[Recruitment Advertising Essentials]: How to Boost your Job Advertising Performance with Job Ad Expansions

Talent Acquisition teams in the US have migrated the majority of their recruitment advertising spend to performance based job boards. They are now buying most of the traffic to their career sites on a Cost-per-Click (CPC) or Cost-per-Apply (CPA) basis.

The beauty of buying your candidate traffic on a CPC or CPA basis is that you do not pay anything until a job seeker takes an action – either clicking on your job ads or filling out an application. This gives organizations tremendous flexibility in trying to reach job seekers in different ways.

Are you successfully leveraging everything that performance based job boards have to offer?

In this article, I’ll focus on one particularly successful approach: job ad expansions.

What are job ad expansions?

Job ad expansions offer one of the best ways to amplify your recruitment advertising efforts. They enable you to advertise a job to multiple locations and/or experiment with different job titles to see what works best and resonates with a larger audience.

Consequently, job ad expansions help make your job ad content more targeted and relevant to a larger pool of job seekers, resulting in better traffic.

In the past, the job postings your organization placed (in your recruitment media) were limited to job titles and locations that existed in your ATS.  This is no longer the case with job ad expansions.

Furthermore, a programmatic job advertising platform that allows for job ad expansions – automatically and at scale – saves your recruitment teams a significant amount of time and resources.

Types of job ad expansions

As mentioned above, there are mainly two ways you can expand a job ad:

1. By location (Location expansions)
2. By job title (Title expansions)

Job ad expansion by location

Location expansions allow you to target job ads to candidates in multiple cities, states, or countries, simultaneously.

In many major metropolitan locations, job seekers may search for jobs by the specific locations they live in – or the surrounding areas. If you don’t include them all, you may miss out on a large number of qualified candidates. For example, if you’re looking for candidates in Houston, job seekers that search for jobs in locations like Sugar Land, The Woodlands, or Katy, may get missed if the job is posted to “Houston” alone.

Also, due to the changes in the labor market caused by COVID-19, a large number of job seekers are now searching for “remote” and “work from home” jobs.

Location expansions can allow your organization to advertise your reqs in other locations that may have larger pools of suitable applicants – automatically and at scale – without adding additional reqs into your ATS.

The benefits of implementing location expansions may vary, but the most common ones are:

• Increase in application volume: Job ads created via location expansions have better conversion rates (both clickthrough and click-to-apply rates) as job seekers are more likely to apply if the job location is close to where they live.
• Reduction in cost per applicant (CPA): If you’re advertising in relatively lower demand areas close to the job location, your competitive bids (and therefore CPCs and CPAs) are likely to be lower.

Job ad expansion by title

Title expansions allow you to optimize your job ad content by experimenting with different titles – without modifying job titles in your ATS.  They help you improve your reach as well as relevance by using alternative job titles in your ad – based on what potential job seekers may be searching for.

As a result, you can switch from titles that have low search volumes to those that are searched more and with higher frequency. For example, you can try changing “CSR” to “Customer Service Representative.” You can also experiment with newer titles that may be a match for the skills you’re looking for. For example, you can experiment with the title “Call Center Specialist” for a “Customer Service Representative” role. You can also try job titles you’ve seen your competitors using.

Pro tips to supercharge your talent sourcing with job ad expansions

1. Determine job title quality: Test your current job title quality by searching for it on a popular job site like Monster or Indeed. Check out how many jobs show up in the listings. If the number is lower than you would expect, try searching for alternative titles. If an alternative title provides a higher volume of listings, try using that as a title expansion.

2. Look for job seekers in cities or towns near the job location: Expand your job ads to locations (cities or towns) within a 20-mile radius of the original job.  For example, if your advertised job is in Redwood City (CA), expand your job ad to Palo Alto, San Carlos, Belmont, and San Mateo.

3. Conduct nationwide job ad campaigns for “Remote” and “Work from Home” jobs: If you’re hiring for “remote” and “work from home” roles, job ad expansions offer a phenomenal opportunity to attract candidates in locations across the country. Just add these words to your job titles, along with the right location expansions (cities, towns, or states where you’re looking for job seekers).

When you’re running a nationwide job ad campaign, you can also substantially reduce your CPCs and CPAs (and along with those, cost per hire) by advertising in locations where competitive bids are likely to be low.

Job ad expansions are a popular strategy among the smartest recruitment teams

Here’s just one example. One of our enterprise clients – that has a large food delivery business – needed to hire part-time delivery drivers within 15 days of a new vacancy. They were seeing a $40 cost per applicant (CPA) due to unimaginative “Driver” job titles and a poor optimization strategy.

When we deployed job ad expansions and switched to newer (and more relevant) job title and location combinations, we were able to get their CPA down to $4 (a 90% decrease!), while increasing the application volume to support filling these positions in 15 days (down from 30 days).

The Joveo platform enables both title and location expansions at scale – and with end-to-end automation – enabling you to drive significantly more qualified applicants and reduce CPA (as well as cost-per-hire),  while saving your recruitment team a huge amount of time and resources.

To learn more about how you can enhance your recruitment marketing efforts (with job ad expansions, programmatic job advertising, targeting job seekers on the whole World Wide Web, and a lot more), fill out this form or send me a message at [email protected] – I would love to chat!