Ad Campaign

The Recruitment Advertising campaign!

Launching your recruitment campaign with all the glitz and razzmatazz normally reserved for a Broadway musical or Hollywood blockbuster is all very well, but ultimately does it achieve its primary aim of getting the right people in those vacant positions.

The world over, advertising has always provided one of the key ways to reach your future stars. Some would perhaps argue that it is the preferred method for recruiting people, before all others are considered. Recruitment posters and adverts have long been used to fire the ambition of people who desire a new career challenge and to embolden that need for change. However, society has changed and many of our more traditional behaviours are changing too, responding to new technologies and channels of communication. In recruitment, things have moved on too, with the process of recruitment becoming more competitive and also more complex and sophisticated. An illustration of which is the fact that many companies across Europe will look throughout the European Union for candidates rather than simply domestically.

So with these changes we need to step back and re-examine what is now available to us and are these traditional methods still as effective as they once were. The modern world offers ubiquitous methods of communication. We can talk, write or see each other without ever leaving our homes. This social evolution has created an environment where we can cultivate relationships with people across our profession and indeed across continents. Our individual networks are continually augmented at professional conventions, through International project teams, alliance partnerships, and any forum where we exercise our knowledge to good effect and initiate new relationships that help us further our understanding. We have seen an explosive growth in social networking with people now connecting professionally and personally through different sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter and Spoke, all of which allow us greater insight to the profiles of the people with which we associate ourselves. It perhaps therefore follows that as you progress through your professional life, you will feel more secure that you can stimulate interest in your skills and experience through the network that you’re surrounded by or connected too. This connectivity among professionals will surely drive significant changes in the way that we scout for talent and look to acquire it for our respective organisations.

There is no argument against the fact that advertising works, with recruitment clearly one of its greater applications. It reaches those people that change jobs regularly, markets where expertise is plentiful and the candidate flow is high. Yet, if you’re a professional with years of experience behind you, a skill set that is sought after, a current job that is satisfactory and no great desire to embark upon the emotional process of changing employment (in other words a ‘passive-candidate’), then are you going to be the person that turns straight to the career supplement of your chosen trade paper? And let’s say for a moment that you are looking for a new job, do you respond to adverts first or make a few calls to people you know and investigate your prospective market.

It is also undeniable that good people too look at job adverts. They have a professional and human curiosity towards the opportunities that may exist for someone with their abilities, for how much they should or could be paid, as well as their chances for progression and development relative to their peers. It is therefore relevant and necessary to consider advertising as part of that overall recruitment strategy review, which if truly dedicated to the acquisition of the industry’s very best professionals, should be all-inclusive, exploring the candidate pool in its entirety rather than the parts that seem more accessible.

Cost is always a driver, especially in recruitment. Yet often the strategy is skewed and the resultant equation is imbalanced because unequivocally, the value return from appointing the very best candidate your industry has to offer, outstrips any investment in finding them. Not simply in terms of what a person of considerable talent can contribute both now and in the future, but in terms of what it equips you with in appealing to future hires, raising your hiring profile and generally staking out your standards for inside and out to see.

It is quite often cost that drives people towards advertising. Advertising has a tendency to look cheap when you compare the price of the advert and the volume returns that it potentially could deliver against other options. This cost consideration has been further fueled by the availability and comparatively small costs of internet or job-board advertising. Cost is a driver which can skew the strategy though and force you into taking the wrong overall decision. Yet most people would agree unequivocally, the value return from appointing the very best candidate your industry has to offer, outstrips any investment in finding them and it is this equation that gets imbalanced by cost considerations. By appointing the industry best, you begin to increase the value creation of your business in terms of productivity and innovation. You improve the appeal of your company to those you’re trying to recruit or even retain, you raise standards and create a culture where people are committed to always recruiting better and betters people who are more skilled and who improve your company, and that is of immeasurable benefit.

Advertising Results- Advertising only really guarantees one thing – that the actual result will be different to your expectations. It is an approach that is highly susceptible to variations in market conditions. Dependent on the time of year, the true circulation of the publication, the positioning of the ad, the number of other competitive ads that it sits along side, the compelling nature of the content and numerous other factors that play a hand in the quality of the results, you can very seldom at the outset, be sure of your return.

It takes time to gather the response and triggers other actions such as recruitment vendors to speculatively call upon your managers and HR team to identify how they could partake in the process. You also take in an unusable volume of candidates with little relevance to the role, burdening you with resource intensive responsibilities for reviewing them all and then declining those responses, ever sensitive that the candidate pool who applied must remain respectful of your organisation and your professionalism, in case they turn out to be a future crop of candidates.

Unsuccessful advertising also carries many hidden costs, in lost time, in cost-of-vacancy and in terms of putting your recruitment programme back at the start. It is often under-appreciated that although your advert pulls in a response, that is only one step of a long process. In a highly competitive skills market, that same candidate could have 4-5 other career openings that they’re seriously exploring. If your company is unable to satisfy their criterion or appeal over other prospective employers, then all advertising attempts could be in vain. Sometimes, losing people during the process is a consequence of size and process complexity, with smaller companies standing a higher chance of recruiting due to often being quicker at executing.

At Liftstream we have frequently used advertising as part of the solution we offer our clients, with good results. But when promoting your business as an active employer you must start to consider whether you’re reaching the entire community that you want to. For instance, would people in your business, that are doing that kind of job, respond to an advert? Do they read that publication, if they do, do they read the career section? And if it doesn’t pull them in, what is the back up strategy – are you going to see sufficient through-flow from elsewhere to select the quality that you want? What else is being done to supplement this advertising strategy?

Too many times, recruiters are asked to support a recruiting project that has had huge visibility and little success. It means that your recruitment partner has to delve into a market that has been saturated with your message and people are both skeptical and unresponsive. So make sure that your strategy is right for your campaign and right for your business. With all the creative options in front of you, you’ll see the possibilities open up to a candidate-rich market.

This article was produced by Karl Simpson, Managing Director, Liftstream on February 20, 2008.


Organisation Relationships Innovation Growth Environment Ad Campaign Carbon Footprints Balance of Power Recruiting Diversity Clustered Talent Core Skills Jobs Celgene	Ad Campaign The Recruitment Advertising campaign! Launching your recruitment campaign with all the glitz and razzmatazz normally reserved for a Broadway musical or Hollywood blockbuster is all very well, but ultimately does it achieve its primary aim of getting the right people in those vacant positions. The world over, advertising has always provided one of the key ways to reach your future stars. Some would perhaps argue that it is the preferred method for recruiting people, before all others are considered. Recruitment posters and adverts have long been used to fire the ambition of people who desire a new career challenge and to embolden that need for change. However, society has changed and many of our more traditional behaviours are changing too, responding to new technologies and channels of communication. In recruitment, things have moved on too, with the process of recruitment becoming more competitive and also more complex and sophisticated. An illustration of which is the fact that many companies across Europe will look throughout the European Union for candidates rather than simply domestically. So with these changes we need to step back and re-examine what is now available to us and are these traditional methods still as effective as they once were. The modern world offers ubiquitous methods of communication. We can talk, write or see each other without ever leaving our homes. This social evolution has created an environment where we can cultivate relationships with people across our profession and indeed across continents. Our individual networks are continually augmented at professional conventions, through International project teams, alliance partnerships, and any forum where we exercise our knowledge to good effect and initiate new relationships that help us further our understanding. We have seen an explosive growth in social networking with people now connecting professionally and personally through different sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter and Spoke, all of which allow us greater insight to the profiles of the people with which we associate ourselves. It perhaps therefore follows that as you progress through your professional life, you will feel more secure that you can stimulate interest in your skills and experience through the network that you’re surrounded by or connected too. This connectivity among professionals will surely drive significant changes in the way that we scout for talent and look to acquire it for our respective organisations. There is no argument against the fact that advertising works, with recruitment clearly one of its greater applications. It reaches those people that change jobs regularly, markets where expertise is plentiful and the candidate flow is high. Yet, if you’re a professional with years of experience behind you, a skill set that is sought after, a current job that is satisfactory and no great desire to embark upon the emotional process of changing employment (in other words a ‘passive-candidate’), then are you going to be the person that turns straight to the career supplement of your chosen trade paper? And let’s say for a moment that you are looking for a new job, do you respond to adverts first or make a few calls to people you know and investigate your prospective market. It is also undeniable that good people too look at job adverts. They have a professional and human curiosity towards the opportunities that may exist for someone with their abilities, for how much they should or could be paid, as well as their chances for progression and development relative to their peers. It is therefore relevant and necessary to consider advertising as part of that overall recruitment strategy review, which if truly dedicated to the acquisition of the industry’s very best professionals, should be all-inclusive, exploring the candidate pool in its entirety rather than the parts that seem more accessible. Cost is always a driver, especially in recruitment. Yet often the strategy is skewed and the resultant equation is imbalanced because unequivocally, the value return from appointing the very best candidate your industry has to offer, outstrips any investment in finding them. Not simply in terms of what a person of considerable talent can contribute both now and in the future, but in terms of what it equips you with in appealing to future hires, raising your hiring profile and generally staking out your standards for inside and out to see. It is quite often cost that drives people towards advertising. Advertising has a tendency to look cheap when you compare the price of the advert and the volume returns that it potentially could deliver against other options. This cost consideration has been further fueled by the availability and comparatively small costs of internet or job-board advertising. Cost is a driver which can skew the strategy though and force you into taking the wrong overall decision. Yet most people would agree unequivocally, the value return from appointing the very best candidate your industry has to offer, outstrips any investment in finding them and it is this equation that gets imbalanced by cost considerations. By appointing the industry best, you begin to increase the value creation of your business in terms of productivity and innovation. You improve the appeal of your company to those you’re trying to recruit or even retain, you raise standards and create a culture where people are committed to always recruiting better and betters people who are more skilled and who improve your company, and that is of immeasurable benefit. Advertising Results- Advertising only really guarantees one thing – that the actual result will be different to your expectations. It is an approach that is highly susceptible to variations in market conditions. Dependent on the time of year, the true circulation of the publication, the positioning of the ad, the number of other competitive ads that it sits along side, the compelling nature of the content and numerous other factors that play a hand in the quality of the results, you can very seldom at the outset, be sure of your return. It takes time to gather the response and triggers other actions such as recruitment vendors to speculatively call upon your managers and HR team to identify how they could partake in the process. You also take in an unusable volume of candidates with little relevance to the role, burdening you with resource intensive responsibilities for reviewing them all and then declining those responses, ever sensitive that the candidate pool who applied must remain respectful of your organisation and your professionalism, in case they turn out to be a future crop of candidates. Unsuccessful advertising also carries many hidden costs, in lost time, in cost-of-vacancy and in terms of putting your recruitment programme back at the start. It is often under-appreciated that although your advert pulls in a response, that is only one step of a long process. In a highly competitive skills market, that same candidate could have 4-5 other career openings that they’re seriously exploring. If your company is unable to satisfy their criterion or appeal over other prospective employers, then all advertising attempts could be in vain. Sometimes, losing people during the process is a consequence of size and process complexity, with smaller companies standing a higher chance of recruiting due to often being quicker at executing. At Liftstream we have frequently used advertising as part of the solution we offer our clients, with good results. But when promoting your business as an active employer you must start to consider whether you’re reaching the entire community that you want to. For instance, would people in your business, that are doing that kind of job, respond to an advert? Do they read that publication, if they do, do they read the career section? And if it doesn’t pull them in, what is the back up strategy – are you going to see sufficient through-flow from elsewhere to select the quality that you want? What else is being done to supplement this advertising strategy? Too many times, recruiters are asked to support a recruiting project that has had huge visibility and little success. It means that your recruitment partner has to delve into a market that has been saturated with your message and people are both skeptical and unresponsive. So make sure that your strategy is right for your campaign and right for your business. With all the creative options in front of you, you’ll see the possibilities open up to a candidate-rich market. This article was produced by Karl Simpson, Managing Director, Liftstream on February 20, 2008.
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