This won’t come as a surprise, but we’re in a job market led by the candidates. They have an abundance of choices in front of them as businesses struggle to fill their open positions. This new talent-centric market structure means that job boards can’t just sit back and wait for the active candidates to come to them.
If you’re a job board, you’ll have to step out of your comfort zone to find the elusive passive candidate: the perfect fit for the job, the experienced high performer with the perfect skills… who may not be available at this time. But isn’t everyone ultimately available when the right offer comes along? That’s why you’ll have to nail your proposition if you want these candidates to apply. Let’s have a look at how job boards work right now and at how they could be working to make this a reality.
The problem for job boards today
What do most job boards currently focus on? Well, they still use traditional methods of attracting and engaging candidates. They’ll wait for candidates to come to their job board to view the vacancies, as they have done for years. This has always worked in the past.
But if we take a closer look at who’s viewing these vacancies, we see an abundance of active candidates… and that’s becoming its own problem in this today’s tight market. Unemployment rates dipped below 4% last year in the Netherlands. As a result, job boards are getting very few replies to their vacancies, and the candidates that apply are low quality. These candidates may be active for a negative reason.
Traffic to job boards has been declining for years, partly due to jobs appearing on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, or on job aggregators like Indeed or Monster. A 2020 CareerPlug survey found that job boards still bring in lots of applicants, but those applicants are low quality: job boards only provide just under 30% of hires. Employers are working on their own website listings too, becoming more approachable, accessible and personal. Everyone in recruitment now realizes that a new approach is needed to get the top talent in.
The candidate you want is the passive candidate: someone who is not necessarily looking for work and who might even be very happy in their current job. They are top performers that help companies grow and have a positive impact on business. This group constitutes 70% of the entire candidate pool. The problem is that they are usually only swayed by a proactive and irresistible offer from a company that shares their values and interests.
The answer: switch it around!
Attracting talent today requires a talent-centric approach. Talent-centric means that job-seekers need to be valued for who they are and what they want to be. Passive candidates will only engage and truly feel heard when their hopes and dreams are spoken to. If you want to attract top-notch talent for your clients, and not just the person who happens to be available, then you’ll have to go the extra mile to attract their interest.
This is also where employer branding comes in. If a company has a clearly defined identity then it’ll have an immeasurable advantage over companies that don’t. They’ll stay top of mind with passive candidates longer, and they’ll be able to attract talent that identifies with their style and values. Being part of a culture and working with like-minded people can be just as valuable to today’s job seekers as their salary. Gallup’s done the research, and the results were clear: culture is what gets you the top 20% of candidates.
Meet candidates where they are
One way to go the extra mile is to include other channels to attract candidates to your website. The use of social media ads is a great way to activate and engage passive candidates and bring traffic in. Especially younger generations like Gen Z are only found on social media and are used to communicating on these channels. Some of them may well have no idea what a job board is. As a result, the only way to reach this group is with a social media ad campaign targeted on their interests.
An added benefit of social media ad campaigns is that they help speed up the candidate process. Using social media ads lets you skip the step of filtering out candidates manually and gets the right amount of required talent into your funnel faster. According to CareerArc, 96% of candidates use social media when looking for a job – odds are that your target audience doesn’t even know about many job boards. Thanks to social media ads, passive candidates will remember job boards’ ads from channels they know and use and visit directly, growing traffic to job boards.
Make your job board unique
Another important factor to consider is that candidates who know about job boards only really know the bigger ones like Indeed and Monster. Targeted ad campaigns can help other job boards stay relevant and carve out a niche in the candidate-driven market. This will see them attract a high influx of quality candidates to their vacancies… and by deduction, retaining clients and making money.
This will put you in a strong position to fulfill the rest of your role as a job board: helping companies build. Generating the right candidates for the job has consequences on many different levels for a company: you increase retention rates, employee satisfaction, and company growth rates. But you’ll also contribute to a positive culture, and build an attractive business that future job-seekers will want to work for.
So, what are you waiting for?
We think it’s pretty obvious from the picture we’ve painted above: you need to add targeted social media ads to your recruitment toolbox to tap into the entire candidate market.
By focusing on just the active candidates, you’re probably only attracting about 30% of your potential. We think you’re missing out: imagine what you could do if you actually had access to the entire candidate spectrum… Social media ads could be the missing piece that takes your strategy (and results) from good to great!
Of course, that also means dealing with all the hassle that surrounds it: getting familiar with Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, and whatever other content management systems you need to understand. You’ll have to get images or even videos made, write text to go with your ads, set up targeting… and then find a candidate to take over your old work because this is a full-time job.
Wonderkind’s Talent Attraction Technology takes all of this out of your hands! We help job boards grow and thrive, with our technology that automates the entire process of creating and running social media ad campaigns. We make it easier than ever for anyone to run a well-rounded and supremely targeted job ad campaign. We target candidates based on their true interests, not just on their current position or degree. You provide the job description, we’ll do the rest.
This is how instead of only attracting the 30% active candidates, our technology allows job boards to engage with 100% of the market. An invaluable advantage over the competition, that makes all the difference for your clients.
Read Wonderkind’s full talent attraction guide for more insights like these, and get in touch if you’d like to see our technology in action!
