Online job advertising is a skill that any recruiter should have.
Training needed on online job advertising
When I speak to recruiters (which is on a daily basis), I notice that they don’t really know how to effectively use online as a source of candidate reach. They post their jobs to the main job boards in South Africa and then wait for a response to come in. Online job advertising means getting your adverts out to far more sources, often free, and analysing the response to figure out where to invest more time, energy and funds.
This is not a complaint about recruiters. Many of them do a stellar job at filling roles, however it’s the roles thye don’t fill or the candidates they don’t have that most often could have been found via online channels.
The main source of reach
Recruiters have to realise that their main source of good candidates is online. It’s true that some positions call for a headhunting or newspaper focus, but these are far and few between and even rare skills are researched online first. Even if only ten extra positions annually are filled by making your online presence a focus, that results in a healthy addition to revenue.
It’s actually easy
Getting your positions online is so easy. Website builders and coders have ample tools already built to simply install and tune, after which you can add and delete jobs daily. ATS systems have multi-poster functionality that pushes your advert all over the Internet. Job aggregators like Adzuna and Indeed gladly list your jobs free (or paid for more traffic). There is simply no excuse not to
Companies are in the same boat
Companies, too, should heed this advice. Whether they are using a recruiter or not, it’s best for them to get their own brand out there, showing their logo and receiving applications directly. A company I have dealt with started to advertise their own vacancies more reputably online and found that they didn’t have to hire around 50% of the positions they usually sent out to recruiters.
Measuring performance attribution
While increasing reach, make sure you have the ability to track performance attribution. This means knowing which reach channels brought you the most and the best job seeker response. Yes, here you would require someone familiar with a bit of programming and an analytics tool such as Google Analytics, however the effort is well worth it.
Online job advertising isn’t rocket science (although the attribution analysis can be). Simply think about how you can get the most reach and implement procedures to make your online job ads travel faster and to more places.
