Why You Must Promote Your Job Vacancies In The Right Way

With so many recruitment channels available, promoting a job vacancy has never been easier. Recruiters can post jobs in all manner of places, from traditional outlets like newspapers and jobsearch websites, right through to social networks like LinkedIn, facebook, Twitter and even Instagram.   Many of these options are even free or low-cost, thereby giving the recruiter an opportunity to post jobs across a whole host of channels.

These can include some great strategies, from utilising free job sites like Indeed, to posting on discussion sites such as Reddit or Quora. LinkedIn will almost certainly be a main arm of your social recruitment strategy, and you can optimise this approach by posting in relevant groups and sponsoring your posts for priority roles. Today, there are countless ways to advertise your vacancies.

And therein lies the danger.

With so many options available, some recruiters are falling into the tempting trap of plastering job ads indiscriminately on all channels, and forgetting that a good posting strategy is not just about promoting a job: it’s about doing in the right way and to the right people.

This practice of ‘post it everywhere and see what comes up’ is becoming more common- in fact, if you search ‘how to post my vacancy for free’, you’ll see people arguing that if it’s free, you may as well use every channel you can. Yet who has that much time- not only to post across the different mediums, but also to track and filter out all the responses?   This approach also attracts many highly unsuitable candidates because they weren’t targeted well in the first place.

Let’s take an example. Recently, we wrote an article about Instagram’s growing influence in the recruitment market. But we were also very careful to point out that Instagram only usually works with a younger, social media savvy audience- and that using fun, informal Instagram to promote your recruitment brand could actually harm your reputation in a more formal, senior job market.

A targeted recruitment strategy is required, where the jobs get in front of the right people, rather than a scattergun approach across every form of media imaginable. After all, you wouldn’t post a high-level CEO vacancy in a celebrity-focused tabloid, would you? Yet when we post a job on an unsuitable website page or social media format, we are a little bit guilty of doing the equivalent. At worst, it damages our brand, at best, it just wastes our time. And if it’s a paid ad, it wastes money too.

There’s another pitfall of posting simultaneously across a lot of channels. Successful recruitment requires that we build relationships with the candidates- and there’s a real danger that when you use multiple recruitment channels to post jobs that you won’t build a strong relationship with your target market. Furthermore, if your audience only hears from you on social media when you have a job to post, it’s unlikely they will build any real loyalty to you as a recruiter.

Social media is a powerful recruitment tool, but only if you use it right. Free things sometimes come at a cost, and there is some truth to the old adage that ‘you only get what you pay for’. Even if what you’re ‘paying for’ in this case   is just your time in creating   a real conversation and online presence on social media so that when it comes time to post a job, the audience is a) the right audience and b) ready to listen.

So before you waste a lot of time posting jobs on every channel you can think of, give real though to who you hope to attract, and whether you need to be a bit more strategic about where you choose to post. Consider what’s worked for you in the past, and whether it’s time to use some of the new channels in a targeted way. You’ll probably save a lot of time, and even protect your brand in the process. Good recruitment is a game of strategy, not luck.

Until next time,

Cheryl