What does promoting job opportunities mean? In its simplest terms, we think it means to publicize the fact that you have a job opening(s) and are inviting candidates to apply. To improve the likelihood of success, it means to publicize the fact that you have a job opening(s) to the most qualified candidates and ask them to apply. Digital marketing can be utilized to promote job openings in both broad and targeted ways.
Marketing Strategies for Promoting Job Opportunities
- Create content on your website and link to any third-party platforms you are using (ex. Indeed.com).
- Use organic and paid social media posts for both branding and awareness – especially about your company culture.
- Use organic and paid social media posts to promote job openings.
- Use your Google My Business page and postings for both branding and awareness and to promote job openings.
Job Opening Content
Think Creatively With Your Team
Every employer wants to promote their job openings. Candidates can find job postings in a plethora of places online. You need to stand out from the crowd. Develop marketing plans – including goals and action steps – and get started.
Hold a brainstorming session with several folks with different perspectives, and especially out-of-the-box and synergistic (those who can connect disparate ideas in unique ways) thinkers. Developing some “hooky” messaging and images can be a big help.
Describe your company culture and what it’s like to work in your organization. Of course describe the basics such as benefits, work environment, etc. as well. Highlight those things that make you different. Don’t be afraid to touch on pain points candidates may currently have (ex. underemployment, lack of promotional opportunities, lack of training and development.
In writing your content, use keyword research and search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to optimize the content for search engines.
Publish your content on a website page or blog article, including your job openings, and provide easy to see and use links or call-to-action (CTA) buttons to your application or any third-party platforms where candidates can complete the application process.
Once your website content is published, it’s easy to re-purpose it and promote it online.
Free Job Promotion (no advertising fees)
How to promote jobs on social media?
Anyone can utilize social media platforms and other online profiles for marketing purposes, and you don’t have to start from scratch! Social media pages/profiles, and a Google My Business page, can be (and should be) considered as secondary websites for your company.
Use your existing social media profiles such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, etc. Invite hiring managers, as well as employees, to like and share your content with their networks, which may increase your exposure significantly.
Branding and Awareness
We recommend re-purposing your company culture content into a series of posts that you meter out over time, and show them to a broader audience (you want to catch candidates, as well as influencers in their lives). The goal is to make online users know that you: 1) exist, 2) what your company does and is about, 3) what it’s like to work at your organization, 4) what’s unique about your company.
Job Posts
Each time you post a new job on your website, we recommend that you also create a social media post on each of your profiles, that links to the job post. Make it easy on yourself though – create a post on one platform, and copy and paste on the other platforms. FYI, Facebook also offers a free job post on their platform (more info here).
Pinned Posts
These can be very important. Some social media platforms allow you to create, publish, and pin posts to the top of the public feed for your company page. We strongly recommend that you create a post that highlights and links to all of your current job openings, and pin it so that it stays in a prominent position on your company page. As job postings come and go, this pinned post should be updated periodically to reflect the current situation. (LinkedIn calls their version of pinning “Feature on top of profile”.)
Google My Business Page
In case you are not aware of this, Google automatically creates a Google My Business page (more info here) for every business it becomes aware of. These pages host the content that appears in the “map pack” section of the Google search engine’s search results page (SERP) presented when users search. This map pack listing also includes easy-to-use links to see a map of your location, get directions, call on a smartphone, and view reviews.
It’s a great strategy to “claim” this page for your business and take control of the content that is published on it. There are basics such as name, address, website, phone number, open hours, etc. But there’s much more available to help promote your business – photos, business categories, products and services, customer reviews, events, etc. And, you can re-purpose your existing content and ads into posts much like on a social media platform. These posts are shown on the right panel of the SERP when a user searches using your company name, along with much of the data include in your company listing.
Low Cost Job Promotion (low advertising fees)
What is the best way to advertise job openings on social media?
Re-purpose your existing content, along with “hooky” messaging and images to grab candidates’ attention, into the various social media ad formats. Use a Call-To-Action like “Apply Now” or “Learn More” to tell the candidates what you want them to do, and link the ads to the job postings on your website.
Video Ads
The most cost-effective online ads we have found are video ads, used within an advertising campaign with the goal of maximizing video views. Videos with real people in them are the best performers. But, animated videos and slide show videos also work well and are usually cheaper to create. Creation cost ranges from moderate to expensive ($5k and up), to quite low.
Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of low-production smartphone videos – they work! Or, create a series of images that can be stitched together in a series of slides in video form (there are some free tools out there, like Promo and Adobe Premiere Rush ).
Facebook, Instagram (owned by Facebook), LinkedIn, and Google/Youtube, all offer video ad campaigns. We generally per view ad spend fees of less than $0.25 per view, and sometimes under $0.10.
Facebook Boosted Posts
One of the cheapest forms of online advertising is Facebook’s offering to Boost a Post. You can promote a post with as little as $20 to increase the exposure of your posts.
Branding and Awareness Ads
Awareness or display ads are typically shown to a “cold” audience (people who don’t know you yet). Each of the social media platforms mentioned above provides ways to target candidates. Targeting criteria varies across ad platforms, and may include parameters such as location, age, gender, household income, industries, companies, job titles or functions or seniorities, interests, etc. Attach a landing page link to the ad to take ad clickers to your company culture or job posting website pages.
Retargeting Ads
Retargeting is a proven method for reminding and re-engaging video viewers and website visitors that have not yet applied for a job with you. Each of the social media platforms mentioned above provides ways to build audience lists of video viewers and website visitors (each platform requires that a snippet of code be added to your websites to enable tracking). Audience members are kept confidential and will not be known to you – but you can address retargeting ads to them.
Use Pinned Posts to Re-direct Users to Job Postings
See above under Free Job Promotion. Pinned posts are especially important when running paid ads on social media platforms, as ad viewers who click on your company name will be sent to your social page, while those who click on the CTA button will be sent to the website URL you specify. If they go to your company’s social page, a pinned post at the top of the public feed will help to redirect them to your website or your third-party recruiting website.
Pay-Per-View/Pay-Per-Click Advertising Management
Running online paid ads is typically referred to as PPC (pay-per-click) or SEM (search engine marketing). If you choose to utilize paid ads – even low-cost video ads – your paid advertising manager will need to update your recruiting ads every time you close jobs and post new jobs.
There is a significant amount of ad performance data offered by the ad platforms, which your paid advertising manager can analyze and use to inform future ad creation, in an effort to improve the performance of your ads.
It’s worth noting that some ad platforms will not allow you to send ad clickers to a website URL that is not on your own website domain. For example, when setting up to run Google Ads you have to specify the domain of your website. With very few exceptions, when you create ads on Google ad platforms, you will not be able to use a third-party site URL like indeed.com as the landing page for the ad. SO in this case you must have your job postings on a page or post on your website, which can then link to your third-party recruiting website.
The impetus for this blog article was our participation in the 21 For 21 event organized and hosted by the Lancaster Chamber Of Commerce on July 28, 2021. Here’s the Chamber’s blog article summarizing the 21 speakers’ contributions.
If you would like to learn more about online marketing, please feel free to review more blog content, our approach, or contact us.
