Marketing 101 for Recruiters, Part 4: Test, Test and Test
Simply Hired Staff
Recruiting and marketing are two distinct parts of an organization, and rarely do workers cross from one field into another, but the departments have some key traits in common. In fact, when it comes to recruiting, there are many benefits you can reap when you put on your marketer hat. In the coming weeks, we will discuss how adopting five tried and tested marketing techniques can lead to lower cost per application, higher quality candidates, and better overall performance of your recruiting campaign.
Up until now we’ve focused on steps you should take before you initiate a job marketing strategy. While Rules No. 1, 2, and 3 can help prepare you for greater success when “going to market” with a job posting, a true marketer never assumes that the plan is perfect. Rather, they continuously test their strategy and fine-tune it as needed.
In marketing a job, there are two types of testing one should focus on. The first is testing copy, or your job description, to determine the right message. In this scenario you should evaluate the resumes you’re receiving and see if they’re aligned with the job description you initially developed.
Once you have received some resumes and you know they are of a certain quality, sit down with your hiring manager and review them. Do some candidates have the best skills? Have they already been interviewed? Did some perform better than others? Take some notes from their resumes. You can refine your job posting based on the type of candidates you want to attract more of. Test your theories by reposting.
If you’re using a job search engine this is a very easy endeavor. At Simply Hired we crawl the web and refresh the jobs on our site every hour. This means that your newly posted job should start landing on the right candidate’s search terms roughly an hour after it’s been posted. Once the new resumes begin to come in, review them to see if the skill sets you prioritized as important are more prevalent versus those received from the initial job description.
Continuously look at ways to improve your copy in order to drive the right candidates to your open position. As noted in earlier posts, the keywords you use for your audience will have a major impact on how quality candidates find you when they perform their job search.
A strong marketer will always rewrite the copy to get better results. This may sound like an arduous task, but it is of significant value, especially for hard-to-fill roles. You may not want to do this for the roles where you have a steady stream of quality candidates in your funnel. However, for those more challenging roles the use of copy testing can help your performance.
