Post Your Own Jobs (And Have Them Be Seen…)

Without stating the obvious, the last 2.5 years have been somewhat of a wild ride. A pandemic impacted businesses, non-profits, and government in a variety of ways - and still continues to impact them, actually - especially in the field of workforce. Labor shortages based on category, wage inflation, ‘regular’ inflation, interest rate hikes. Basically, there’s no shortage of issues that are affecting the labor market. As marketers, it’s not really our job to explain them as an economist would - it’s our job to navigate them for our clients.

1. Online job platforms are full…of noise

2. Focus on your company/organization’s story in order to attract the right workforce

3. Leverage your story as Paid Ads to circumvent online job platforms

4. Make sure your website acts as a hub to capture your prospective new hires

Noise:

Yes, online job platforms like Indeed, LinkedIn Jobs, Monster, and ZipRecruiter are massively popular. They are great businesses that have figured out how to develop a marketplace of available open jobs and help serve as a matchmaker between employers and employees. Even though these are massive platforms that attract many prospects, do not forget that they are your partner as long as you are paying them to feature your job posting. The minute your competitor chooses to pay more to promote their job above yours, this fact becomes abundantly clear. These companies are your best friend only as long as you’re paying them.

Secondly, because they are massive marketplaces, they are full of noise and present your competition next to yours. If you (as a prospective employee) are looking for a job as a Project Manager in construction, with a quick filter you can see every job available and while that’s very easy for the prospect, it’s very difficult for the employer to stand apart from their competitors. Why? Because now the employer is a commodity. It appears that they are just a salary package with benefits and the prospects loyalty leans towards the one that ‘seems better’. It’s noise for employers, and doesn’t actually help prospects understand the culture of the organization they are applying to work at. Online job markets are not bad, they are convenient…and noisy.

Telling Your Story:

The opposite of noise is focus. If online job marketplaces don’t allow you to stand out beyond ‘paying to get higher in their search results’, how do you separate yourself from the noise? Answer: tell your story outside of online job marketplaces to allow your prospective employees to find you upstream where you have their focus. Yes, this comes back to content, because that’s the most effective way to tell your story and have people pay attention to it. Leverage visuals that are authentic to your company/organization to bring them in the door, write out the details, and tell your organization’s story so your audience knows you extremely well before they consider applying.

Paid Ads:

Great owned content should be leveraged as paid content. There, I said it. Why? Because your current audience, the one who knows you, isn’t your entire potential audience. There are lots of methods for expanding into others’ spheres of influence, but one of the most straight-forward methods is to leverage owned as paid. What’s the secret to making sure it’s not ignored? Well, it’s not exactly a secret, but here it goes: be authentic and the rest will take care of itself. People sense and ignore ads like it’s their second job in today’s world - don’t serve awful Ads, serve owned content as Ads.

Build a Hub:

You’ve created content, you’ve shared it, you’ve paid to get it seen outside of your network…and now what? You need to think about the bottom of the funnel to give your audience something to do next. Most people think making content is the ‘hard part’, but truthfully, it’s this last step that is most overlooked component of marketing: the conversion. What is your applicant supposed to do now that they’ve demonstrated they’re interested in your story? Give them a place to submit their information so you can start that relationship. Build a landing page, an application form (it better be short because they’re probably doing it on their phones…), and follow-up with them after they connect with you.