Have your Job Ads Serve a Dual-Purpose!

If you are like most recruiting organizations, you post your job advertisements to multiple recruiting channels for every one of your job ads. Whether its job boards, social networks, email or mobile recruiting, you distribute these job ads with one goal in mind: acquiring as many qualified applicants as possible.

This is a fine goal, however with this goal you are losing out on a great number of qualified contacts that you could add to your Talent Network.

So what are qualified contacts you ask? And how are they different from applicants? Here is a quick summary:

Applicant - An applicant is a candidate that goes through your application process and completes it. It’s as simple as that.

Contact - A contact is a candidate that was interested in your position, filled out a quick opt-in form but was unable to fill out the job application. We’ve seen application drop-off rates anywhere from as low as 30% to as high as 80-90%.

There could be numerous reasons they failed to fill out the application including it being too long, certain parts of it being broken or the candidate not having the necessary time to complete it. These contacts have showed interest in your company and can be a valuable resource as you look to grow your organization.

When conducting any job campaign, you have a tremendous opportunity to not only add qualified applicants to your Applicant Tracking System but you also have the opportunity to add qualified contacts (who drop off your application) to your Talent Network. These connections can be valuable when you are looking to fill future job positions. Your goal shouldn’t be just to get as many applicants as possible but should be: get as many qualified applicants AND qualified contacts as possible.

When you are looking to distribute your recruitment marketing campaigns, make sure to enable your organization to collect not only applicants for the position but add in a simple opt-in form to collect contacts as well.

For the same amount of money you spend on these job ads, you will be able to exponentially build your Talent Network. This network will in turn enable you to get more applicants for every future job ad you run for the exceptionally low price of free!

There’s no reason you can’t more out of every job distribution campaign.

Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Technology blog.

Comment by Chris Brablc on March 9, 2011 at 2:29pm: Thanks for the comment, Luke!

As far as candidates that don't apply, it can be for a number of reasons. They could not be interested, the application could be too long, the application could be broken, they might not have had the time to finish the application, etc.

When collecting contacts, I think it's important to do two things. First, go through the contacts and determine which ones are qualified & not qualified. And Second, communicate with these qualified contacts. This could be just sending them emails for future job openings in their discipline. Most importantly, this should be a part of your recruiting process. When you send a job ad, you should also send an email to contacts who qualify in your Talent Network.

In working with our clients on utilizing these Talent Networks, we've seen that when they send emails in accordance with distributing job ads to job boards, they've seen on average 30% more applicants from these campaigns than they had previously.

So I would say the contacts are more valuable for future job ads for similar positions then they are to the current job campaign that you are running.

Thanks!