5 Recruitment Advertising Strategies to Improve your Time to Hire

Never before in history have employers struggled as hard as they do today to find relevant candidates for their jobs. As demand for candidates continues to rise, the shrinking availability of interested and qualified job seekers has placed significant stress on recruitment teams to hire candidates, and hire them fast. 

As an employer, the costs of hiring slowly are significant and varied, beyond simply the operational overhead of a longer hiring process. The opportunity cost alone of not hiring in time is massive and can run into hundreds of millions of dollars. Having a large volume of critical roles unfulfilled has an obvious adverse effect on business execution and your ability to serve your customers as planned. In addition, the longer your hiring cycles are, the more opportunity you present your competition to siphon away top candidates from the available talent pool. 

Finding the right candidates for a job among hundreds or thousands of applicants is like searching for a needle in a haystack, and this would take more time than usual if the candidates applying to your jobs are not a good fit. There is also often a misconception that sourcing applicants rapidly comes at the cost of their quality. In reality, though, quality and speed go hand in hand. If the match rate of your applicants is high, you are more likely to move them through your hiring process quickly and improve your time-to-hire (TTH).

With this in mind, here are the top strategies you can use to improve your time-to-hire:

1. Optimize your job descriptions and job titles

Be specific about the role and your desired skills in your job descriptions. A well-written job description will help a candidate better decide whether to apply to the job or not, resulting in fewer irrelevant or poor-quality applications. In addition, it’s common for subconscious bias to creep in while writing job descriptions, which could inadvertently turn away diverse candidates. Tools like Textio and TalVista  can help you detect and eliminate bias in your job descriptions. 

Job titles, too, play a key role in attracting the right talent. Ensure you adhere to the best practices of drafting headings for your job ads, which include using popular search keywords that generate a lot of traffic, adding a key benefit (such as the hourly compensation), and more. In addition, job title expansions (one of the capabilities of Joveo’s programmatic job advertising platform) make it possible for you to reach out to more candidates by advertising your job using a large number of alternative job titles without hassle. As a result,  fill your positions much faster by capturing a wider audience without sacrificing candidate relevance. 

(Read More: How to Boost your Job Advertising Performance with Job Ad Expansions)

2.Tap into your existing talent pool

When you need candidates quickly, the best place to start is the already existing database of candidates in your Application Tracking System (ATS) or your Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) platform. These are usually candidates who applied to your jobs in the past, but did not convert into hires at the time. Using the information in your database, you can run targeted ads focused on these candidates across the World Wide Web or even send them personalized emails informing them about your new and relevant job openings. In addition, you can retarget candidates who previously abandoned your job application forms midway. They are highly likely to convert into applicants for new jobs due to their familiarity with your brand as an employer. 

(Read More: How to Retarget Candidates with your Job Ads on the World Wide Web)

3.Simplify your job application process

High-quality candidates with the best hiring potential are usually spoilt for choice, since they are high in demand among employers. A less-than-satisfactory candidate experience, which includes the job application experience, can result in employers losing out on engaging with some of the top talent available in the job market. 

Recruitment advertising teams often spend huge sums of money to attract the attention of relevant job seekers. But, far too often, once these job seekers click on the job ad to fill out the application, they’re met with a clunky and poorly designed form that takes a lot of time and effort to fill out. This inevitably results in a good portion of these highly valuable candidates to drop off.  

A well-designed job application form ensures you deliver a great candidate experience by simplifying the whole process, such as making resume uploads non-mandatory on mobile devices, eliminating the need for candidates to register to view the form, displaying only the mandatory questions first and withholding the optional ones till after the form is submitted, and several more. Once all the hard work of attracting the candidates is done, driving better click-to-apply (CTA) conversions via an optimized job application experience can significantly improve your time to hire. 

(Read More: 6 Best Practices to Deliver an Exceptional Job Application Experience and Improve Click-to-Apply Conversion Rates)

4.Track to hire

Recruitment marketing teams usually evaluate the performance of their various candidate sources by tracking the number of applicants each source delivers for a certain cost. The ones that deliver a high applicant volume for a low cost usually end up being allocated a large portion of the recruitment advertising budget. However, since hires are what these teams fundamentally care about (and not applicants), there are inherent risks and inefficiencies in this approach. For example, it is possible for sources to deliver a large number of applicants that end up converting poorly into hires. This could adversely impact your time to hire. On the other hand, the opposite could also happen, wherein sources that deliver high-quality applicants (although low in number) could covert at an impressive rate into a good number of hires.

Tracking all the way from a click (and its source) to a hire can help you identify sources that deliver the highest number of hires for a certain spend (and not just applicants). This way, you can better allocate your recruiting budget by prioritizing sources that deliver better applicant-quality – and ones that help you fill your jobs more swiftly. 

5.Sign on to a Job Ad Exchange, powered by programmatic technology

When looking to hire candidates quickly, manually engaging with individual job sites and job ad publishers, managing campaigns with each of them, and tracking the performance of each individually can be time-consuming and inefficient. A Job Ad Exchange can help solve this problem. 

Signing on to a Job Ad Exchange enables you to instantly gain access to a large number of select, high-quality talent sources to advertise your jobs on. This can save you considerable time and effort.

(Read More: Understanding and Leveraging a Job Ad Exchange)

In addition, most job ad exchanges, like Joveo’s MOJO^TM Ad Exchange, leverage programmatic job advertising technology to select the best sources for your jobs and automate campaign management on an ongoing basis. As a result, all you need to do is feed your jobs on the platform and enter your goals. The platform, powered by AI, then decides on the best sources to advertise your jobs on and how much to spend (and bid) in each. It then distributes your jobs accordingly across these sources and reports to you on the performance of each. Furthermore, it relies on a self-learning, AI-driven algorithm that enhances the performance of your job ad campaigns based on hiring outcomes. As a result, you can acquire many highly qualified applicants rapidly, at minimal cost and effort. The right Job Exchange (like Joveo’s) will still allow you to transparently see which sources are providing the best results on a site by site basis so you always know what is working and what is not.

(Read More: The Ultimate Guide to Programmatic Job Advertising)

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To learn about how Joveo can help you improve the quality of your job applicants and reduce your time to hire, reach out to us today!