As a marketing person for a somewhat large (200 recruiters nationally) staffing firm, one of my biggest difficulties has always been ensuring consistency across the board. When it comes to things like brand standards, policies, messaging, etc., it can be difficult to police all of it so that the company image looks unified on a national front.
Thanks to my terrific marketing team across the country we have been able to manage all of this relatively easily, but the one thing that seemed to always escape our grasp was quality control of our job ads.
Up until this year, we never really had a policy on ad format. It was simply up to the recruiter to write and post their ads. Our guys didn’t necessarily write poor ads, they simply lacked a level of formatting consistency across the brand.
We spent the first few weeks of January doing a complete overhaul of our ads, explaining the importance of SEO, working out an ad template, and removing any usage of superlatives in job titles.
We saw immediate results.
Our concentration on SEO helped our ads get found more on Indeed.com and other job sites, as well as organically on Google.com. Our ads were more aesthetically pleasing and easier to scan and because of that we saw users applying to more jobs. And our job titles were descriptive and helped convert more applications. In the month of January after our ad overhaul we more than doubled our application rate. We saw a dramatic spike in traffic to our home pages from people clicking through from our ads, and our website bounce rate dropped off the table, going from 44% to 23%, meaning when people came to our site, they stayed. This is all due to getting serious about a format to our job ads.
My advice to you is to do your research on which formats work best for your area of specialty, and constantly tweak and improve them to get their maximum level of efficiency. Try A/B testing to see if one format yields better results than the other. With the algorithms search sites like Google or Indeed use nowadays to provide the best possible results for the users, posting ads really has become a science. The era of post and pray is dead and gone; it’s time to evolve!