Getting your job found by the best candidates
Mark Lennox and Simon Lewis, co-founders of award-winning niche job board, Only Marketing Jobs, disclose proven methods of increasing jobseeker applications
For many recruiters job boards are an integral part of the talent-attraction strategy. Understanding how to turn views into more relevant applications will improve your ROI. The first thing to understand is that successful job advertising is split into 2 very separate parts:
- Getting your job found
- Converting the job view into an application
Here are 7 tips to ensure your job gets found online:
1. Job title consideration
Use a job title that’s likely to be searched – and make it generic. Forget what the hiring manager wants to call the job, identify what the job really is. For example, a Marcomms Exec should be a Marketing & Communications Executive; the latter title being more readily searched.
Titles are important to jobseekers so make ensuring you hit their sense of relevance will increase views.
2. Use keywords but don’t spam
Virtually every job site will place weight on the job title, category information, uppermost main description text and the incept. It’s best to use keywords in these places BUT any excessive/unnecessary use is unlikely to make a huge difference and could easily put the jobseeker off by cheapening the look of the job.
3. Categorize correctly
Resist the urge to spam the categories by ticking every given box. If it’s quality you’re after be more specific; select the top 1 or 2 categories that are directly related to your job.
Any tenuously ticked category terms are likely yield irrelevant applications, resulting in your time being spent sending rejection messages and fielding unnecessary calls.
4. Don’t be lazy, complete the job
Pressures to get your new job up quickly can result in missed opportunities. Far too many recruiters press ‘save’ before maximising fields designed to position your job correctly. Apathy is a recruiter’s biggest enemy.
Ironically, to save your time, most job boards don’t make every category or search field mandatory – but this should not mean shortcuts for you. What’s the biggest waste of time: a few seconds updating some field boxes or sifting through a bunch of irrelevant applications? Perhaps worse still, incomplete fields can result in no applications at all.
The most commonly missed field is ‘location’. It is a misconception that once the mandatory ‘location’ field is complete this automatically populates the preview area. It doesn’t. If you are given an opportunity to define the location, use it. Even if you repeat the mandatory field.
5. Make your job stand out
Upgrading your job to appear at the top of the searches or carry a little extra branding doesn’t need to cost the earth. If you approach your advertiser you’ll often be surprised at how little extra it costs to gain the additional exposure, which in most cases will x3 the number of candidate applications.
6. Advertise at the right time
In truth, there’s no best time to advertise although the most applications are made between Monday afternoon and Wednesday morning.
7. Do your own marketing
Grab the link to your advertised job and update your social media status. Opening up a free www.ping.fm account will enable you to multi-post to your channels, which should include LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
You can also advertise your job in the jobs area of LinkedIn groups for free.
Now you’ve got your job found, you need to convert views into applications. Read how to make your conversion stats rocket.
What to do next:
Read Part 2 of The Secret to Getting Great Job Applications – Converting views to applications
Take a look at our example of a great online job advertisement
You might also like to read Why Can’t Recruiters Write Good Job Copy?
