The Power of Recruitment Advertising

Recruitment marketing is still a relatively new field for many companies, especially here in the Czech Republic. And that’s one of the reasons why it is sometimes overlooked, because people don’t see any value in recruitment advertising as a great way to attract applicants.

Attracting passive and active candidates can be a challenge, so that’s why recruiters need to learn a little bit more about marketing these days. If you would like to be a good recruiter, you need to be creative and always try to find new ways. With the right recruitment approach and the right marketing tools, you will find out that recruiting works best together with marketing.

Recruiting has always been about selling, you are selling how cool the new position is, how great the company is, and how amazing the team is. But people are overloaded by ads. Ads are everywhere, they are on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Especially on LinkedIn, people are posting hundreds of links to new positions, pictures with famous quotes, brain teasers and yes, I have also seen a few pictures with cats. People are also not reading texts of these ads, just the headlines.

But when you see the number of likes and shares under the pictures, you will find out that what works pretty well on LinkedIn are pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words. Moreover, if you combine the right picture with the right message, you can get attention of thousands possible candidates within a few days. There is a very simple rule for these pictures. The more visually striking the ad is, the more attention it draws. The goal is to get in front of the right people’s eyes at the right time and LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are great tools for that.

However, posting only pictures is not going to lead the people to your list of open roles. It will get the attention that you are looking for, but in order to attract new talent to a company website, it is necessary to make these potential candidates aware of the opportunities available within your organization. So don’t forget to add some text with the link to your job openings (a call to action).

Recruitment is going through evolution, we have tools that we didn’t have a few years ago and these tools are helping us a lot (LinkedIn, ATS, Connectifier, Gild etc.). But the greatest challenge for every recruiter has been to attract individuals (passive candidates). LinkedIn stream provides a great opportunity to attract these candidates or get their attention. LinkedIn is not going to offer you real time statistic as Google Analytics does, but in the section “Who’s Viewed Your Updates”, you can still get good information about how many people you were able to reach in your network and also how big the audience that could see your advertisment is beyond your immediate network.

In marketing, it is vitally important to know your target audience. Also as a recruiter you always need to understand first who are the people you would like to approach. In my case these are mostly people from the IT world. And if you are a recruiter looking for IT guys, you already know that it is not easy to attract them. So you need to be creative.

I am always trying to find new ways, so when I started my LinkedIn stream, I thought that I would try to use some picture ads. When I brought my first few ideas to our graphic designer, he created amazing and unique pictures. After I started using these pictures on LinkedIn, I got more than 5 times more views of these pictures than of posts with just job links in them. Some people also click on “like” and share them, so I am able to reach people outside my network (2nd, 3rd connections).

When I started with these pictures, I had only one rule. The rule was not to use generic smiling stock photos, because everybody is using them. And I don’t want to create ads that will be similar to others. My goal is not to support other company brands, but the brand of the company for which I am working.

As I studied my LinkedIn stream, I also saw lots of math teasers, such as “If you are a genius, solve this”. When I saw the number of likes, comments, and shares, that was something that caught my eye. People love math teasers, so I started with the first one. I created a math equation and hid my phone number there. Yes, the equation is simple, but I was really surprised with the number of people sharing and commenting on it. Yes, I got some feedback like “it’s really simple” and the answer is: “I know it’s simple, but you spent some time thinking about it, you saw it and that was the goal”.