The Official Rules for Advertising Your Jobs

By Lou Adler, October 3, 2007

Show some R.E.S.P.E.C.T. This is the most important rule of them all: treat candidates as exceptional people and show them at least as much respect as you show your customers. It seems that retail organizations and those close to their end customer clearly understand this. From a sourcing standpoint this means you emphasize what's in it for the candidate over what's in it for the company.

Emphasize the DOING not the HAVING. To keep the R.E.S.P.E.C.T. alive, make sure your ads emphasize what the candidate will do, learn, and could become. Minimize qualifications and describe what the person will be doing instead. It's much better to say "Have enough industrial design background to create the best handheld tools in the world" rather than "Must have 10 years industrial design background in the O.E.M. hardware industry."

Focus on the first 10 seconds. The title and the first two lines of your ad will determine if it will be read. A job posting on any job board is equivalent to direct mail marketing. Direct mail marketing experts know that the title needs to stand out and the first few lines must be captivating to get a strong response. This way your ad will be seen above the clutter and it will be read.

Googlize you ads to make sure they can be found. As part of this you'll need to free your ads from your ATS. Most career sites and candidate management systems prevent people from finding your job postings using Google. Look at the URL associated with one of your open jobs and see if the title of the job is clear. Then look at the meta tags associated with the ad to see the keywords. If the title and keywords aren't relevant, your ad is invisible to the search engines. Jobs2web.com can quickly redesign your career site to solve this problem.

Sell the product line, not the product. Stop advertising individual jobs. Instead, advertise all related jobs in one mega-posting. This technique will massively increase the number of good candidates applying. For one thing, more candidates will find your posting since it covers multiple positions (e.g., all software design engineers). For another, the candidate response rate will increase since there's less exclusionary content. For example, a mid-level engineer might stumble on your ad for a senior level spot, but not apply. However, if the ad said "We've got some great projects for engineers who have anywhere from one to ten years of experience," everyone will apply.

Use talent hubs instead of posting on job boards. Since more candidates are using Google to find jobs you'll be more visible if you use talent hubs to advertise your jobs. A talent hub is something you can create yourself that is designed to be found using a search engine, rather than through a job board. It can be a single page or a micro site. By advertising all related jobs this way you'll be able to make a more effective marketing presentation for your open positions. Send candidates to individual jobs from the talent hub or have them send you their resumes directly.

Reverse engineer your ads to find the best boards. Before posting an ad try to find it using Google. When you search for your ad insert terms a top person would likely use to search for a comparable job. For example, if an industrial designer was looking for a spot in San Jose she might search on the terms "industrial design jobs consumer products San Jose." Look at the boards and companies that show up. Then post your ad on these boards and do the process again until your ad shows up in the Google search. This is the reverse engineering process. Separately, do something similar on the job board you ultimately use and make sure your ad is one of the first 10 listings.

Make sure your ads can be found. A great ad that can't be found is as effective as a boring ad that can't be found. Designing ads and talent hubs to be found using Google can take some time to produce results. In the interim, pay the placement premiums on the boards you use to put your ads towards the top of the listing. If you group your ads, your cost per ad will still decline. Also, buy Google keywords and have your ads appear on the right hand side of the search. This pay-per-click approach can be very reasonable if you push candidates to your talent hub which covers multiple positions. As a minimum, use aggregators like Indeed.com to scrape your ads. This will improve their position on a Google search.

Keep score. You need to track every aspect of your ad campaigns. Google offers a free web analytics package to track the performance of your career site and talent hubs. Whatever you use, you need to know how many people saw your ad, read it, and how many applied. You also need to know when prospects opted-out. All of this information allows you to fine tune your ad campaign for maximum results.