There must be something quite jarring about the President of a staffing company promoting LinkedIn job ads. I won’t get too far into self-congratulation mode because all of our clients fully recognize how selfless we are here.
Nobel Peace Prize material in fact.
Every HR professional on the planet has made the mistake of placing an ad that pulled 800 replies, none of whom were even close to a fit for the role. I’ve seen it myself more than once. I started life about a million years ago working for a recruitment advertising agency in London, England. Back in the day when they had newspapers that did more than stuff moving boxes or act as wrappers for the wad of local grocery store flyers.
We had clients who spent thousands on little ads that were creative masterpieces and were the foreplay to the call to the headhunter to fill the job.
So what’s changed?
Targeting, that’s what.
The majority of targeting for newspaper ads is based around who’s doorstep it lands on, for many papers it is who pays for it. Creatively, most are or were superior but with that said, so what? The wrong person gets to see the creative masterpiece.
LinkedIn uses the same search criteria that you as an agency or employer based recruiter use, they just employ that search criteria to who actually gets to see the ad, it’s genius. It’s perfect pull selling to a very targeted audience.
The big challenge is making sure that the ad is written correctly. We ran an ad at Gateway a few months ago and somehow ended up being seen by in-house lawyers.
If you write the ad correctly then it gets seen by the right people and as you publish it will also give you a list of recommended candidates based on what you wrote.
This is great, not just because you get a headstart on some people to reach out to but also because you get to confirm that you have the right search word sin your ad for the right audience. It was this second part that allowed us to rewrite in order to not have a slew of lawyers applying for an IT job!
A word of caution, LinkedIn applicants are generally passive so you have to build in some thinking time. There’s also a hint that the LinkedIn search algorithms need some thinking time in order to work out who should be seeing your ad.
If you’ve never tried LinkedIn job ads, try them. You won’t get 800 applicants for a totally different job that you didn’t advertise, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how targetted and effective they are.
But as you know, there is no guarantee with job ads, “you pays your money and you takes your chance.”
