Building a marketing strategy to promote your job advert is of utmost importance in the current economic climate. Your job opportunity is going to be in competition with numerous other openings, so a normal job advert could easily be ignored. According to Paula Page, our Head of Procurement and Sustainability Recruitment, the only way to attract passive job seekers is by making sure your opportunity stands out. Therefore, it is crucial to build a reliable marketing strategy that successfully advertises your opportunity. Here are some tips she suggests!

The first step to making sure your job opportunity stands out is to develop its visual design. The appearance of the advert is as important as the content it carries. Ensure that you use imagery and font that is aesthetically appealing, while maintaining the overall structure of the job description. This makes the job vacancy stand out as well as provide an indication of what your organisation does and the larger culture it follows.

You should view your own advertisement through the eyes of the candidate and ask yourself, ‘would I apply to this role if I saw the advertisement?’

Nowadays, most job advertisements will be viewed on a mobile phone. It is, therefore, important that the format of your job advert is mobile-friendly and can easily be viewed and accessed by mobile phone users. It is also important to ensure that the application process is user-friendly making it easy for applicants to apply for the vacancy. Make sure your marketing strategy pays attention to the smallest details when it comes to advertising your job opportunity!

While there are multiple channels through which you can advertise your job vacancy, it is important to prioritise those that give you the best possible return of applications and those that are right for your specialist areas. Consider those channels through which you and your peers applied for jobs as well! Always think about how your advert is going to look to your wider professional network.

Social media is an effective way to market your job advert as the online traffic on social media platforms never runs out. LinkedIn, for example, is one of the biggest social media platforms that caters to building professional networks. So, keep in mind how your advert appears on a platform such as LinkedIn; whether it stands out as you scroll through your feed.

While digital marketing is the predominant method of advertising job vacancies, do not be too quick to disregard print adverts. Depending on the seniority of the vacant position, consider advertising via the press!

Your aim is to target to the right candidate group for your job vacancy.

If you have approached an external party, like a recruitment agency, make sure you have partnered with a specialist agency. It is essential that the team designing and marketing your advert fully understands how you want it to look and most importantly, how your organisation would be viewed by the wider community who will be seeing your advertisement.

Apart from the usual ways you can advertise your vacancy, consider creating a video advertisement! It is a powerful way of marketing your job opportunity. If your team is comfortable appearing on video, ask them to introduce themselves so that potential applicants can visualise what it would be like to work in your organisation. A video advertisement will help to capture the culture of your workplace and the video could even introduce the key stakeholders that the candidate would be working with daily. Video adverts are a powerful way of ensuring your role stands out amongst all the other vacancies in the market. Make sure you do not limit yourself when trying to find the optimal way to stand out amongst other job adverts, because ultimately the aim of marketing your job opportunity is to get the attention of those passive job seekers who will be a perfect fit for your organisation.

Once your recruitment process has a reliable marketing strategy to follow, it is time to think about the route you are going to take to recruit the candidate; whether it is going to be direct recruitment, or whether it is through an external recruitment organisation. Regardless of the route you take, it is imperative that everybody involved in the recruiting process understands exactly what your organisation is looking for to ensure that the advertised position will prove to be successful within your team. Hence, make sure you have invested enough time in fully briefing your recruitment team on the advertised role and how it can not only benefit the wider organisation, but the candidate as well, thereby highlighting each feature and benefit offered by the role.

Some of the most successful recruitment processes carry information delivered by those who are passionate to work in their organisation. So, make sure that voice is carried forward to the hiring partner who will eventually echo it in the job posting. Understanding every detail about the role will help in matching it against the experience levels of potential candidates, making it easier to put the right candidates through to the next round of selection.

Key takeaways on how to build an effective recruitment marketing strategy:

• Use imagery and font that makes your job advert stand out!
• Make your job advertisement mobile-friendly
• Prioritise advertising through channels that give you the best possible return of applications and those that are right for your specialist areas
• Think of different ways you can advertise your vacancy – consider video adverts!
• Choose between direct or external recruitment processes