In this candidate short market it becoming increasingly difficult to attract a decent response to any recruitment advertisement. What can YOU do ? Not every business can afford to just increase their advertising budget and increasing the size of their advert or place it closer to the front position to Increase the quality and volume of your response?
Here are 10 practical ways for you to maximise the quality of your ad response without just spending more money:
In this candidate short market it becoming increasingly difficult to attract a decent response to any recruitment advertisement.
More than 90% of Technical Focus clients surveyed now actually acknowledge that internet career/job sites will not totally replace newspaper campaigns. In fact the school of thought now seems to be that they should be used to compliment them. Perhaps act as a source of more detail on the position than the newspaper advert can accommodate (a successful example of this was Ambition's earlier recruitment profile, however, they seem to have started inserting full job descriptions these days?)
What can YOU do? Not every business can afford to just increase their advertising budget and increasing the size of their advert or place it closer to the front position to Increase the quality and volume of your response?
Here some practical ways for you to maximise the quality of your ad response without just spending more money:
(statistics show that you only have 4 seconds to catch a readers eye in advertising)
This first point is the most important point of this whole e-bulletin and something that so many organisations seem to put very little thought into.... their advert title!!!
We receive approximately 4 calls a week from HR and Operations Managers who are struggling to fill a position because they have used the actual job label or position title.
Some of the most common job labels that fail are :
What is wrong with these if you want Purchasing Officers, Logistics Coordinators?
Nothing if that's all you want. My experience tells me that organisations aren't really just looking for a candidate who has done the same type of job before at this low to mid level of position. Most organisations, when quizzed hard enough, are almost always looking for a type of personality first and it is a bonus if that person has actually done similar type of work before. For example they don't really just want a Planner, they want a detail freak and someone that is supremely organised and shows high levels of initiative, someone that has the interpersonal skills to be able to negotiate internally with sales, marketing and production without upsetting things.
If your organisation can offer more than just a job label then why not offer that? Why not try titles with a relevant description or dynamic to attract a more enthusiastic audience?
Titles that we have found usually work really well are (my advertising agency couldn't understand why I was willing to just give these secrets away so here's just a few teasers!) :
Candidates typically put a value on themselves in a salary range, if your advert is non specific on salary the good candidates may just not bother to call you or send a CV.
A number of our clients are reluctant to put any salary on the advert because of internal parity issues. We still encourage them to do so by using broader salary ranges and fuzzy adjectives such as Negotiable, or package the salary up including super, shift loadings, car and emphasise any bonus. Often if our clients are using Technical Focus advert style then it's not an issue anyway, as the readers will not know who the employer is anyway (see use of Blind Adverts in item 8).
Again remember that you only have 4 seconds to catch the browsing eye so if job location, salary, style of company eg industry and environment appeal to the right person then they will read the advert and/or call you. If they live in Campbelltown and are only able to travel as far as Liverpool but your advert doesn't say South West or Liverpool the you may miss their application, they may plan to call you to ask but never get around to it because they are very busy.
We have just initiated an assignment for a client who had advertised themselves and not found the right candidate. They are a very well known food company and brand and yet they actually wanted people from the process industries such as petrochemical or chemical, NOT food and packaging. The fact that they used their food brand logo and did not emphasise this need for a complex process background appears to have given their advert the wrong angle. This resulted in $4,000 and a substantial amount of line managers time wasted before they called in Technical Focus.
I read so many adverts by busy HR professionals that only give a PO Box with no contact telephone number and this is obviously because they are busy and don't want to be continuously interrupted for three weeks with candidates calling to ask questions. My suggestion to them would be to either give the advert response responsibility to someone in their organisation that is really interested in talking to applicants or to farm it out to a professional recruitment firm.
Candidates are becoming more and more choosy these days and if they can't quickly qualify a particular point (eg location, specifics on the role) then they often will not bother applying. Catching the keen candidate by telephone and listening for enthusiasm and English / communication / interpersonal skills can always save time later in the CV screening anyway. Quite often I will invite a red hot candidate in for an interview straight away anyway, because they are almost always under offer for another position anyway.
A few very keen recruitment consultants even invite candidates to call them on their mobiles on a Sunday evening between 6-7pm....great idea if you're that keen and don't have young children that scream a lot at that time in the evening or don't mind broadcasting your mobile number!!!
Most of you will know that the top or middle of the right hand page towards the front of a newspaper is premium space because statistics show that it generates the best response. Most of you will also be aware that certain recruitment firms have allocated space near the front of the Sydney Morning Herald.
It is also relevant to understand which are the stacker pages and what shapes and sizes of adverts usually get set at the base of the page so you can try and avoid them. Why not talk to a specialist recruitment advertising agency to see how your corporate style can be utilised in a shape and style that will give you the best position or stand out more (we use HMA George Patterson contact Terry Maloney Tel: 02 9202 8700 or email)
We are quite explicit in our final paragraph in encouraging emails instead of awkward faxes and posted CV's, this is the standard paragraph we use at Technical Focus:
"Please call 02 9421 5900 or promptly email your CV to . Alternatively (less preferred) mail to Technical Focus, Suite 15, Level 1, Elevation Building, 6 Meridian Place Norwest Business Park NSW 2153 or fax (02) 9421 5999 quoting Ref Number or visit our webpage www.technicalfocus.com.au."
We find that emailed CV's enable us to discuss candidates' backgrounds more quickly while accessing their CV on our screens during their first phone call rather than fumbling around for the only hard copy of their CV.
We believe that (especially for Technical Focus) it is getting to the stage where if the candidate has not, or claims to not be able to access emailing facilities, then should we bother with them anyway. Their are so many internet cafe's and friends with email facilities these days that it is close to not being a valid excuse anymore.
Never assume that your corporate logo our ad style will always pull the right response. Your business may have a superb retail or consumer reputation, however, candidates may perceive your business in a totally different light as an employer (examples of names withheld). There may be inaccurate rumours or you may have advertised with enough of a frequency to put people off even if it has all been related to new growth, there is a tendency for the novelty factor to wear off pretty quickly.
Of course there are hundreds of recruiters that are willing to take on your advert. The point I am trying to make is that you should monitor the press for a month or so (if you have that amount of notice) and choose the blind recruiters advert style that catches your eye the most or you think is relevant to your organisations needs. Of course you must also be happy with the recruiters themselves for what else they can deliver.
Take care in asking them to just pass on the advertising response CV's as there are a number of candidate confidentiality issues that need to be addressed for this to happen without compromising the applicants identity. These candidates apply in good faith that this will be managed correctly and any recruitment firm that cuts this corner is not abiding by our industry's ethics.
The structure we find is successful is as follows:
First paragraph what's in it for the candidate eg size, industry type of your organisation, future prospects, any other quantifiable details that can be offered to attract candidates.
Second Paragraph what does the job entail, who does it report to, what are the specific dimensions of the role and its short term objectives.
Third Paragraph what is our selection criteria? Is a degree essential or preferred? What level of industry background or management experience are we really after? Of course we cannot specifically say how many years experience we are looking for but we can use a couple of years to mean 1,2 or 3 and several years to mean 3 plus.
Fourth Paragraph response instructions as per our standard paragraph in item 7.
As I mentioned earlier, I now think that most of our clients are over the illusion that internet advertising would be an economical panacea to all of our poor ad responses. The reality seems to be that its very hard to beat the browse factor and tactile nature of the Saturday newspaper.
The sites we currently use (cost approx $60-$100 per advert not inc GST) are:
www.technicalfocus.com.au (FREE to us for obvious reasons)
The same methodology of wording headings and bullet points as described in this e-bulletin does not always apply as there is very little browse factor with these sites and you are actually better off using standard job title headings to avoid confusion and not miss hits of interest.
Well I hope that these 10 points are of value to you enhancing your approach to your recruitment advertising. We may produce a paper based newsletter and fact sheet that goes into much more detail in future months and allows us to give more visual examples.