With a seemingly endless list of recruiting channels, determining the most effective strategy for sourcing candidates can be a formidable task. You could put a large budget into a job board and hope you’re targeting the right candidate base, but when it comes to choosing what will work best for your company, it’s imperative that you first assess where the candidates you want to reach are.
As recruiters, we focus so much on paid distribution through job boards that we sometimes forget about the channels that cost nothing for job posting. Sometimes, going back to what we did before we had a budget is the solution for reaching top talent. We also should consider what’s trending in our respective industries, and in job search in general.
Three Ways to Increase Candidate Applications for Your Job Postings
Strategy #1: YouTube As a Tool to Optimize and Enhance Your Job Postings
Beyond Google’s search engine, video is a powerful medium. A simple short 60 second job posting video from your hiring manager talking about the job can be a great low cost tool to share with your social media community not to mention the cross-posting advantages on Facebook, Instagram, and most importantly YouTube.
YouTube is currently the second most popular website in the world, with over 800 million unique users visiting each month, making it the perfect place to find a new and more engaged audience. Consider including testimonials from current employees, a snapshot of your company’s culture, and an engaging job description. One-minute videos can include more information than you’d think, plus you can use the budget that you’d planned on spending on CPC advertising for video production.
Bonus: Videos on your career site (and shared via social) are good for your employer brand. Employer brand videos are a great way to engage prospecting applicants and communicate your company’s story, brand, culture, and mission in a way that words and images simply cannot. Include your social links and an email alert subscription call-to-action or candidate sign up, and your career site can be a way to fill your hiring funnel even when you’re not actively trying to fill open positions.
Note: If you have a standard business YouTube channel that’s connected to a single Google login, consider moving it to a brand account. It’s free and YouTube provides easy instructions to do so here. A brand account allows you to have multiple users managing your channel, which is a must when using videos for recruiting.
Strategy #2: Twitter as a Job Distribution Platform
Twitter remains the third most popular search engine and is the go to platform for breaking news and information. You can set up a RSS feed of job postings from your own career site or you can use free tools like Hootsuite to set up free scheduled postings featuring your jobs. With the right hashtags including city, position title, and industry you can drive passive traffic to your job postings.
There’s also the added benefit of having a presence on a very active social channel. When people are actively searching for a job, their friends and family know about it. Putting your job postings on your Twitter channel with hashtags increases the likelihood that your posting will reach qualified candidates who are also actively searching.
Think that Twitter is past its prime? An annual study by the Pew Research Center reports that Twitter is a popular social network for two specific groups that recruiters covet:
- College graduates and those age 18 to 29 to fill entry level roles.
- Urbanites that make over $75,000 a year for more senior positions.
There are other active ways to use Twitter in your recruiting strategy. To find people based on occupation or location, you can use Twitter’s search bar. Twitter also has a useful advanced search option where you can do a more detailed search. This is useful to find influencers to follow, as well as finding potential candidates.
Strategy #3: Free Job Posting Scraping Services
If you don’t have a paid account with Indeed, there still is an opportunity to have them pull in your jobs XML feed allowing you for free organic traffic that is unpaid.
Aggregated jobs appear in Indeed’s organic, or free, search results and Indeed recommends the following best practices to ensure your jobs appear on its site and help you maximize hiring results:
Provide an individual web page for each job on your career site. Indeed search results link to a specific web page for each job. This ensures each job listing has a unique URL. Ensure your jobs are posted in HTML on individual web pages, and avoid posting your jobs on your website as a PDF or Word document.
Include essential job information. Your jobs are more likely to appear in our search results if each job listing on your site contains separate fields for job title and location as well as a detailed job description. Your job listings must also include a prominent link or button to apply online or an email address. Including a location specifying an address is best, but city, state and/or zip code is a must.
Set up automated source tracking. Automated source tracking provides the most reliable data about candidate source. Your applicant tracking system provider can help you set up source tracking so you can tell exactly where your candidates are coming from and measure the performance of your recruitment advertising channels. Another option is to use a connected applicant tracking system that already integrates with Indeed. Learn more about connected applicant tracking systems here.
Provide an XML job feed. This is the fastest way to include your jobs on Indeed. It should include the details of all the jobs on your site and be updated each time new jobs are added. Here’s a sample XML job feed that you can use on your career site.
Follow Indeed’s search quality guidelines. Job listings that don’t meet Indeed’s standards for organic inclusion may be subject to review before appearing in Indeed search. Job listings that are misleading or compromise the job seeker experience may be subject restrictions or even removal from search results altogether.
If you are budget conscious, here are more job boards that offer free posting services beyond distribution.
As recruiters, we rely heavily on data, so consider a refresher on your data mining skills. There are vendors and third-party software services to do this for you, but it’s easy to get back to the basics with tools like Data-Miner.io — for scraping data from web pages and into a CSV file or Excel spreadsheet (free for 500 pages per month).
What’s your favorite go to job posting and distribution platform?
Are you looking to start your hiring process today? Comeet can help. Check out our plan options to learn more about how we can redefine the way you recruit new talent.
