The advert problem
No problem, pt 9
A little while back, we were chatting to our friends about house moves.
They’d just decided to stay put, with a house that continued to meet the needs of a family with two teenage boys.
We’d talked about the pros and cons, and the conversation moved on to how they would redesign their kitchen.
So committed were they to this new plan, we’d recommended a builder and kitchen company, who’d given them quotes and they were about to buy.
But then they moved house instead.
The Love it or List it people would have been gutted.
You see their’s is the classic suburban British village, where the houses are a bit nicer and a bit cheaper than those in the local city of Ely.
And people don’t tend to move out once they’ve moved in.
While there are houses the locals admire, and wonder if they’d ever come on the market.
This one did, and not through Rightmove or, similarly, no agents please!
Instead through word of mouth and the people they know.
It’s a lovely house they have now, big enough to have also housed a Ukrainian family since last year.
Without the reliance or expense of the mechanisms that typically take a house to market. One they’d bought through awareness of what that particular house could offer them if it ever came available.
They sold theirs through an agency, for efficiency's sake.
Moving houses has many parallels to moving jobs.
And it makes me wonder, just how important is a job advert in the grand scheme of recruitment?
I mean, you can get away without any form of advertising under the right circumstances.
Such as if you already know the right person for the job.
Or when I’m in conversation with a hiring manager -
“thanks for finding Nick - he’s great. Now if you hear of a job that lets me have the flexibility to see the school play, that would be great,” he said in a pre-pandemic kind of way.
Or those candidates that would love to work for ACompany Ltd, and are just waiting for the right job to come up, whether through word of mouth or on their website.
Even then, at some point those people will want to understand how a move will impact them, which requires, if not a job advert, then something that shows what’s in it for them.
That might even simply be a phone call.
How about those times they aren’t even aware they have a problem that needs solving, until their other half slips an advert under their nose? That’s happened on occasion, and is indeed my favourite bit of advert feedback.
I think it’s a mistake to think of a job advert as intrinsically a top of funnel marketing activity that raises awareness.
It can be mid funnel, for people who’d love to work for ACompany, or bottom funnel for those that are primed for a specific move when it’s available.
I think it’s also a mistake to think of a job advert as only those you read.
In the same way our friends’ house wasn’t advertised, except it was. Their awareness of it from visiting their neighbours and driving past it everyday was about as effective an advert as it could be.
Much like when you drive behind a plumber’s van on a school commute - of course, you’ll never take note of the number, unless you’ve a leak and the plumbers you’ve already tried don’t respond to messages.
Then that number alone is the best advert it could be because you need to take action.
So if a job advert can be every part of a marketing funnel, and can be many different things in addition to those job board ones, how should we think of them?
For me, job advertising starts with the vacancy consultation.
Full insight into the context, the outcomes wanted, auditing the job description to be representative and realistic, what good actually looks like, and what will appeal to the people you want to employ.
From there we establish where they are going to be.
Candidates can be both anywhere, and in specific places that are only relevant for their role.
A milk round for a grad.
Github for developers.
A broadcast expo for broadcast sales people.
Youtube for that random guy who was doing tutorials on the niche skill being recruited for (that’s happened).
A recommendation.
While all of these people might see a job board advert.
Each place has a different need from its advert, whether that’s a handshake and an elevator pitch, a DM or a voicemail, or an appealingly written job board advert.
But they all flow from the same place. That vacancy consultation at the top.
Often when I recruit for an employer they have a weak or poorly defined brand, including jargon-filled websites that try to make them look dead clever.
Part of the consultation is to define the brand and the vacancy value proposition, so that when it comes to researching the role, there’s something relevant and tangible for the candidate to read.
Yet that proposition is also the crux of my written messages and job adverts. It’s the crux of my calls and meetings. It’s how I engage the market.
Yes, it’s entirely possible to recruit without a job board advert (I do often enough for confidential vacancies).
But it’s hard to recruit without the process that leads to a good advert.
And if your process leads to a badvert it likely reflects how you’ve thought out your recruitment messaging.
Which will only appeal to candidates who are problem aware - out of work, at a dead end, crummy boss, and all those things that activate a job search.
If you want to appeal to the problem ambivalent and the problem unaware, you need to have integrated messaging that appeals consistently across all channels.
Ideally including your careers page too.
Including where possible, a job advert.
Get your messaging consistent, and you’ll maximise the odds of candidates coming to you, and for their positive response to your outbound messages.
An integrated, appropriate multichannel job marketing strategy.
Get it wrong, and you may push people away.
And if someone complains adverts don’t work, and therefore aren’t worth doing well, it often shows insight to their process.
Would you be confident in how they access other candidate channels?
Thanks for reading.
Regards,
Greg
p.s. I’ve filled my vacancies. If you don’t want me cold-calling you for business, feel free to get in touch.