Your recruitment website is an investment of both time and money. Fully utilising it to boost your candidate attraction strategies – including as a platform to advertise your jobs for free – just makes sense. And yet there are many recruitment websites that don’t advertise any jobs, even if they have a jobs page with search functionalities all set up and ready to bring in candidates. This could potentially be costing those recruitment agencies candidates and placements.
We’ll look at the reasons why recruiters might not advertise their jobs on their websites before digging into the huge benefits of utilising the power of your recruitment website to attract talented candidates, plus how to leverage that power to optimise your jobs and increase relevant traffic to them.
Why some recruiters don’t advertise jobs on their website
These are the common reasons recruiters don’t advertise jobs on their recruitment websites – and some of the ways you can address them.
- A lack of the right integrated technology
Without tech such as a job multi-poster, advertising on your website as well as on job boards becomes another, separate, task that’s easy to forget. With a multi-poster, it’s just a matter of ticking the relevant box. What is crucial for speed and ease, with whatever technology you choose, is that it is integrated so that it can get your jobs to your website with the least amount of hassle.
- “We can’t compete with the job boards so we don’t try”
Some recruiters are of the opinion that they’ll never compete with the marketing power of the big job boards and aggregators and that therefore there’s no point even trying. These agencies instead focus their websites on delivering quality content and insights, as well as providing information about the agency and their people. All of this is undeniably important and all recruitment agencies should include and update such content but that doesn’t have to be at the exclusion of their jobs.
It’s important to remember that creating further visibility to your jobs is also creating another pathway to your website, where candidates will be able to get to know you, read your content, maybe even register their details or sign up for job alerts.
- Discretion needed in the recruitment process
There are certain roles, in certain industries, that require the utmost of discretion and for that reason recruiters won’t publicly advertise them at all. Instead, they’ll turn to the talent pool that they spend a considerable time building and nurturing. But these occurrences are niche and certainly not reflective of most agencies, clients or jobs. And if you’re going to go down this route, you really do need to spend a sizeable amount of time building relationships with people you know have the required skills and experience to do these specialised jobs.
The huge benefits of posting jobs to your recruitment website
Having countered many of the arguments for not advertising your jobs on your website, let’s now look at the myriad benefits of doing it.
- Free advertising
You likely spend a decent chunk of your recruitment marketing budget on job board advertising which, as long as you select those job boards carefully and post to them at the right times, remains a solid candidate attraction strategy. However, when you advertise jobs on your website there’s no additional spend – once you have a recruitment website, it’s essentially a free platform on which to advertise.
Your website plays an important part in your overall recruitment strategy, which will be made up of many different parts. The huge benefit of this part is that it can provide free, organic traffic to your jobs. With fully optimised job adverts and a job page with good SEO, you have the potential to drive a solid amount of qualified candidates to your jobs, meaning that you may even find you can reduce your job board ad spend.
- Providing candidates with what they want to find
The majority of candidates accessing your website will be searching for one thing – a job. If they land on your website, like what they see but can’t find a way to access the jobs you’re advertising, there’s a good chance they’ll leave and find their way to a competitor’s website. Give candidates what they want with a well set-up jobs page, including filterable jobs listings to make finding relevant jobs easy.
- Extra control over the candidate experience
If candidates are applying for jobs on your website, you can be in complete control of the candidate experience right from the very start of the process. Providing a positive candidate experience from the moment they land on your jobs page will encourage candidates to begin the application, prevent them from dropping out before they submit, and instil trust in them that your agency will help them find the perfect job, enabling you to build stronger relationships.
- Increased traffic to your website
Advertising jobs on your website will boost candidate traffic to it. Even if candidates don’t end up applying for a job, they might explore your website further. Analysis from the RecWebs team found that visitors to individual job ad pages on recruitment websites go on to search for other job adverts or the login/registration page (to apply or set up a job alert). They might also navigate to your news and articles page or the About Us page. The point is, any visit to your website, for any reason, can spark further interaction – even if the visitor doesn’t immediately apply for a job.
- Builds brand reputation
By advertising jobs on your website you’re simultaneously building your agency’s reputation for specific sectors and roles. Your job ads are in effect also ads for your agency, helping you to become known for certain areas to both clients and candidates. This will help you to evolve your agency into becoming the ‘go-to’ for the industry for which you recruit. It will also help you to build a niche audience, increasing the relevancy of the traffic to your website.
- A niche audience
As long as you’re optimising your adverts to ensure relevancy, advertising jobs on your website will bring candidates to you that are niche to the industry you recruit in. This is how you start to build a niche community of candidates that have the right skills for your jobs, even if they don’t immediately apply for a particular job or if they are unsuccessful on their first application. If you’re also providing insightful and helpful content in the form of blogs and news articles, you’ll capture their attention further and they are likely to keep returning.
- Unique candidate capture
The details of candidates that apply to your jobs via a job board will be stored in a shared database that anyone who pays for access can find and use. By contrast, candidate CVs from applications through your website can be stored in your secure database, allowing you to build and nurture your own unique talent pool. In any market, talent pools are invaluable, allowing you to directly source suitable candidates quickly and reducing the cost that other search methods incur.
- Automatic free job board posting
Ok, so this is only with RecWebs but it’s a great added benefit. By posting a job on your RecWebs website, that job will automatically be posted to Jooble for free at the same time.
Optimise your jobs to boost candidate traffic
The majority of job searches start on Google so optimising your jobs so that they show directly on Google for Jobs can significantly increase your chances of finding the right candidate. Google for Jobs can be an insanely valuable source of organic candidate applications – the way they’re set up, candidates can view your advert from within Google for Jobs and then click to apply through your website, driving traffic to it. And yet RecWebs research has found that, of the recruitment websites that advertise jobs, nearly 50% don’t optimise their jobs for Google for Jobs.
How to optimise your jobs for Google for Jobs
So, how can you optimise your jobs so that they appear on Google for Jobs in searches? All jobs listed on your website should have structured data added to them in order for Google to know that they are job postings and therefore allow them to be found by Google for Jobs. In order for Google to find your jobs and rank them in relevant searches, there are several details that must be included in your job listings. These include salary, location, job title, job description, company name, and job expiry date. You can check whether the jobs posted on your website are correctly displayed on Google for Jobs by logging into your Google Search Console account if you have one (all RecWebs websites do) to check for any ‘critical’ issues. It’s also important to use and update sitemaps and make your web pages indexable.
Think like a candidate
Ultimately, you need to put yourself in the candidate’s shoes. If you were a jobseeker – and most of us have been – how would you go about searching for a job? You’d likely begin online and probably on Google. Advertising your (Google for Jobs optimised) jobs on your website will mean that relevant, qualified candidates who have specifically searched for jobs like yours will be more likely to find them and apply through your website.
When formulating your recruitment advertising campaign, you’ll be considering where your candidates are searching for jobs and Google should definitely be on that list. Yes, ads listed on job boards will show up in Google for Jobs too but directing a candidate to your website should be the priority.
Having a recruitment website without an active jobs page is a bit like owning a high street shop where people can only browse and not buy your products. Your website offers a free way to advertise your jobs, bringing in traffic that may or may not immediately convert but that has now been introduced to your agency, giving you a chance to show off your brand. Any perceived disadvantages to advertising jobs on your website are far outweighed by the myriad advantages. So go on, max out the ROI of your website and get your jobs on there!
