Times have changed when it comes to advertising jobs. Gone are the days when we all waited for 'Jobs Day' in the local paper, and it's clear now that the jobs pages have shrunk beyond belief for a substantial number of papers. Our advice when it comes to searching for your staff, on a limited budget, is to source a mix of channels which help you reach the right number and quality of candidates for your job.
Our top tips are:
- Pick at least one job board to advertise on, making sure that it has the right ways of attracting a quality audience. Many job boards (and there are thousands out there) have thousands and even millions of candidates registered. That's only useful if those candidates are interested in looking for a new job at the time yours is published.
Many of the job boards have people who have been there for years and are no longer looking for jobs. If you ask them for stats, x number of thousand sign ups per month is better than x million user accounts which may or may not be active.
- Make sure the job boards you use don't just let you post your job on their site, and hope for the best. Job boards need to be clever about the way they attract applicants - job alerts to registered jobseekers are great, but the vast majority of job boards now share their jobs across 'aggregator sites' such as Adzuna / Jobrapido and many others to increase visibility and results, which is an excellent tool for giving your jobs a boost.
Similarly, some push jobs out across social media to ensure they reach passive jobseekers. You never know who your job will appear in front of and persuade to take a leap to something new.
- Work out if offline methods will also work for you - and you can try some very cheap and cheerful ways. Whilst local press advertising isn't what it was, it does still work for some jobs. It can be expensive, but can do the trick.
- All companies should have a social media presence, for many reasons, not least boosting your visibility locally and possibly nationally. Make use of your company facebook / twitter / linkedin accounts to publicise your vacancies.
You can do this for free which could work if you have a large audience, but you can pay for boosts to highly relevant targeted audiences to make sure you're reaching the right people.
- Finally, make sure you measure your results from each source so that you are clear which are getting you the right results for each type of job. Some channels will work well for some industries, and some won't - and you should be taking time to find out, to make sure you are targeting the right audience each time you advertise.
If you don’t use metrics to track the success of your recruitment channels then it is very much trial and error so tracking which adverts perform well is important. If you do this, your results will improve continuously.
