Let us take you back in time: we’re visiting 2010, and the web is the place to find a job. Online job boards are thriving and are getting a massive amount of traffic as other channels such as newspapers become redundant. There really isn’t anywhere else to be if you want to find a job, except maybe at your local job office! In 2010, online job boards were the go-to place if you wanted a quick overview of the job market without having to leave the house.
You could argue that job boards had it very easy for a long time: just post your clients’ jobs or find a way to aggregate them on your platform from elsewhere, and the people will come to you. How different things are now! Job boards need to pull out all the stops to get the traffic and applications they need. Today’s job seeker doesn’t want to scroll through pages and pages of mostly irrelevant job postings – they know better. They probably already have a few brands in mind that they’d like to work for, and at least some idea of what kind of company they’d like to join. So as a job board, how do you play to that way of searching instead?
It’s time to start marketing
Differentiating, standing out, and convincing have become key for job boards. And looking inward at your own performance is one thing, but putting the candidate first is even more important. Candidates today want to feel seen and valued. They’re more than just numbers: they’re all individuals with their own plan, and they won’t care much for your job board if they don’t feel like you understand that.
Obviously, you have a plan for your job board as well, so how do you combine these two sides of the same coin? Think it through, and the key becomes obvious: marketing to the right candidates! This may seem like a no-brainer, but it takes a fundamental mentality shift to do it well. You can’t just sit back anymore, you’ll have to go out and get people to visit your platform. They have lots of options to choose from and you have to assume that they won’t just stumble across your excellent selection of job postings.
Assuming that you already know who you are as a job board, let’s have a technical look at how to spread your communications for maximum effect.
Be where your audience is
First, let’s analyze who your current audience is. You probably have a ton of website data telling you where they’re coming from and how they’re finding you.
- What kind of job posting does well?
- Are there any common properties between the job postings that get filled first?
- And how are the applicants? Is the quality high enough, are your conversion rates doing okay?
- Can you use this information to set up profiles that detail the intrinsic needs of your audience?
This last one is important: it will allow you to internalize your audience and target them with every little step you take. Find their common characteristics but make sure you understand what makes them different as well. Make sure you don’t skip any steps while piecing together your target audience: you don’t want to find out that you missed out on possible candidates after running a massive campaign. This mistake is more common than you might think.
Once you have all this information laid out, it’s time to look at the prevalent platforms and decide how you’re going to use them to get your message across. Let’s start with the most obvious one when talking about jobs…
Yes, it’s LinkedIn
The social media job platform we all know and love, LinkedIn contains an abundance of mostly white-collar job seekers. As a social media network, it’s a place where companies and professionals alike come to humblebrag and connect, exchanging information and displaying their skills and accomplishments.
On LinkedIn, it’s all about showing expertise and professionalism. Your target audience will be here to talk about work or to explore their network. They’ll be in exactly the right mindset to learn about new opportunities! Here are a few pointers for how to communicate on LinkedIn:
- No need to sugar coat it: you’re here to talk business. Your communication style can be professional and straightforward, you don’t need to wrap everything in conceptual or flashy designs.
- Provide value. Tie the name of your brand to excellent weekly blog posts by in-house experts. Give insights about your operation, don’t be too scared to share your success. Sharing data works like a charm on LinkedIn by the way.
- Talk about how your company’s been saving money, thinking ecologically or taking care of its employees. Frame it as a short story about how you grew and these posts can even have viral potential.
- Set up ads targeted at profiles that might benefit from your service. With LinkedIn being full of professionals, it’s easier than anywhere else to talk about jobs and be heard.
Next: Facebook (or Meta, if you will)
You’d be surprised how many people are still on Facebook! While pretty much everyone under 25 has moved on to Instagram and TikTok, the age group between 25 and 40 is still firmly in place. You’ll find mostly blue-collar profiles here that you won’t find anywhere else. Of course, you’ll also have to compete with pretty much the entire internet for attention. The timeline is unpredictable and people are quick to scroll, so you better make sure you stand out.
- Beware the short attention span. Grab the attention immediately or your ad will be tossed onto the growing pile of never-watched timeline content. Actually, remember this for all of the following social media networks.
- Video gets prioritized by the algorithm. If you can make it into a video, please do!
- Don’t be afraid to get flashy and use text on your images. Many people scroll through on silent mode: text will be what gets your message out.
- Facebook is one of the internet heavyweights when it comes to advertising. They know pretty much everything about their users, and you can use that to your advantage. Facebook ad manager has an easy-to-use interface that lets you target for pretty much anything.
Google Display
Advertising with Google display means breaking free of the confines of social media and using pretty much the entire internet as your billboard. With Google Display ads you can choose from a broad selection of profiles that you’d like to target. Google then finds these people wherever they may be and targets them based on cookies. What does this mean in practice?
- You can target visitors of certain websites that you know or think line up with the interests of your target audience.
- There’s a very wide range of profiles to choose from and target for, and lots of options to customize the images you’d like to show them.
- You’ll be visible along the sidelines of trusted and loved websites, which lends legitimacy to your own message.
- Google Analytics gives you lots of very exact numbers on how many eyes your ad reached and how often it was clicked. Analysis of these numbers can lead to many more interesting insights.
Who doesn’t know Instagram? This Facebook/Meta-owned visual platform is extremely popular with people between 15 and 35. It benefits from the Facebook ad machine meaning that you get highly accurate targeting and results. And the best news: there are so many ways to use it for job ads!
- Get on Stories. Putting your ad in Instagram Stories will show it between other pieces of content from friends of the viewer, catching them in a highly susceptible moment.
- Make your visual stand out for your target audience: go for a pleasing aesthetic, try to approach the style of typical viral content, or make it very relevant for one specific group. This depends on your own brand and who you’re targeting.
- Instagram loves video and will prioritize it – even ads.
- Try to surprise and don’t go for cliché images, they won’t stand out.
TikTok: the home of Gen Z
Finally, let’s have a look at Gen Z’s favorite platform: TikTok! This is a tough one as it has its own special forms of communication. But it’s getting ever more accessible as brands learn what works and TikTok starts to accommodate advertisers. The platform still has lots of music-related content, but with the expanding user base, a lot of new forms of content have also found fertile ground here.
- Work with trends. This shows you understand what’s happening right now, and that your brand is in touch with the world.
- Careful not to over-produce any image or video: you don’t want to be perceived as “cringe”. Better to make your content look low-budget, even when there’s a lot of work behind it.
- TikTok is the platform if you want to reach the youngest audience available on social media. Think students, high-schoolers.
- You can pay to put your ad at the front of the queue on the timeline, or to show it right after the first 3 TikToks from the top. See the possibilities here!
How to use social media advertising for your brand
As you can tell, there are LOTS of options for your brand to use social media for job advertising. Every one of these can bring you the traffic you want, and help you deliver quality candidates to your clients. These candidates get hired and tell their friends, clients tell their colleagues, and your job board is off to the races! Social recruitment is simply the future, and it’s not just us saying this.
Of course, every new start can be daunting. All of these different options require their own specific approach, so make sure to read up and get comfortable with the platforms before throwing in your entire advertisement budget. Maybe you don’t have the time, or you’re not entirely comfortable on social media? Then we’d love to invite you to try Wonderkind!
Wonderkind’s talent attraction technology lets you outsource social media advertising completely. You just deliver us a job description and a rough outline of who you’d like to attract, we’ll do the rest. Our technology automatically creates social media ads that speak to people’s interests, based on data. That way, rather than only targeting active candidates, we remove bias completely and attract the best candidate – whoever they may be. All fully automatic and without the need to set anything up yourself. How does that sound?
Assuming that you already know who you are as a job board, let’s have a technical look at how to spread your communications for maximum effect.
