How to Reduce Your Reliance on Job Boards

So how do you find the ideal attraction methodology for the roles you recruit?

Our approach when working with new clients is to first run a workshop that identifies your audience, your USP and your marketing objectives. From there, we put together a strategy that will help you achieve those goals and produce a solid ROI.

But for the purposes of this blog, we’ve put together some initial ideas to get you started:

Establishing Your Online Recruitment Hub

The ultimate goal when recruiting should be to drive quality candidates to your website and for them to either register their interest or directly apply for an active role.

Your website is your recruitment epi-centre and the most important public-facing asset you have ­ outside of your team.

It should be a place where you can differentiate yourself from your competitors, answer any questions or address any concerns and most importantly house all of your active roles.

The key to a good website is making sure it’s functional and user-friendly. That means putting yourself in the candidate’s shoes and making sure there is an easy path for them to follow from landing on your site to taking some form of action e.g. applying, uploading their CV or calling one of your consultants.

If you find any blockers, such as compulsory fields that could be off-putting or onerous application processes, do what you can to remove them.

Building Brand Awareness

So, you’ve built a functional website and uploaded all of your jobs, but how do you attract candidates?

Brand awareness comes through actively positioning and promoting your business within your marketplace. It’s becoming the go-to people when candidates decide they want to change roles. It’s skipping the jobs board because people know you’re the best connected and most experienced, so why waste time with the middleman?

Brand awareness can be achieved through a number of different channels and methods, from promoting consistent and engaging content on social media to sponsoring industry events and hosting webinars.

Harnessing Paid Advertising

Recruiters can sometimes be nervous about paid advertising because any Pay-Per-Click model sounds less controlled than a flat fee.

But if you’re strategic with your paid advertising, you can create campaigns that directly target different roles or role types through tailored media placement and drive interested job seekers directly to your website.

Bespoke landing pages can be created to continue the single candidate experience and maximise the chances of them applying for the role then and there.

Amplifying Social Media

We all know you can promote jobs through LinkedIn, but are you making the most of your personal and corporate LinkedIn profiles? Are you positioning your business and your people as industry experts who regularly and actively participate in industry discussions? Are you creating original content that demonstrates your understanding of the marketplace?

And are you making the most of your network? It clearly takes a lot of time and effort to develop connections within your community, so now is the time to cash in on those contacts. Sending InMails and promoting referral schemes are just a couple of ideas.

Automating Communication

Once a candidate has registered with your recruitment agency, it’s the first step in their nurture journey. They may be actively looking for a new role or only interested in a specific advertised opportunity ­ or they could be at the start of six-month-long long process with you.

If there’s one thing we know recruiters are short on, it’s time. And that’s where automation can achieve great gains. By automating some core email communications you can take the pressure off yourself and your team by regularly touching base with candidates automatically.

Some examples of automated communication include birthday messages, checking in on a new starter during their first day/week/month and regularly touching base with passive candidates.

Get in Touch

With talk of monopolies and duopolies in the job board industry, it’s always useful to re-assess your reliance on any single talent attraction tool. Not only could you find significant cost savings, you could also take the first step to boosting your own brand awareness and increasing your market share.

Here at Prominence, we work with recruitment agencies and help them navigate their way out of the confusing maze of recruitment marketing. We’ll help you achieve your marketing goals and connect you with the clients and candidates you want to reach.

Contact one of our specialist team today to find out how we can help you.