Recruitment Advertising: Now, and in Future

You can’t argue that recruitment advertising has evolved over the past couple of decades, and there’s been significant innovation and disruption in this category.

For example, there used to essentially be a duopoly on recruitment ad spend, with CareerBuilder and Monster (after the latter’s acquisition of HotJobs! from Yahoo!) dominating TA budget and bandwidth; today, there’s essentially a duopoly on recruitment ad spend, with Indeed and LinkedIn dominating TA budget and bandwidth.  

Now, that’s the kind of progress most other industries would envy.

Another example that comes to mind is the evolution of recruitment advertising from a “post and pray” model to programmatic advertising, showing the significant strides we’ve made towards a data driven, analytical approach to talent acquisition, which is why we have no idea which paid source our candidates are coming from.

This is a big change from the days of candidate self-reporting, because now there’s an algorithm automating last touch attribution, a paradigm shift in how people find companies, and companies find people.

By being able to target job ads to the right candidate at the right time, instead of simply passive posting, recruiters can ensure that the resumes they don’t look at are significantly better than before. As part of a strategic, omnichannel campaign, strategic recruitment advertising can be an indispensable tool in building engaged pipelines of top talent that’s just a job alert away.

Leveraging employer branding as part of a holistic recruitment advertising approach also lets candidates – and employers – know that they’re not just the right fit for the job, but also, for the company and its current employees, allowing you to ignore the latter (and their referrals) the minute you open a req.

After all, internal recruiting is everyone’s responsibility except for, you know, internal recruiters. The only talent community that really matters is the one that’s allowed to see and apply for those billions of dollars companies spend on recruitment advertising every year, not the one behind the corporate firewall or employee monitoring software.

Alright. Maybe recruitment advertising has come a long way (just today, Indeed sent me a press release touting their shift from a flat rate to a performance based digital advertising model – mind blown), but as they say, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The economy and the job market might be cyclical, but recruitment advertising will remain a convenient scapegoat for producing either too many or too few candidates, depending on whether we’re in a boom or a bust. And there’s really something comforting about that.

This month’s edition of Talent Acquisition Magazine is dedicated to exploring what’s new and what’s next in recruitment advertising (a good rule of thumb: anything that’s already considered passe by consumer advertising).

We’ll be taking a close look what recruiting and people leaders need to know in order to make every dollar of the estimated $300 billion we spend every year in North America alone count. Because giving everyone of the 165 million workers in that market a check for the over $1800 we average on job ads to reach every single one of them just wouldn’t work as well as a talent CRM or a content management system just for your career site.

If there’s one thing that we understand here at Talent Acquisition Excellence magazine, after all, it’s advertising. That’s why there’s so much of it between the articles in every edition.

April fools and happy hiring.
 

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