Google AdWords is the biggest pay per click advertising platform online and is used by thousands of businesses worldwide to promote products and services to millions of individuals and businesses. It is both cost effective and targeted as you only pay for those ads that are clicked on and choose the keywords your ads are shown against.

Although AdWords is widely used by every business sector, we have found companies wishing to recruit new employees are not utilising it for this function. We can’t help but feel companies are missing an opportunity to attract candidates to their internal career site.

The leading players in the job boards market are certainly using AdWords. For example if you type “Account Manager Jobs” into Google, you’re likely to see at least one of the well-known job boards appear in the paid results.

A massive benefit of using AdWords to promote a job is the geo-targeting feature. This allows you to set your ads to only be displayed to people in specific locations. For example, if you are looking to recruit in the London area, AdWords will show you a map of the UK and you then select London on the map. You can also choose multiple locations to show your ad if you are looking to recruit in different locations and decide what distance from that location the advert will be displayed e.g. 30 miles radius from London.

One of the big benefits of choosing specific locations to show your ads is that only geographically relevant candidates will see them. This should make your advertising more effective and cheaper as you will not be paying for irrelevant clicks from people not in the right geographic location for your advertised job or people who do not have an interest in relocating. AdWords will show your job ad against any keyword you choose as long as you bid high enough for each click.

If you were to advertise for an account manager job in London it would be sensible to bid against “Account manager jobs London” and other obvious search terms candidates might use to find the role. Try to be clever and imaginative with your keyword choices. Why not even bid against your competitors?

For example, Nike could bid for the keyword “Adidas jobs” and when this or similar searches were entered into Google Nike’s recruitment ads would be shown.

Also bidding for industry based keywords will help you attract the best candidates. A financial services business may want to bid on “financial services jobs”. Many jobs now require specific skills and qualifications for specific roles so advertising for a person with a banking or investment qualifications will entice people to the careers site for the financial services business.

Once a user has landed on your careers site it is also crucial that you choose the right landing page for your ad as the ad copy and landing page copy have to match. This can also help you build up a talent pool by making sure users complete a form and leave their contact details before leaving the landing page.

These are just some of the ways to attract candidates using a system like AdWords. Although you will have to pay for every click, you are likely spend a lot less than if you were to hire a traditional recruitment agency and you can build your own candidate pool from the candidates that come through to your career page.

Millions of people use Google search every day and it is a resource that is still heavily underutilised by employers when advertising for their roles. At Online Resourcing we have a dedicated digital marketing team that can create, manage and optimise your PPC campaigns for recruitment.