The 10 Essential Online Recruitment Strategies

Here we share our top 10 online recruitment strategies that are guaranteed to maximise your results online.

If you want to maximise and optimise your recruitment process, it’s important to focus on each stage in the recruitment process. From the technology you use, to the way you communicate with applicants, there are plenty of ways to do this.

Here we cover 10 proven, most effective ways to improve your online recruitment strategy, and start attracting and hiring top talent.

Always include a salary banding

Listing a salary will always be beneficial when advertising jobs. This is because a high percentage of candidates ONLY look for jobs with the salary listed. Some employers may not want to list a salary, but it is always advised to list a wide salary banding than none at all.

No salary will reduce the application rate by as much as 60%. With more than 90% of candidates viewing your job already being in employment, you are effectively eliminating the hottest prospects from your campaign.

Create an exciting opening paragraph

Your opening introduction needs to grab the reader’s attention and persuade them to click on your advert. This is because when candidates search for jobs online, the first section of your job description is usually shown in the initial listings as a summary. Therefore the opening paragraph is effectively the advert for the full advert.

For tips on what to include in your opening paragraph, download our eBook on writing the perfect job advert.

Use the correct terms for job titles

It is critical to use the correct job titles for specific roles to ensure that you attract the best talent to fit your role. It is also beneficial to use well-known job titles to utilise popular terms on search engines.

For example, an internal sales consultant is effectively a telesales consultant. The latter job description is likely to be searched inside the job boards more than twenty times more than the former.

SEO optimise your job ads

You can utilise SEO (search engine optimisation) to ensure adverts appear high within listings when a potential candidate searches for a certain keyword or job title. Job Board search engines will decide where your job advert appears, based on an algorithm that is assessing the content for relevance.

Understanding how the algorithm works so that you can optimise your keywords is essential to getting your job advert appearing on the first page of results. The difference in viewing numbers between pages one and two is as much as 5 times.

Some tips for this are:

Avoid mechanical job descriptions

Job adverts should be creative and inspire the right people to apply. Humanising the language and avoiding too many bullet points is critical. 91% of all views of your adverts are by people who are already in a job. They won’t apply to it just because they can do it. They need to believe that it will be an improvement on the role that they already have or they won’t apply.

Sell the company & opportunity

Attracting the best in talent is the ultimate goal in advertising a job online. This can be achieved by writing a persuasive, creative advertisement which sells your company as a fantastic place to work.

Establishing four or five of the most powerful reasons why someone doing this job for a competitor would want to consider your role is key. Research shows that the most powerful section in your job advertising copy is the ‘opportunity’ section. However, it is also the section that most advertisers leave out …?

Respond to all applicants

Advertising a job online can be a reflection of your company, so protecting your employability and brand is crucial. By responding to every applicant within a respectable timeframe (even if it’s bad news), ensures you have taken the time to review their application and that their time and effort has not been wasted, leading to an overall better candidate experience.

Remember, a potential applicant could one day be a client, so ensuring etiquette could prove beneficial to your business in the long term.

Maximise advertising exposure

73% of all applicants start their job search in Google, so advertising your job across multiple channels can maximise your exposure and significantly improve application rates.

Use Google to find the advertising channels that candidates are most likely to go to for each job, by simply searching for your role and reviewing the top results that appear. Get better value from your advertising budget by using a media buyer or fixed-price advertiser. These usually cover the largest and most popular national job boards for a single fee.

Nurture candidates that apply

If you get your online strategy right, you are going to attract far more passive applicants to your job. These individuals are more susceptible to dropping out of the process if you don’t give them a good experience of engaging with your brand.

Most good recruitment platforms provide the ability to communicate quickly and intelligently with applicants at every stage in the process. Many of these communications can be personalised for bulk mailing and automated.

Use pre-screening tools

According to KPMG and PWC research, one in five hires is considered a bad hire that cost thousands of pounds. To reduce the risks of making bad hires, it would be beneficial to use cultural and behavioural pre-screening tools within your recruitment campaign.

The aforementioned research established that around 80% of people leaving a job in the first year of employment leave for cultural and behavioural reasons, and not because they couldn’t do the job.

Want to expand your knowledge?

It can be difficult to know where to start if you want to maximise your online recruitment strategies. That’s why we’ve put together a complete Talent Acquisition Toolkit to help you – simply download for free today!