One of the areas that will make a difference is the ability to fill vacancies faster than the market. If you’re using much the same job boards and search tools as your competitors, how will you achieve faster results?
There are plenty of signals that the recruitment industry is gearing up for a strong post-covid recovery, with job volumes increasing and growth in hiring activity occurring across industries.
This trend looks set to accelerate across the rest of the year as restrictions continue to be eased and the economy shows signs of growth. Later this year, we’ll see a sudden shift in business priorities as organisations make the decision to move from ‘survival’ mode into ‘growth’ mode. And with that comes hiring. Fast.
After over a year of pent-up demand, many employers will be looking to recruiters to provide results quickly - and changing your recruitment advertising approach can help you better meet their needs.
In this growth blueprint, we’ll show you how optimising your recruitment advertising for speed will set your agency up to meet the needs of employers.
Why speed matters
During the height of the pandemic, many organisations reduced headcount, furloughed staff and restructured teams as part of their strategy to stay lean and respond to changes.
But now, that has left many teams under-resourced and struggling to keep up with the increasing demands of business recovery.
Organisations looking to rapidly grow in the post-pandemic market will be on the cusp of giving the green light to head into ‘growth mode’. That means winning new business, looking ahead, and most significantly, hiring.
For staffing organisations, speed will now be the top priority for many of their clients. They need people to power their growth plans right away.
Especially in briefs where multiple agencies are appointed, you need to be first to deliver results and win placement fees.
The average time to hire is 27.5 days according to research by Glassdoor. In the post-pandemic world, agencies who want to grow need to be much faster.
Step 1: Building speed into your goal setting
Do you have an internal benchmark for how quickly you expect consultants to provide a shortlist of candidates to your clients? 48 hours? 5 working days? What does ‘normal’ look like in your market, and how much faster would you need to be to impress clients and take a larger share of their budget?
How can you measure your teams against this goal, and identify areas for improvement? For example, is ‘provided shortlist’ a stage in your CRM, and can your CRM report on the average time take to reach this stage?
Could a change to your team structure help you process candidate applications more quickly, for example by adding extra team members to support your consultants with candidate search and filtering?
Step 2: Re-think your advertising strategy
If the goal is speed, is it better to advertise on 3 job boards for 30 days, or 30 job boards for 3 days?
Duration based advertising (where you buy credits to advertise a job for a fixed amount of time) can be a reliable source of candidates but it often takes longer to generate applications.
With a performance approach, you can switch on advertising simultaneously across a broader range of channels without a fixed duration of advertising. That means you could be spending the same money, to generate the same quantity of candidates, in just a few days.
When competing with other agencies to deliver candidates first, this could make all the difference. Plus, you may be using channels that your competitors aren’t (and therefore able to access unique candidates).
This doesn’t necessarily mean using different job boards, as many job boards now offer both advertising models.
Step 3: Re-think your job adverts
Recruiters typically post one advert per job. But this means taking a guess at the most effective job title, choosing a single location, and judging which perks are most relevant.
Coordinating multiple adverts provides an opportunity to mitigate the risk through covering a range of job titles, clusters of locations and different formats of job advert, appealing to a much broader range of candidates in a short time window.
Step 4: Re-visit candidate pooling
When a new requirement comes in, the fastest candidates are clearly the ones you already have. Despite huge investment in new technologies, most recruitment consultancies are very poor at re-using candidates from previous roles.
Getting this right unlocks one of the most powerful recruitment advertising strategies in terms of both speed and ROI - cluster-based advertising. Imagine an area where you have ten similar roles. For whatever reason, some of those significantly outperform the others on job boards.
Wouldn’t it make sense to focus your spend and efforts on the jobs that return you perhaps 4x or 5x the number of candidates for the same spend, in the same time period?
Agencies that find improvements in this area will have a huge advantage in delivering a faster (and more profitable) response.
Finding ways to be faster throughout the process
Advertising that generates results faster is only useful if you can process and turn around these candidates to the client quickly too. That’s where looking at your processes and speeding up your recruiters can make a real difference.
Check out 10 Effective Ways To Reduce Time To Hire (via Harver) and HR secrets of speeding up your hiring process (via Agency Central) for tips to speed up other parts of your process.
Apply this blueprint and grow your recruitment agency
Book a walkthrough of these growth blueprint techniques with our recruitment advertising specialists to see how you could apply a faster advertising approach to your agency’s job board advertising.
If you manage or oversee job board advertising contracts, this growth opportunity is too good to miss.