Advertising Tips for Employee Recruitment: 5 Ways to Make Your Business Stand Out

Regardless of their industry or location, many businesses across the country are struggling to deal with a pervasive problem: it’s harder than ever to find workers to fill open positions.

The reasons for this labor shortage are complex and not fully understood. Experts argue that a number of factors are likely contributing to the challenges of finding and hiring qualified workers. Those factors include, but aren’t limited to:

• Lingering concern about working conditions that expose workers to COVID-19;
• A loss of female professionals who have cut back hours or left the workforce to take care of their children;
• Increased unemployment payments that reduce the financial incentive for seeking out work;
• A resistance by employers to raise wages to competitive levels.

As a business owner, these hiring challenges are requiring new investments and strategies in employee recruitment. Your advertising and marketing strategy can be a powerful tool for increasing visibility of job listings and engaging relevant job-seekers to build interest and drive applications.

If you’re struggling to fill open positions within your business, here are some effective strategies to improve employee recruiting.

1. Use Geo-Conquesting to Capture the Attention of Your Competitors’ Potential Employees

With geo-conquesting, your business can target job recruiting ads to mobile device users within geofenced locations—including the properties of your rival businesses. Whether you run a restaurant, a home services company, a dentist office or any other type of business, geo-conquesting can target ads to the employees at these properties—and deliver messaging designed to steal them away.

Geo-conquesting offers a few significant benefits to businesses seeking qualified talent. First, applicants referred by these ads will likely have the relevant industry experience you’re looking for. Your recruiting can also create competitive advantages in your market by turning your employee gain into a rival brand’s employee loss. And you may be able to learn some interesting insights into that company’s operations to improve your own operations and customer engagement.

2. Target Job-Seekers Through Social Media

Social media is a heavily used platform for both businesses with open positions, and for job-seekers on the hunt. It’s not just LinkedIn, either: With many users sharing employment, career, and location information on Facebook and other social platforms, your business can carefully target recruiting ads to a relevant user base.

Consider both paid and unpaid social promotion of job listings to maximize your reach. Paid search can leverage precise audience targeting, while organic posts can solicit shares from your followers to help spread the word and generate interest from applicants who are already familiar with—and even a fan of—your brand.

3. Leverage Local SEO Best Practices to Increase Traffic to Job Listings

At least 70 percent of job searches start on a search engine. A simple trick for increasing your job listing visibility is to promote open positions through paid search advertising and SEO targeted to job-seekers in your local area.

Long-tail, localized keywords will concentrate your online referral traffic among job-seekers within commuting distance of your business. Be sure to build these keywords into job listings, and into any related content to maximize search rank and visibility. You can also use these long-tail search terms to identify low-cost, high-value keywords to power your search marketing.

4. Reach Working-Age Adults Through Targeted Video Campaigns

Cable TV, streaming, video-on-demand and other ad-support video services make it easy to reach targeted audiences through improved filtering and ad delivery tools. A targeted video campaign can concentrate ad exposures among the demographic groups that represent your target audience for a given job.

Video campaigns can be particularly effective at reaching the 18-to-49 age group, which is the prime audience when seeking working-age professionals.

5. Engage Visitors to Online Job Postings Through Retargeting Campaigns

Job listing visibility is an important top-of-funnel marketing campaign. But bottom-of-funnel campaigns are crucial for incentivizing submitted applications.

Many job-seekers will view a job listing but then leave without filling out an application. Retargeting campaigns continue a dialogue with those potential applicants by keeping the job listing top-of-mind, with the ultimate goal of motivating an application submission in the future. These ads can be delivered across a wide range of advertising channels, including display, mobile, and social media, among others.

Don’t let ineffective recruiting and unfilled roles drag down your business performance. A digital advertising partner can help you leverage advertising and marketing campaigns that reach new, promising job applicants, increase job applications, and raise the ceiling for your business performance. Contact Cox Media today to get started.