Unique Ways to Recruit Employees with Digital Advertising

Last Updated on April 6, 2022

Finding new employees can be harder than ever in this digital world! There are so many places to post, and the competition can feel incredibly steep. Fortunately, there are ways to hack this process. Getting creative with how and where you post your job openings online can help you get in front of that perfect candidate.

Before you even post a job opening, here are some tips on how to post a job online.

Here are some unique ways to recruit employees online using digital advertising.

Table of Contents

1. Your Website’s Careers Page

Having a killer careers page on your website is a great way to quickly introduce potential employees to your company and culture. This can often be the first impression someone may have of your company, so make sure to use actual pictures of your company. Don’t just list the open positions…and most importantly, don’t be boring.

Really look into optimizing the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of this page. You want to get it as high up on the first page of Google’s search results as possible. Identify a target keyword that describes what your company does plus the word “jobs” or “careers” and your location. You can use this tool to make sure there is search volume for your chosen keyword or phrase. 

Here is an example: Let’s pretend we are looking for construction workers for our construction company in Cincinnati. For great SEO, I’ll use the key phrase “Construction Jobs in Cincinnati.” After checking with the linked-above tool, I see that my phrase has about 140 searches a month, which is great! That’s specific enough to ensure that our page won’t get lost in the mix, but enough to make a difference for our ranking. The phrase’s SEO Difficulty (basically a measure of how difficult it is to rank for a given term) is a little higher than we would like, but we can work with that. We don’t need to worry about the CPC or Paid Difficulty for this. 

Now that we have our keyword targeted, we can include it in our page’s title, meta description, content, and in some image ALT text. These changes should help improve our organic search rankings of the careers page. 

2. Social Media

If you have built an engaged and interactive social media following over the years, this is the time to really use it to your advantage. The people who follow your accounts are often your best and most loyal customers. 

Your followers are familiar with your company. They’ve got a sense of your culture from your posts. Chances are high that one or more of those followers (or somebody they know!) would love to work for you after interacting and engaging with you online. 

Make an engaging post with some information about your job posting and link it to your awesome careers page. Then, sit back and let likes, comments, and shares do the work!

3. Get the Most From Job Sites

Job sites like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor are excellent places to get your job opening in front of even more people. These sites let you post your listing directly on their platforms. Then, applicants can either apply through that platform or head directly to your careers page on your own site.

LinkedIn

Don’t just post and walk away from these sites. Use and post to LinkedIn on a regular basis. It doesn’t matter if it’s weekly, biweekly, or monthly, as long as you are consistent you will be able to show potential employees and even potential customers who your company is in a more up close and personal way. 

Indeed + GlassDoor

Indeed and Glassdoor are sister companies with different purposes, and can be used to highlight each other very effectively. Indeed is an online job board that people often use to find a job. Glassdoor is geared around workplace transparency with company reviews from current and former employees.

When you post a job to Indeed, your company reviews from Glassdoor show up. The Indeed posting links to your company page on Glassdoor as well.

Use Glassdoor’s ratings to help improve your company’s online image. Responding to reviews shows that you are active and care about how your employees feel. People want to feel heard and valued, making this is a great way to show potential employees the kind of workplace you have. At the same time, you have a great opportunity to use these comments as a way to improve your workplace.

4. Promoted Posts

Promoted or sponsored posts on LinkedIn, Indeed or even social media can be a relatively quick, inexpensive, and unique way to recruit employees. This is something to consider if you need to fill the position right now, the market is very competitive, or you just haven’t been able to get enough quality applicants. 

Both LinkedIn and Indeed give you the opportunity to pay to promote your posting on their site. This can be a great way to increase your reach through a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign, where you only pay if your ad gets clicked.

LinkedIn

On LinkedIn, your posting will be sent out or shown to people that LinkedIn thinks could be interested in your job. This can show up in LinkedIn’s in-app messaging, the Jobs Feed, or in the “Jobs Recommended for You” tab. 

Indeed + GlassDoor

Indeed’s paid job posting promotion works a little differently than LinkedIn. Indeed’s job feed lists out postings that match searched keywords. Typically, as more jobs get posted, your posting moves further and further down the list. With a paid promotion, your posting stays at the top of the feed – making it much easier for the right people to search for and find your job.

Social Media

If you post your job opening on your own social media, you can boost that post, using the platform’s targeting control to get the post in front of the right people. 

All of these options will help increase your post’s reach and help you find the right person while maintaining control on how much you spend and for how long. 

5. Search Ads

If you have an ongoing hiring need, the next few options could be for you. Running Google or Bing Search ads are some options that you can use in your digital marketing arsenal. 

Search ads are the ones you see at the top of Google’s search results page. For this option, you will choose a handful of high-intent keywords to target. When people search your keywords or similar keywords on Google or Bing, your ad may appear as a result. 

These show up above the organic search results. In the graphic below, we searched “Construction Jobs in Cincinnati”. The results in orange are the ads, which stay pinned above the blue organic results. 

Let’s say our Cincinnati-based construction company has ongoing hiring needs, and we wanted to invest in this strategy. We decided to run a Google Search Campaign and have targeted keywords “construction jobs”. When somebody searches, “construction jobs in Cincinnati”, if our bid wins, they will see our ad. Then they’ll go to our website and fill out an application!

6. Display Ads

Running display ads is another potentially effective way to address an ongoing hiring need. These are the image ads that you see everywhere on the internet. We have a couple of campaign options for targeting potential employees with these ads. 

Before we get going with these types of ads, let’s make sure we have a really good creative team to work with. If we don’t have great, eye-catching ads that convey that we are hiring, all this effort is lost. 

The ads don’t have to be anything overly complex and can easily be done with online photo editing sites such as Canva. Be sure to use high-quality images, avoid overlaid logos, buttons, image collages, and text, and make sure the focus of the image is your service.

When you make these ads, focus on these five sizes. These represent the most common placement sizes across the Google Display Network:

• 300 pixels x 250 pixels – Medium Rectangle
• 366 x 380 – Large Rectangle
• 728 x 90 – Leaderboard
• 300 x 600 – Half Page
• 320 x 100 – Large Mobile Banner

Pro tip: make sure they are under 150 kB, too! 

Prospecting

The first option we have is a prospecting campaign. For these, targeting can be a little tricky. The options from Google can seem a little overwhelming! Start by taking all the commonalities from your current employees. Go through the targeting options, and check the boxes that would apply to your current staff. 

You can add keywords and topics to help Google show you ads on sites related to certain topics, products, or keywords. These can be things that are related to your job, but can also be more general – like common interests. However, be careful with these, as you don’t want to give too many options. Google will show your ads to fewer similar people if it has too many options to work with.

With these display ads, don’t worry when you see a huge number of impressions and a sub 1% click-through rate (CTR). That is just the nature of the beast with prospecting display ads.

Remarketing

Secondly, we can use a remarketing campaign to target people who have already visited our website or a specific page, like the careers pages, on our website. The goal of remarketing campaigns is to encourage a site visitor who didn’t take a conversion step on their last visit to come back and fill out or submit an application now! 

To set up one of these campaigns, you first need to create a remarketing audience. This is as easy as going into the Audience Manager in Google Ad’s Tools & Settings.

You will want to select the “+ Website Visitors” and have your career page slug in the “Page URL contains” field. Set your membership duration for about 7 days. You want to make sure they see your ads soon after visiting your careers page so they come back and apply.

7. Geofencing

Another unique way to recruit employees is geofencing. This is a way to show display ads to people who are in or have recently visited a specific location (or locations). This is a significantly more deliberate way of targeting people: If you know where your current employees and people who are similar hang out, you can make sure to get in front of them! You can also set a radius from your location to get eyes on an ad about your openings specifically to people who live, work, or play in your area. 

This is an option we have seen work well for our clients. If we were to do it for our hypothetical construction company, we would look at geofencing certain events or concerts our employees would attend. If our construction workers go to those events, we can say with a high level of confidence that people similar to them, who might be looking for a job, will be there as well.

We would set up two campaigns to do this. The first would be to show them the ad when they are at the event itself, or on their phone shortly after. We then would like to show them that ad again in a week or two to get them to click on the ad and apply. 

 

Want to use a digital advertising campaign to recruit employees, but not sure how? The creative team at US Digital Partners can absolutely help! Or, if you’re ready to learn more about web development or any of our other services, please reach out…we would love to chat!