Upgrade your recruiting funnel with advertising technology

A typical recruiting funnel is built on the basic steps of the hiring process: awareness, attraction, application, prescreening, interviewing and hiring. A good recruiting funnel is also well defined, with clear processes, benchmarks and goals at every stage, allowing employers to build replicable and scalable objective-based campaigns. 

In the earliest stage of developing a hiring campaign, employers identify objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) — for example, the number of desired applications or cost per application. Hiring teams then craft job posts, whether by generating new ones or extracting existing posts from an applicant tracking system (ATS). 

Once these job posts are ready to share, it’s time to think like a marketer and strategically target job seekers’ awareness of this hiring content. A marketing funnel uses metrics, such as clicks, views and engagement, to inform strategy,  place content and build audience awareness. A job post is simply an advertisement for an open role, and targeted advertising is the first tool in fine-tuning your recruiting funnel. By combining Indeed’s simplified campaign interface with ad targeting based on specific hiring goals and KPIs, companies can strategically place postings where they’ll reach the right audience of job seekers. 

What’s more, Indeed’s optimization technology automatically uses multichannel placements to promote job postings. Moving from time-consuming, limited manual placement to automated placement that targets the best channel, time and audience not only streamlines recruiting but gives hiring campaigns an extensive reach: 80% of US job seekers use Indeed or Glassdoor^[1], and Indeed’s Trusted Media Network reaches 120+ partner sites. 

Build quality candidate attraction by targeting your ad strategy

When talent professionals can place ads in front of quality candidates who are most likely to apply, they’re better able to hit campaign goals. Indeed Targeted Ads: Brand (ITAB) adds additional focus to targeted ads. 

By adding ITAB to your portfolio of Indeed advertising tools, you can increase job seeker attraction by customizing banner ads, which appear on the right-hand side of job search results, to fit the target audience by sharing information such as company details, open roles and photos. For example, if you’re hiring for a managerial role with flexible hours, ITAB promotions can include information that helps define “flexible” at your company. You can even add a customized call-to-action (CTA), such as “search for open roles” or “receive ongoing updates.” 

Another component of Indeed’s advertising experience that enhances job seeker attraction is Sponsored Jobs, which uses nearly two decades of job-seeker insights and proprietary data from 225 million resumes and 25 million worldwide job posts to target job postings and provide increased ad visibility. Users surveyed report that these premium listings improve the next step in the recruitment funnel, application — delivering, on average, 2.3 times more applicants than posting a job for free^[2] and increasing by 250% the likelihood of a successful hire.^[3]

Turning job seekers into applicants through better brand building

Turning views into applications involves more than posting open roles. In fact, more than 60% of job candidates look for more information about a company after reading a job description.^[4] This is where brand building takes center stage, especially as an employer’s brand becomes more important in career choices. A recent Indeed whitepaper, “The Impact of Employer Branding on Recruitment and Retention,” reports that “79% of people surveyed consider a brand’s mission before applying for a job and more than half of workers say that, when it comes to job satisfaction, company culture is more important than salary.” 

A positive first impression about your company’s mission and culture is, therefore, crucial to engaging job seekers. You may be aware of Indeed’s Company Pages, which are available to all companies with jobs on Indeed; last year, job seekers used an Indeed Company Page to research a company more than 1.5 billion times. What you might not know is that your company can now enhance and fine-tune that basic brand messaging with the Select Branding Bundle, an expanded service through Indeed’s partnership with Glassdoor. 

The Select Branding Bundle upgrade combines Indeed’s and Glassdoor’s reach — 55 million job seekers monthly on Glassdoor^[5] and 595M Job Seeker Profiles on Indeed^[6] — through increased options for brand promotion and campaign oversight. Through the Select Branding Bundle, for example, you can invite employees to post reviews, effectively acting as “talent ambassadors” by showcasing their experience; highlight company culture through the “Why Work With Us” multimedia section; integrate social media accounts; and more. Plus, you can view and respond to all of your Indeed and Glassdoor reviews in one place. 

The Select Branding Bundle also comes with data-based insights, such as “follower” reports by location, job function and email, or keywords used in reviews, which use word clouds to build visual representations of pros and cons. Analyzing these insights can develop actionable items for improving your brand perception — and an appealing company story can shift talent from “just looking” to actively applying. In fact, employers who use the Select Branding Bundle report, on average, an increase in views across their Indeed and Glassdoor profiles (12%),^[7] job clicks (27%)^[8] and “apply start” clicks (34%).^[9]

Getting quicker to the hire through better candidate experiences

No matter what role you’re filling, the goal is keeping quality talent progressing through the recruiting funnel — prescreening and interviewing — and to the hire. Waiting can be the hardest part of any job search, and too long of a timeline creates an HR “black hole,” causing quality talent to disengage and drop out. “Ghosting” (a term from online dating that refers to disappearing from a relationship without warning) has become a standard hiring experience that’s only increased since the pandemic’s onset. In fact, Indeed’s research reveals that 51% of job seekers believe employers are ghosting more during the pandemic — and that may be due to overwhelmed recruiters. 

Indeed Hiring Events, with its automated resume screening, interview scheduling and candidate assessments, speeds up the hiring process by reducing time spent in repetitive processes and workflows — eliminating up to 90% of manual recruiting tasks from hiring teams’ to-do lists^[10] and driving faster, more efficient candidate prescreening. 

Fine-tuning hiring processes through automation can free up recruiters to spend more time nurturing candidates through quality communications. Job seekers and employers alike believe communication problems are one of ghosting’s biggest drivers. For example, some job seekers who ghost employers at the interview stage say anxiety played a role. Through more empathetic and nurturing interactions with employers and recruiters, job seekers can share needs (breaks between interviews, necessary accommodations for required assessments, travel or technology concerns) and reduce stress.

These essential human touches help provide better candidate experiences — as does efficient, effective interviewing. Indeed Hiring Events is built for effective virtual interviewing, and recruiters are seeing gains in candidate experience: 90% of job seekers favorably rate their experience with Indeed Hiring Events.^[11]

Making the most of your recruiting funnel

Thinking like a marketer can help expand your hiring campaign’s reach and deliver more competitive outcomes at each step in your recruiting funnel.

Whether you’re building awareness, driving attraction, increasing applications or making prescreening, interviewing and hiring more efficient and timely, identifying and using the right tools and technology can fine-tune your processes and maximize outcomes. 

Pairing Indeed’s automated ad experiences and employer branding services means employers and recruiters can more strategically address goals and KPIs. And while a successful recruiting funnel starts with putting job postings in front of quality job seekers, hiring teams need comprehensive solutions that simplify, optimize and improve their recruiting funnel to deliver the right talent in the best ways.

---