Company websites are the most widely used channel for advertising new jobs
Virtually all organizations advertise for jobs, and most (92%) advertise jobs on their company website. This makes sense—your company careers page allows you to immerse candidates in your employer brand and position your job advertising exactly as you want. It is also a very cost effective place to advertise.
However, effective recruitment advertising also relies on building a pipeline of qualified candidates who find your organization elsewhere online before coming to the website. Aside from the company website, the most common way of making candidates aware of a job is via major job boards (74%). Although we did not ask about job search engines, which typically aggregate job postings from multiple job boards, these are sometimes hard to distinguish from conventional job boards for users.
Internal job advertising is also key for most organizations. Our research suggests more organizations are looking within to fill jobs. In fact, 71% share job openings via internal postings or email.
Employee referrals are the most popular method of attracting candidates
As well as investigating which advertising channels today’s HR professionals prefer, we also wanted to investigate the methods that they use to attract candidates. Employee referrals are used by threequarters of participants. Job ads are also popular (72%), of course. At the other end of the scale, online videos are used by less than a third of our respondents (28%).
Pay-for-display ads remain the preferred option
Many organizations are choosing to move some advertising budget over to pay-for-performance job ads. With this type of advertising, the organization only pays when a candidate applies for the job being advertised—as opposed to pay-to-display advertising, where the organization pays a fixed price to post an ad regardless of the results it delivers.
However, it seems that pay-to-display advertising remains popular, with 20% of respondents saying that they spend 60% to 100% of their budget on pay-to-display advertising. In fact, 28% of respondents say they don’t spend any ad budget on pay-for-performance ads.
Most organizations prefer to handle recruitment advertising internally, but some rely heavily on external partners
The majority of our respondents say they use employment agencies and recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) providers to a low or very low extent (71% and 73%, respectively), though some rely heavily on them. In fact, 13% of our respondents use employment agencies to a high or very high extent, and 8% use RPO providers extensively.
External sources are primarily used for creative services or to save time
Of those respondents who do use employment agencies and/or RPO providers to a high extent, the most common reasons are the creative services they provide (44%) and a lack of time to handle recruitment advertising internally (40%). Some also value the analytics such partners can bring to the table.
Few organizations use text messaging for recruitment to a high degree
Only 8% of participants say they use texting for recruitment advertising to a high or very high degree, though another 21% use it to at least a moderate degree. Although text messaging can be a good way of staying in touch with a candidate after an introduction has been made, such messages may not be the best method of doing the initial outreach. In fact, potential candidates may view it as intrusive, questioning who you are and how you got their number.
Still, when used carefully and well, SMS text messages can potentially enhance recruitment. Texting is typically quick, easily personalized and more likely than email to grab the attention of candidates.
