Recruitment agencies spend a lot of their time and budget advertising jobs on various job boards and quite often overlook other forms of investing in recruitment advertising.
There are numerous reasons behind this behaviour, from budget limitations to a lack of knowledge on how to run paid campaigns or even limited awareness of the benefits PPC job advertising can bring the recruitment industry.
So, what is PPC advertising and how can your recruitment agency use it within its recruitment marketing strategy?
Let’s focus on one of the most popular options for digital advertising – PPC campaigns on Google.
PPC stands for Pay Per Click, which means that you will pay a set amount of money every time someone clicks on your advert. The price per click varies depending on the platform you decide to use, your targeted audience, or even the time of day or day of the week, amongst many other factors. You can usually get the estimated costs beforehand making it easier for you to set up your plan and control your overall budget.
Target the right people
Recruiters don’t usually consider PPC for recruitment advertising, missing an effective opportunity to reach new candidates. With a pay-per-click job posting campaign you can select a set of keywords to bid on, how much you want to spend on the campaign and even which geographical location the job advert is going to be displayed. This is a very effective method as you can decide when and where your ad is going to be displayed. You have better control of who can see your job offer which will give you better conversions and interactions from the users that see your advert.
Job adverts on Google
Some recruiters might think that it’s too expensive and competitive to advertise their jobs on Google and that there is no chance of winning against the big job boards. However, when we did our own keyword research to find out how expensive it can be, we found that what most recruiters fear it’s not usually the case. As an example, if we take the keywords ‘accounting jobs’ or ‘engineering jobs’ the cost is £0.37 and £0.47 respectively, which is not a bad price considering that these are very generic phrases. In some of our campaigns we achieved a conversion rate of 8%-23%, driving the right candidates to the website, who in turn are keen to apply for jobs, subscribe to job alerts or just browse the services on your website.
How can recruiters use PPC?
If you are a recruitment agency that specialises in a niche market, your keyword competitiveness and cost might be even lower than you expect. With many jobseekers starting their job search on Google this is the right platform to reach more candidates.
By using Google adverts you can also retarget users that visit your website, redirecting them back to it or to specific job description pages. For example, you can send a ‘Software Developer Job’ advert to users who performed searches on your website related to this job.
Recruitment advertising to source candidates
Where advertising on job boards is a very good strategy to attract active job seekers, PPC for recruitment advertising on Google or retargeting Google ads allow you to reach PASSIVE candidates. These candidates might not necessarily search for new job opportunities every day but might be willing to send their CV if they spot a good job opportunity.
Useful tips for your PPC recruitment advertising
Targeting searches and people with specific skills maximises the chances of receiving job applications from the right candidates. This is a good method to not only get more applications to your jobs but also as a way to increase your brand awareness!!!
If you need help to get quick leads cost effectively just drop me a line.
Remember though – tread carefully. With Paid Search as soon as you stop any budget you will stop seeing results. This is where SEO is beautiful… SEO results are known as “evergreen” in as much as the results will stay long after the work has been done – you just need to maintain them with TLC.