When I talk about my first recruitment marketing “stack,” I’m being literal. It was a stack of binders with ad sizes and contracts from local newspapers with the pricing for different-sized ads. I know, I know, it makes me sound positively ancient, but in reality, the drastic changes in ad technology have been as rapid as they have been complete.

From those binders, we went to a portfolio of pay-per-post job boards. And even that sounds incredibly simple when compared to today’s world, where recruitment marketing is hot on the heels of consumer marketing, requiring a specialized group of tools and techniques to make the most of finding and converting top candidates.

To make sure your offerings remain modern and relevant, here are the essential elements you should have in your ad tech stack:

1) Great Career Site Analytics

We have great upcoming content on what makes a great career site, but the ad tech to track results behind the scenes is one of the most critical elements of recruitment marketing.

  • Google Tag Manager: One consistent item in my toolset is measurement. You’ll likely need to place 5 to 10 tracking pixels on your career site for various purposes, and Google Tag Manager is a convenient way to do that. It allows you to do it yourself, without having to bug your vendor or internal IT every time. Tag Manager allows you to put a container in your website, then add or subtract tracking pixels in an easy interface. It’s an essential (and free!) component to increasing your sophistication.
  • Google Analytics: An obvious one for marketing pros, but GA will help you track users throughout your career site, allowing you to understand what content is popular and what truly helps conversions.
  • Remarketing Pixels: Remarketing pixels help measure conversions and help re-market to users who come to your site but do not convert. Statistically, most visitors to your career site don’t apply. Remarketing pixels let you keep your organization in the forefront of their mind to drive them back.
  • Content Management System: Without great content, your website is just a list of jobs. You’ll need a decent CMS to keep your content organized and up-to-date.
  • Conversion Pixels: Understanding your data requires conversion pixels, usually so you can tell if a user’s session got to a point of “conversion” that you defined. This is often done by completing an application, joining a talent community or another goal.

2) Programmatic Advertising

The world is becoming more automated, and advertising is no exception. Making sure you have a good handle on Programmatic Advertising is the key to sophisticated recruitment marketing in the modern era.

  • Pay-per-click management tools: The world has moved on from pay-per-post to the more flexible world of pay-per-click, which provides better flexibility but requires more sophistication. Tools like AppCast, Recruitics, JobAdX and others help large employers get their arms around optimizing their ad spend.
  • IP Address Targeting: A nice tool in the toolbox for “narrowcasting,” IP address targeting allows recruiters to target specific individuals with advertising messages. Licensure or events lists dug up by your sourcing teams can be a great start to being able to cast messages to the right audiences. Our friends at El Toro are the best in the business.
  • Geofencing: In social media, search engine marketing and display ad tools, geofencing can be a key strategy to target the right audience with ads. Getting good location data to make integrations to the right partners may require ATS changes, but being able to target ads well is worth the effort.
  • Creative Creative: Many recruiting departments have a challenging time getting decent creative ads to use as content for their posts, but it makes a massive difference in getting results. Befriend the marketing department or make good use of professional freelancers to be sure you’re looking good and spending media dollars wisely.
  • Social Media Management: To drive a following for social recruitment, you’ll quickly be overwhelmed without some good tooling. Sprout Social has emerged as a tool of choice to measure the many channels needed to get the job done, but there are many great tools available that beat old fashioned manual tweeting.

3) Reputation Management

One of the keys to converting candidates through the marketing funnel is having a great employer brand.

  • Social Listening: Keeping on top of interview experiences can be highly automated through social listening tools that can detect when your brand is being mentioned on social media. Of course, applied to a career context careful responses are always needed.
  • Review sites: Tools like Ratedly target help manage the ever-growing suite of online career review sites, covering the top 15 sites like Glassdoor, Indeed, and CareerBliss. Doing it manually can be a pain, so having a tool so to track your reputation is helpful.

The tools I’ve mentioned are far more than just shiny new objects that solve problems you don’t have. They reflect the ever-growing sophistication of advertising tools available, and recruiting departments – like yours – need to follow suit so they can build their stack to measure and market effectively in a new media world.

 

Post contributed by Adam Godson, Cielo’s Vice President of Global Technology Solutions. Follow Adam on Twitter @AdamGodson or connect with him on LinkedIn.