Resources

Recruitment marketing is hard work: it takes a lot of creative energy to compile compelling copy and imagery, distill your company’s values and mission into a few paragraphs and a headline, and engage on-target candidates to take an interest in joining your organization. To top it off, it’s a never-ending task.

The years change, your company changes, the hiring environment changes, and for these and many other reasons, advertising your job opportunities can never be a “set it and forget it” task. Job seekers will notice if your materials are stale, and this can measurably impact their interest in learning more or applying for your jobs.

Here are a few suggestions and ideas on how to keep those recruiting materials fresh, relevant, and engaging to the eyes of every candidate that finds them.

Check Your Dates

One of the most common mistakes we see, especially for seasonal employers, is old dates being posted in recruiting materials. If you are reactivating a previously posted ad or profile, make sure your season and job start dates are accurate. Whether you are referencing operating dates (“Our season begins on May 1, 2023”) or making broader references (Join our team for the 2023 season!), make sure you’re referring to the correct year. A job seeker will turn away quickly if they believe that they’ve opened a stale advertisement.

For bonus points and extra credibility with job seekers, include the starting and ending dates of the positions that you are advertising. Job seekers are making big time decisions and commitments when it comes to where they’re going to spend their next season working. They trying to plan their lives and their livelihood. Help them (and yourself) out by letting them know from the outset when you need them to start and when they can expect their season to end.

Update Your Job List and Job Descriptions

If you are advertising for your entire roster (such as with an Enhanced Employer Profile) as opposed to an individual job, make sure to update your Jobs List. You may inadvertently be advertising positions that you don’t need to fill or missing many of the jobs that you need to be advertising. You could also be advertising outdated wages, using old job descriptions that no longer apply, or excluding exciting new perks or features of joining your team. Building all of this information out the first time is a lot of work, but it is equally important to keep it regularly updated so that job seekers know exactly what you need and when you need it so they can plan accordingly, and you both can avoid unpleasant surprises.

Fresh and Updated Imagery as Often as Possible

A picture is worth a thousand words, and sharp, high quality photography instantly sets a listing apart. The Enhanced Employer Profile can showcase 25 photos and three videos. A job ad will display one photo, and five photos total visible from your basic employer details page. While it seems simple and insignificant, outdated and stale imagery is the easiest and most commonly overlooked opportunity for improvement that we see employers miss. Regularly revising, deleting, and updating new photos every year will make an enormous impact in keeping your recruiting sharp, and giving your materials an edge.

Iterate and Measure Results with A/B Testing

In keeping with the theme of proactive recruitment marketing, experiment with different headlines and calls to action, and measure your results. Have you been using the “Live an Adventure This Summer” headline on all your advertising materials for the last 10 years? If you’re getting great results from that, wonderful, stick with it! But job seeker attention is, and likely will continue to be, at a premium, so in a competitive hiring environment, you’re likely to find that the taglines that used to drive interest are no longer working as well as they used to. Try mixing things up with some new headlines that focus on what makes your organization and employee value proposition unique. For example, “End of season bonus, private housing, opportunities for advancement – all with the best summer backyard you could ask for!” Narrow down what it is you would be most excited about gaining from a season with your organization and what’s unique about your opportunities, try out some different combinations, and measure your results to see what works best.

The hiring environment is likely to remain very competitive for the foreseeable future, so regularly updating your recruitment marketing message (and your company’s offerings) will be critical to continuing to attract enthusiastic, on-target candidates for your positions. Stay on top of your messaging to make sure you’re attracting those future stars that will help your team thrive!

We’ll leave you with Three Golden Posting Rules that will help your postings perform better:

1. Put on your job seeker glasses. We often hear, “I just want to get this posted, I’ll make sure to come back and update the details later.” This is an unfortunate misstep that we’d like to see all employers avoid. A listing gets its maximum organic exposure when it’s freshly posted, and as the saying goes, you don’t get a second chance at a first impression. Before you hit that post and pay button, first look for the preview button and review all the page(s) of your advertising. If you are renewing a profile, don’t miss that crucial second page that lists all of your jobs and season dates! Do the photos that display line up with the season that you are hiring for? Is the start date in the past? Are you advertising wages? There are new fields on the basic profile that could use some new info. Taking two minutes to review can make a world of difference in your results.
   
2. A Job Description is not an ad. Copy and pasting a bulleted job description into your CoolWorks ad and hitting post might be fast, but it’s not effective when it comes to educating a potential applicant on your culture, your employee value proposition, and why they should invest their time and energy pursuing your opportunities. The ultimate swing and a miss is when an employer posts an ad that is a barebones dry job description, and a job seeker clicks apply now to continue learning more, and they land on the identical job acquisition page in your ATS. A housekeeping job is a housekeeping job. An ad isn’t the vehicle to cover every last detail of bending, kneeling, carrying, lifting, and folding. Use your marketing to sell your company, your culture, and the reason a housekeeping job at your company will be the kind of adventure that brings people to CoolWorks in the first place. You can cross the t’s and dot the i’s with the 37 bullet-pointed list of requirements a bit further into the process of the interviewing and hiring journey. It serves an important and necessary purpose in your organization, but it’s not the shiny lure that will attract and convert a seeker into an applicant.
   
3. Space out your postings. Whether it’s multiple ads that you need to post, or posting and boosting a listing on the same day, instead space things out! By staggering your start dates, you’ll get increased organic exposure and better results. You can still do all of your postings in one session, but use the date picker to stagger the dates that listings go live on the site.