How to advertise a job online (to attract strong applicants)

In a crowded online world, where should you post a job to attract strong candidates? 

Read on to discover the best job posting strategy for your organisation.

Where to post job openings online 

Firstly, let's explore the different places you can publish a job post online. What are your options if you want to advertise job openings in your company?

The most obvious (and best) places are:

• Popular job board websites
• Social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook
• Your own website

To attract the strongest job seekers, it's important that there's consideration and presence for all three of these.

However, all three should be used slightly differently. 

How to advertise jobs on your company website

The best candidates are unlikely to see your job vacancies here first unless your job advert is incredibly well optimised and coming up high in the search results when relevant candidates search Google for jobs.

However, candidates might ultimately choose to apply through your company website because they want feel they're coming in through the front door.

It’s vital your job advert appears on your website in a way it can:

a) Easily be found to prevent interested candidates from losing interest or becoming wary

b) Offer good supporting information about your company and its culture so the candidate can really feel themselves working in your organisation.

Tips for using job sites to find candidates

There are a variety of job boards, like Indeed or TotalJobs, you can use to promote your job.

However, advertising on job boards is an incredibly expensive easy to generate candidates.

We'd go as far as to say using job boards is by far the most expensive (and often inefficient) way to generate candidates, and here's why.

• The fees are extremely high
• Competition is stiff - you're competing against all the other companies advertising on that job board
• Your advert has to be incredibly well written and optimised to appear in search results (both on Google and on the job board itself).

Therefore, these are our tips if you feel you do need to use job boards:

• Make sure your advert is well written and optimised - don't just copy and paste your job description
• Use a mix of generic jobs boards and industry specific ones, like caterer.com (for hospitality) or jobs.ac.uk (for education)
• Bulk buy ads if you can for the best value (one way around this if you don't have frequent vacancies is to use a recruitment agency and benefit from their bulk buy discount) 
• Look at the data - see what you spent last year on jobs boards and how many candidates you hired to calculate your spend per hire - is it worth it or could it be better spent elsewhere?

Advertising jobs on social media

Social media is actually a really underrated way of finding the right candidate for the job, so explore different ways of using it to your advantage.

Here's our advice:

• Think about where your audience is
• Be creative about where to post (e.g. special interest or community Facebook groups)
• Try proactive ways to get engagement and expand your reach - for example, asking employees to share posts to their networks
• Mix jobs posts with other types of content, like educational and inspirational posts.

Make sure top talent in your industry sees your next job post online

While there are plenty of creative ways to advertise job roles in your company, you have to strike the right combination for your business.

At Cummins Mellor, we advertise jobs online for a range of clients as one part of our detailed recruitment strategy, which also includes market and process mapping and outreach techniques.

To make sure dream candidates find your job online, speak to our team today for advice and support on 01254 239 363 or [email protected]