How To Advertise A Job Online: Where To Post Jobs To Attract Strong Applicants
In a crowded online world, it's crucial to understand the different ways of advertising a job online to ensure your job posting process is a success.
In our latest blog post, we're exploring the best way to advertise a job online so your next job opening attracts strong candidates who will be an asset to your organisation. Read on to discover the best job posting strategy for your organisation.
Where to post job openings online
First things first. Let's explore the different places you can push a job post online. What are your options if you want to advertise job openings in your company?
The most obvious (and best) places are:
Popular job board websites
Social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook
Your own website
To attract the strongest job seekers, it's important that there's consideration and presence for all three of these.
However, all three should be used slightly differently. So, we're going to break it down so your job advertisement is seen at the right time and in the right way by ideal candidates embarking on a job search.
Best way to advertise job openings on your company website
Let's start with your own website or careers page.
The best candidates are unlikely to see your job vacancies here first unless your job advert is incredibly well optimised and it’s coming up high in the search results when relevant candidates search Google for jobs.
And actually, they might ultimately choose to apply through your company website because they want feel they're coming in through the front door.
But it’s vital the relevant job ads appear on the website in a way it can:
a) Easily be found to prevent interested candidates from losing interest or becoming wary
b) Offer good supporting information about the company and its culture so the candidate can really feel themselves working in the organisation.
Of course, this refers mainly to external job postings. However, if you have a private employee intranet or dedicated online space, you can use this to do internal job advertising to attract good applications and support career progression.
don't have a careers page?
Build one!
If you want to advertise internal vacancies but your website doesn't have a careers page, we recommend you create one.
You might have the internal function to do this yourself, or you might have to speak to your web developer or agency to do this for you.
Without this, you're likely to be missing out on candidates who want to feel like they're coming to you directly rather than applying via job advertising sites.
Tips for using job posting sites to find the best candidates
There are a variety of job boards, like Indeed or TotalJobs, you can use to promote your job.
However, advertising on job boards is an incredibly expensive way to generate candidates. We'd go as far as to say using job boards is by far the most expensive (and often inefficient) way to generate candidates, and here's why.
The fees are extremely high
Competition is stiff - you're competing against all the other companies advertising on that job board
Your advert has to be incredibly well written and optimised to appear in search results (both on Google and on the job board itself).
Therefore, these are our tips if you feel you do need to use job boards.
Make sure your job advert is well written and optimised
Unless your advert is very well written and optimised, you're likely to be wasting your money. If you copy and paste your job description or use an unusual job title, it's unlikely your job details will be seen by the right eyeballs.
Read this blog to learn how to write and optimise effective job ads.
Consider which boards you're using
Our advice is to be very considered in which job boards you’re using to advertise the job.
There's the generic job boards with high traffic like TotalJobs, Indeed, Monster, CV Library. Plus, you can also use job sites that are industry specific, like caterer.com (for hospitality) or jobs.ac.uk (for education).
To ensure that your job gets the right traffic, we recommend using a nice combination of both industry-specific and generalist job boards.
Bulk buy if you have more than one position
The other thing to bear in mind is not only how much you spend, but how you spend it, before you jump in and start splashing your job ads all over every external job site.
Buying one-off adverts on online job boards is incredibly expensive and - to be completely honest - not a good use of your recruitment budget.
The only way really to engage with job boards in our opinion is to benefit from some kind of bulk buy discount. So if you’re an organisation that can afford to buy 150 job slots a year, you’ll benefit from a massive reduction in cost per ad.
For example, instead of paying in the region of £300 for a one-off ad, you could get this figure down to £50 an ad, so there's a real saving to be had there and it suddenly becomes more cost effective to advertise on a job board.
But clearly, there’s a lot of businesses that don’t need 150 job slots a year.
One way to get around that is to use an agency and benefit from their bulk buy discount. Our Recruitment Lite package does that - we basically buy lots and lots of jobs slots on different job boards to benefit from the discount then pass that discount onto the customer, so we can get your job ad in lots of different places and you pay one set fee that covers everything.
Look at the data
If this is sounding like we're anti-job boards, that's not the case. We're not saying don't use them. We use them after all! The key thing is to do data testing on the performance of those jobs boards to see if they're worth your budget.
Look at the sources of all the candidates you successfully recruited and then look at where they came from.
If some came from jobs boards, look at how much you spent in total and calculate how much it cost you to recruit each person.
This will tell you how much you really spent getting successful candidates through job boards.
For example, if you spend £3000 on a particular job board in a year and you've recruited two candidates who actually started at your company, it’s cost you £1500 per hire to use that job board.
It might be that one year you choose to use one and analyse the performance and decide it’s not really cost-effective for you because it’s not giving you the ROI, so you try a different one. This way, you get a good insight into your spending and return.
Be realistic (and open-minded) about your spending
Be really honest about the money you're investing in them and decide if that's where it's best spent.
Add it up for the year and consider whether there's a better way to spend money from your recruitment budget to generate job candidates.
Say you spend £10k. How could you spend that in a different way to generate better results?
Could you use a consolidated job board service from a recruitment agency to get a bigger reach, take away all the admin from advertising the role and generate a long list of candidates?
Could you put that money into a referral scheme to recommend referrals internally within the business?
Could you put it into a social media campaign and generate a bigger following and momentum on social media to improve your employer brand?
Could it be spent on training for your in-house HR or recruitment team to learn how to use LinkedIn properly and map the market so they can proactively reach out to candidates rather than relying on candidates applying for job ads?
Look at that cost and make sure you’re truly happy with the use of it as part of your recruitment budget and strategy.
Advertise job openings on social media
Social media is actually a really underrated way of finding the right candidate for the job, so explore different ways of using it to your advantage - including more niche social media tactics.
Posting your job on social media platforms is a good way to advertise your job online for free for starters, but there are other ways to use social networking to boost the visibility of your job and help you find the best person for the job.
Here are some factors to bear in mind on the subject of job posting on social media.
Think about where your audience is
Just because social media offers free job advertising opportunities, it doesn't mean you should plaster every job across every company social media account.
Take a strategic approach by understanding who your audience is and where they're likely to be to ensure you're promoting your job to the right people.
Think about the right social media for specific industries and individuals before bombarding every channel with every ad (and risking a drop in engagement and followers).
For example, HR professionals probably are on LinkedIn even if they're not active, so this would be a great place to share HR jobs online.
Be creative about where you share your job posting
Be creative and go one step further than simply using platforms like Facebook to post ads on your business page.
Many people are active in local community groups on Facebook, so if you identify this as your demographic, it's a great way to use niche social media for specific targeted exposure.
It’s a different way of tapping into that market, and it can be extremely effective.
Some group admins allow employers to advertise jobs on Facebook groups while others ban business posting, so it's worth checking out the rules or speaking to the page owner to see what your options are.
Try proactive ways to get engagement
Ensure your job ad is seen by as many relevant people as possible on social media by encouraging targeted engagement.
If their network is relevant to the job, ask employees to share job posts, tag others, and publish adverts on relevant social media groups to increase the reach among your target audience.
Don't rely solely on social media
Social media can be a great way to post jobs for free, reach new audiences, and build your employer brand, but it has to complement other stuff going out from the business so your followers don't switch off.
Post social media job ads alongside other content types, like educational content and personal posts about your team, so your company feed doesn’t become one long list of jobs.
ensure job seekers see your current job openings online
Hire the best people for your organisation this year by making sure you advertise your job openings in the right places.
While there are plenty of creative ways to advertise job roles in your company, you have to strike the right combination for your business.
At Cummins Mellor, we advertise jobs online for a range of clients as one part of our detailed recruitment strategy, which also includes market and process mapping and outreach techniques.
To get help making sure dream candidates find your job online, speak to our team today for advice and support on 01254 239 363 or info@cumminsmellor.co.uk