Category: Marketing

Researching Your Candidates for Social Media & More

by Maddyin Marketing

Social media is an important and useful way to market to candidates and attract job seekers to your job board. But how do we use social media recruiting to its best advantage? How do we figure out which social media platforms are right for reaching your particular job seekers?

The challenge is two-fold: the first step being research, and the second being experimentation. Today we’ll mostly focus on researching and how to use what you learn.

Let’s say we have an imaginary job board and it’s focused on targeting social workers as job candidates. The first step is to learn more about social workers!

There are great online resources out there for researching demographics, such as the US Bureau of Labourand Stats Canada. (And if your Google-fu isn’t strong and you need a little help – your local library will always be able to point you in the right direction.)

Having used the Bureau of Labour site above, I’ve found out that most social workers in the US are between the ages of 24 and 44, and most of them are women. That means by targeting social workers, we’re mainly aiming at women aged 24-44 (rather than, say, men aged 35-55).

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Simple Social Media Tricks to Reach Candidates

by Maddyin Marketing

We’ve covered ways of using social media to promote your job board and recruit candidates before, but it’s always worth refreshing ourselves on the basics.

There are several dead-simple ways to use social media to help promote your jobs and reach candidates. By implementing these small, “low hanging fruit” ideas, you can can make a significant difference to your reach and influence.

1. Create the accounts.

Go ahead and do it now. I’m just going to go ahead and quote myself here:

Pick 3 or 4 platforms that your target market uses, and focus on using those channels. Specialize in retail, food, fashion, or another industry big on visual presentation? Instagram and Pinterest may serve you well. High finance? LinkedIn is appropriate. Whereas writers and journalists tend to flock to Twitter and Medium. Recruiting Gen Z? Bite the bullet and figure out how Snapchat works.

(It’s also not a bad idea to create accounts on more platforms, even if you don’t intend on using or promoting them. Think of it as planting a flag in the ground. You have a brand and you’re ready to make use of it when you need it.)

Plant the flag. Use your messaging. Hootsuite has templates for sizing your social media profile pictures and banners properly (check #6), so you have no excuses not to get going.

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Maintaining SEO When Your Website Changes

by Maddyin Marketing

You have a job board, and maybe you need to change the domain name. Maybe you’re upgrading your CMS, or even your entire job board’s structure and technology.

No matter why it’s changing, when your existing URLs change, it will impact your site’s SEO. It will also impact traffic from sources beyond search engines – think of your established audience who types in your URL directly or has you bookmarked. Think of all the places online that link to pages on your site.

If you make a change that affects those URLs, you’re going to get hurt. Yes, even if you’re moving to a better system with nice, clean, human-readable URLs to replace the less-than-ideal dynamic ones you had before.

There are ways to mitigate the damage, however, and it helps to plan ahead.

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How to Promote Your Job Board

by Maddyin Marketing5 Comments on How to Promote Your Job Board

Start with Branding, and Know Your Value

I routinely come across a lot of recruiting, staffing, and software websites, and I’ve developed a very particular pet peeve as a result. I hate it when I visit a website and can’t ascertain in ten seconds or less what they actually do.

Reading their Twitter profile bio (if they have one) is often my best bet to get a quick summary or definition of their business, because it’s concise and to the point. 140 characters or less, baby!

It’s tough to take everything you do and boil it down to a tagline, but it’s so worth it. A clear message to your target market and audience helps focus your goals, making them easier to achieve. It’ll be easier to build upon that success and pitch to other markets as you grow, so don’t worry about excluding future verticals. Start with how you’re going to make money and serve your base of employers and candidates now.

Before you start your marketing campaigns, lay out the welcome mat. Put yourself in a stranger’s shoes–would this person be able to grasp all the amazing things your job board can do for them? In ten seconds or less? 140 characters or less?

It’s hard to pack the entirety of your value into such small packages, but if you lead with brevity and give them a reason to go deeper, you make it easier to stick around. A recognizable brand (name, logo, colours, taglines!) and a clear offering go a long way. Out of that, you’ll start to define keywords and more ways to sell.

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Your job board’s brand and why it matters

by Jonathanin Marketing

Every organization, as small or insignificant as they may be, has a brand – even my aunt’s bookkeeping sole proprietorship. It will never be as recognized around the globe as Apple or Coca Cola are, but to my aunt and her clients, the business’ brand is imperative for ongoing success. As the idiom goes, “you are judged by the company that you keep”, and the same wisdom can be applied to an organizational or personal brand (in my aunt’s case, much of the business’ brand is made up of the associations with her actual person).

Cast your mind back to 2013, and the damage that the Joe Fresh brand suffered (and is still defending against) when it was associated with the Savar Building catastrophe in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The unfortunate disaster stands as a reminder of how quickly a brand’s equity can be destroyed, and that the associations stakeholder make with your brand – both positive and negative – can linger for extended periods of time.

Noting that an organization’s brand as an employer is as important as ever, job board owners should be asking themselves whether they are doing everything they can to ensure that their board is a brand that employers wish to associate with.

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5 Ways to Write Better Job Posts

by Maddyin Marketing1 Comment on 5 Ways to Write Better Job Posts

We’ve broken down the basic components of a job post on this blog before, but there is always room for improvement. Here are five ways you can write better job posts, or help your customers do the same.

  1. Be Search-Friendly

This slideshare featured on Recruiting.com recommends avoiding overly creative job titles. iMediaConnection has collected a list of hilariously (and unnecessarily) creative job titles here, that will give you an idea of what they mean. “Wizard of Light Bulb Moments” and “Chief Visionary Officer” might sound fun and quirky, but you’ll drastically reduce the discoverability of a job advertisement with that title. If you’re looking for an Inbound Marketing Strategist, don’t advertise for a “Growth Guru” if you’re hoping to cast a wide net. Candidates are unlikely to search using your fun and quirky terminology, and they won’t be using them in any email/job search alerts.

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Turning Your Job Board into an Online Community

by Maddyin Marketing

Job boards are a tricky business. They have two types of customers, and in many ways they aren’t buying what you offer–they’re buying what they have to offer each other.

As a job board owner, you are the facilitator, the venue through which they are able to find each other. You create and maintain a space that attracts both parties.

Despite evidence that job boards are a significantly big, if not the biggest, source of hires, many employers and recruiters don’t always feel like they get their money’s worth. They want quality applicants. If you’re not attracting those applicants to your board, you’re never going to make your recruiting customers happy.

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Honesty in Employer Branding and Attracting Candidates

by Maddyin Marketing1 Comment on Honesty in Employer Branding and Attracting Candidates

You’re hiring! That means finding and attracting candidates who you then need to evaluate for the position. But it’s not that simple, is it?

Let’s define what it is you or your company wants when you’re looking to hire. Bottom line? You need somebody who can do the work you need done.

But typically, most employers also want that someone to:

  • Do the work really well
  • Have the traits and interpersonal skills that enable them to work with others in the workplace as necessary
  • Help strengthen their organization through their efforts

We’ve seen a shift in how we talk about recruiting and hiring, and the idea has emerged that employers need to market themselves to candidates as great places to work/people to work for, similarly to how a company markets to customers. Over the past two decades, we’ve seen the Internet multiply and diversify–no matter what it is you’re looking for, you will find it in abundance, and easily. A little too easily, sometimes.

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