn’t

The first thing you want to make sure when advertising for positions within your company, is to never land a user on the homepage. Why? If I see an ad for a certain position and I click on it, I expect to be brought to that particular job listing/posting, or at least a careers page.

One thing to be cautious of, however, is you don’t want to lead people to then fill out an application and land them on a page that looks like this:

I clicked on the ad because you piqued my interest and now I want to know more. What are the qualifications of the job? What is the salary? What are the requirements? What shift is it? I am not ready to apply to this position that I just saw briefly in the ad; I now want more information and that’s what that landing page should be about.

The next things to consider are, what exactly is that information that a job seeker wants to see? Give the old “elevator pitch” on your company. Talk about the company history, what makes you different than your competitors, what are your company values? Believe it or not, almost 70% of workers want a career change and say they’d take a better work-life balance over higher pay. Mention the fringe benefits that you might offer such as health insurance, company car, vacation time, etc. Some other tips to get that landing page to garner more applicants is to show photos or videos of your staff in real work situations or even outside-of-work gatherings like an employee appreciation luncheon or a holiday party. The candidate application rate goes up by 34% when a job post includes a video. Give a glimpse into what the real-life work culture is like.

This is also a great opportunity to brag about your company. What are the best things about your company? What awards for employee retention or workplace environment have you won? What do current employees say about working there? You’re also allowed to be picky with who you’re looking for, so list the attributes and qualities of the type of person you want to hire. Then last, but certainly not least, you want to have a very thorough job description of the open position(s) that you’re hiring for and explain what the hiring process is like so the applicant has an idea of what kind of timeline they are looking at.

This is all information that you want to include on that landing page so once someone sees the ad and clicks on it, this is what they are seeing. Here is an example of a solid landing page for recruitment from a company named TaskRabbit that lists all the elements that we just went through:

Digital ad campaigns drive awareness, engagement, and strong applicant flow, so now that we have a solid foundation for when job seekers see the ad and click on it, let’s talk about the different types of digital advertising that works well for recruitment:

The goal of the campaign is going to help be a deciding factor when determining what product(s) are the best to use for that particular recruitment campaign. If the goal is to find part-time workers, college aged students, to fill entry level positions, or attract those with general skills, the two best products would be Facebook and Instagram, and Social Mirror™.  These two products allow for a little more flexibility with how much text is allowed in those ads, and they also typically drive higher conversion rates.

Now, when we are looking at Facebook and Instagram for recruitment, you want to keep in mind that there are restrictions when it comes to how we are targeting job seekers. For example, if you are looking for a very highly specialized type of person like a mechanical engineer, you can’t target by that job description for recruitment. That is one reason we recommend using Facebook and Instagram for more general positions that have more mass appeal. Because of the restrictions in targeting specific job titles on Facebook or Instagram we recommend other digital products if you need to find someone highly specialized.

If the goal of a campaign is to target a highly specific type of worker or a certain type of profession, then you’ll want to look at running Video, Social Mirror™, Native, and/or Display Ads. All of these products have over 100,000 categories that we can target by, including B2B and Recruitment categories. With the recruitment specific categories, that allows us to target people of a certain skill, or by specific job titles. We can also utilize Keyword Targeting, Artificial Intelligence, and Retargeting with those products.

So for the example ad above we were able to target people who had job titles such as Security Guard, Police Officer, Corrections Officer.

Now maybe you’re a business that is trying to fill more blue-collar type positions or trying to reach Moms, fast food workers, or want to target employees at a competitor’s location.  This is where you’ll want to utilize Mobile Conquesting™.  With this product we can target by Online and Offline Behaviors, and we can also use Geo-Fencing and Geo-Retargeting to reach potential employees at their current place of employment.  With Mobile Conquesting™, keep in mind that most people are typically applying for jobs on larger devices like laptops and desktops. They might see the ad on their mobile device and then later go to their desktop to read more about the position and apply, which is going to cause the conversion rate to be lower for Mobile Conquesting™.  Something that will help increase those conversion numbers would be adding in Cross Platform Targeting where we are now following people who have been served the mobile ads (whether they clicked on the ad or not), onto other ad platforms on ANY devices they use.

So maybe I see an ad for Infinity on my phone while I’m at work, but I don’t want to apply while I am work, so I don’t click on it. Later that night I go home and get on my desktop and now I have the potential to see that same ad on my desktop. Cross Platform ads can be Display, Native Display, Video Pre-Roll, Facebook and Instagram, and Social Mirror™ Ads.

If a company is looking to do a recruitment campaign that is tailored more towards driving traffic to their website or reaching a wide audience or increasing branding and awareness, some products to consider would be Amazon Targeting Ads, Online Audio, and/or Google Pay-Per-Click (aka Google Ads). These products would be good for a business that wants to get their name out there for reaching a large, vast audience. With Amazon, we can target by behaviors, or maybe they have a list of people that have applied for positions in the past. We can use that list and serve ads to people while they’re on Amazon.com, using Amazon owned properties (IMDb.com, IMDb TV, Fire TV), and across Amazon Publishers.

Online Audio is a great way to reach individuals who are currently employed and not actively looking for a new job, but who may be open to a good career opportunity if one came along. This audience is also known as a “passive job seeker”. You might be able to grab their attention with an Online Audio ad while they are sitting at their desk at work. They hear that ad after having a not so pleasant encounter with their boss, and then check out the website to get more information.

Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads are going to be a good fit for businesses that have a lot of brand recognition and a larger budget. Using PPC as a strategy for recruitment can get expensive because it can become a challenge to keep the cost per click low when using certain search terms like “new career”, “now hiring”, “recruitment”, and “job openings”. Since these words are considered competitive keywords, they are going to cost more to bid on which can chip away at a budget quickly.

As I stated earlier, there are a lot of businesses with open positions to fill these days in all different types of the workforce, but how do you make it so your ads capture someone’s attention and not your competitors? It is found that 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious, and reaching someone for job opportunities isn’t any different. Take a look at this for example:

People are spending more money on things that have been branded for certain feelings, emotions, or status symbols. Starbucks isn’t the best cup of coffee, but it’s been branded as a coffee that makes you feel happy. When you see someone wearing a Lacoste shirt, you immediately think “Wow, they spent a lot of money on that shirt” and it becomes a status symbol. Recruitment advertising is the same type of situation. You want to relate to people on an emotional level. I saw a video recruitment ad for a trucking company that hit the nail on the head. They were looking for drivers and they did a video with a high school aged girl talking about her dad always missing family dinners, her volleyball games and track meets because he was on the road working. She then went on to say that ever since he started working at “XYZ Trucking”, he’s been home every night to enjoy family dinner, and he is there to watch her volleyball games and track meets. I am not even looking for a new job, but that video ad speaks to me!

People will not only purchase goods and services based on emotions, but they will also make big life changes based on emotions and that ad right there was a great example of using emotion to reach someone. I’ll leave you with some other clever ads that are making that business stand apart from their competitors by grabbing the attention of job seekers using humor: