As HR and talent acquisition professionals, your job is to locate, engage with and recruit top talent to help your organization drive business, regardless of where those candidates might be. Luckily, these days the majority of candidates can be found in one place: the Internet.

In fact, according to Statista, in 2018, applications received through job boards accounted for a fifth of job hires worldwide. During the same period, job boards accounted for almost half of global job applications. Also, according to a global survey of hiring decision makers in North America, 58% of the respondents regarded social professional networks as a source for quality hires, making the internet the number one channel for finding new work. 

With that said, as HR and talent acquisition professionals, you must have a strong understanding of this online landscape if you’re interested in recruiting today’s top talent. Most importantly, it’s key to understand how to effectively and efficiently advertise jobs online if you are to gain access to this growing talent pool.

To help, we put together this quick list of the three most common ways to advertise jobs online so you can better familiarize yourself with this ever-evolving digital environment:

• Sponsored jobs are performance-based job advertisements where the total cost for advertising an open position is determined by how much traffic or how many conversions a particular job is able to generate on a given website. Sponsored jobs are typically purchased through a PPC (pay-per-click) or CPA (cost-per-applicant) model, where performance is determined by volume of clicks (traffic) or applications (conversions). Sponsored jobs are often the most cost-effective job advertisements you can run and, when paired with the right analytics and optimization tools, can produce the greatest return on investment.

• Job postings are your typical, run-of-the-mill job advertisements, where ads are bought for individual jobs for a flat fee and displayed on a vendor’s website for a specified period of time (usually 30 days). Job postings are often the least expensive option for HR and talent acquisition professionals, but they generally cannot be optimized like sponsored jobs. Job postings are often referred to as “post-and-pray” job advertisements because the cost of the advertisement is fixed, regardless of how well it performs on the vendor’s site. This method of advertising your jobs is generally much less efficient than sponsored jobs and therefore shouldn’t typically be used on a large scale without risking wasted budget.

• Job slots are the happy medium between sponsored jobs and job postings. Costs for job slots aren’t determined by job performance like sponsored jobs and you won’t be buying individual postings for each of your jobs. Rather, an employer pays a flat fee for the “digital real estate.” When you purchase a job slot, you’re contracting the slot for an allotted period of time at a set price. Over the course of this contract–usually anywhere from 30 days to a year–you can swap in and out as many new jobs as you’d like. One way of thinking of job slots is by comparing them to paid parking spaces. Regardless of how often you use your parking space, or which car you decide to park in it, the monthly fee remains the same. Similarly, employers can “park” a job in their slot, and swap it out for a new one when they feel it’s appropriate–and they can do this as many times as they’d like for the duration of their contract. We’ll go into greater detail about how job slots can be optimized in the coming weeks, but it’s important to note that effectively managing job slots is often a difficult and time consuming process. However, those who can fully optimize their contracts by leveraging recruitment marketing analytics and automation tools can see a significant ROI for their efforts.

Advertising your jobs online is essential to recruiting today’s top candidates and ensuring that your talent acquisition efforts help drive business for your organization. 

Check these other blog posts that may also be helpful:
Best Practices for Advertising Remote Job Postings
10 Reasons Why You Can’t Find Your Jobs Online
What You Need to Know About Search Rankings on Indeed
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Ivan Vega

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Ivan is a leader in recruitment marketing strategy. Born and raised in Northern California, at 18 Ivan joined the US Navy as a Submariner. While serving, Ivan worked on his education part-time and after 8 years deployed, and active duty finished Bachelor of Science in Business Analytics and International Business from Old Dominion University. Finding a passion in Decision Sciences, in 2017 he completed his Master's in Business Analytics from Saint Mary's. Even after graduating, Ivan has stayed close to the Analytics field. When he’s not teaching or knee-deep gathering insights, Ivan enjoys spending time with his wife, son, and bulldog Winston.