Why Job Advertising and Recruitment Marketing Need to Work Together

In today's competitive job market, finding qualified applicants and keeping hiring costs down remains a challenge for most companies.

Job advertising is the most effective means of filling roles quickly, however, without a complementary recruitment marketing strategy can lead to poor applicant quality, a high cost-per-hire, and overall underperformance.

Whether your talent attraction is managed in-house by a talent acquisition team or through a recruitment marketing agency, aligning your job advertising and recruitment marketing will help you drive efficiency and results. 

First, let’s define how job advertising and recruitment marketing relate to each other:

Job advertising involves using job boards, programmatic platforms, and agencies to drive applicants for jobs and is typically considered one part of recruitment marketing.

Recruitment marketing includes job advertising as well as managing talent networks, candidate engagement and nurturing, job alerts, career sites, employer branding, and candidate experience. That’s a lot!

When we think of recruitment marketing we often think of the top of the hiring funnel. It’s everything that’s building toward a job seeker submitting a job application, and job advertising sits at the top of the top of the funnel. 

That’s why it can be painful to realize that 95% of the traffic from job advertising bounces off your career site without applying for a job. Imagine how much more powerful your hiring could be if you could grow that conversion rate! That’s where recruitment marketing alignment comes in to help.

Talent networks, candidate engagement and nurturing, and job alerts should be positioned right behind your job advertising to provide support, drive engagement and grow conversions.

Unfortunately, many of these recruitment marketing tools existing in name only and aren’t actively being put to work to maximize the impact of your job advertising. Here’s how to change that:

Talent Networks: Anyone who clicks one of your job advertisements deserves to be enrolled in your talent network. But how can you make that happen when many job seekers only visit your career site for 2-3 seconds? 

Many employers use pop-up forms to capture job seekers’ info as soon as they land on a career site and even before they can view a job opening. That ensures that even if they are pulled away by a distraction or run into a roadblock you can bring them back to apply.

Job Alerts: People who click your job ads should also be engaged and nurtured with recurring job alerts. All too often these alerts are impersonal and sent out via an email digest once a month, which makes it pretty much useless.

Impactful job alerts need to be highly relevant to the job types and locations that a job seeker is interested in, sent via text message and email and delivered on a daily basis. That’s because the majority of people looking for a job need to find one quickly, and any job alerts you send them need to reflect that same level of urgency.

Hiring today isn’t easy and organizations will need to leverage the power of recruitment marketing and job advertising working in tandem if they want to succeed. By combining these two essential components, businesses can create a cohesive and compelling recruitment strategy that reaches the right candidates, increases efficiency, and ultimately leads to successful hires.