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Welcome to episode 15 of Claire Shares. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m going to be sharing with you high energy, bite size videos, about all things talent attraction, talent acquisition and talent retention. Today’s talent attraction topic is about different ways to distribute your job postings to attract your ideal candidates! In the last episode we talked about creating job postings that attract your ideal candidate. Now that you have that done, it’s time to advertise it and get the word out! Before we get started with today’s talent topic, I want to share with you my recommendation of the week.
Recommendation of the week
My recommendation this week is to connect with Technology Talent Manager at Lighthouse, Brianna Hodge! Brianna is the certification director on the board of directors for the BNHRA, the buffalo Niagara human resources association. Bri is a great resource if you are looking to get an HR certification, or are looking for credit opportunities to keep your certifications active! Having my HR certifications has been so helpful to my HR career – it’s helped qualify me for opportunities, and the continuous knowledge gained in order to keep them active has allowed me to advance in my career and help me on the job. If you’re considering certification or have any questions at all, contact Brianna today! You can find her on LinkedIn 😊 Onto our talent topic of discussion for today! Distributing job postings to attract your ideal candidates!
What you need so you can distribute your job posting
For starters, it’s important to have a link to the open role for credibility purposes. I’ve been on both sides of the table as a recruiter and a candidate. As a candidate, I’ve received messages from recruiters about an open role and there was no link to the position in their message – they just said there was an opening, or attached a word doc job posting. I questioned whether the position was legitimate, as it didn’t look branded or like an official opening.
I’ve also been the recruiter, and have tried the attaching a word doc to the email or InMail route before, and candidates asked way more questions such as, why is this role open? Is it posted anywhere? If so why not? And they asked more questions about me and my organization. Rightfully so. When reaching out to candidates with a link of your job posting, it helps establish that trust that are you are reaching out about a legitimate opportunity and is an employer branding opportunity.
Now I know what you’re thinking – what if this is a confidential role, or it’s a back-fill so we don’t want it posted? Or maybe you just don’t hire that often, so you don’t have the careers page or applicant tracking system infrastructure to create a job posting link. Something we’ve done here at Lighthouse is have our marketing manager upload our job posting document to our website and create a 1 off link. Those with the link can access the information, but it’s not part of our website where someone could find it and click on it.
Ideally, you’d want to post the opening on our website or careers page so it’s easily findable and visible to your ideal candidate! And with a link, it’s much easier for managers and employees to share with their social networks, which we will get to in a few minutes.
Different types of job boards and tools
Next, you want to look at common and popular job boards to post your opening to, that will help with visibility and distribution. For positions such as administration, IT, accounting, marketing and engineering – LinkedIn is a great platform to post your open role to. Indeed and Zip Recuiter are great options to post these types of roles to also, but I find the quality of candidates is higher with LinkedIn. Indeed and Zip Recruiter have been great when I was hiring more hands on roles when I worked in manufacturing and hospitality such as technicians of all types, cashiers and bartenders. In addition to these large and popular job boards that many candidates are aware of, you may also want to consider function, location, and community specific job boards. Let me dive into more details.
Examples of function specific job boards for technology roles could be Built In, or tech jobs for good. Another example could be posting with professional association groups such as BNHRA, the buffalo Niagara human resources association, or the BNSME, buffalo Niagara sales and marketing executives. Both groups have a job openings page on their website. So if you’re looking for an HR, sales or marketing professional, these could be great groups to post with. An example of a location specific job board is Be in Buffalo here in Buffalo.
I also want to touch on how important it is to be intentional about where you are distributing your job postings to. There’s a new tool I demo-ed recently called CollabWORK, which specializes in community powered hiring! CollabWORK will post your jobs to niche slack or discord channels where your ideal candidates are “hanging out.” So perhaps you’re looking for diverse candidates, or candidates with certain backgrounds or interests, using a tool like CollabWORK could be a good option for you! Or, you as HR/the recruiter, or your hiring managers may be part of slack or discord groups already that you could post your opening to.
Don’t forget about alumni job boards. Certain educational institutions may have specific programs or majors that you are interested in for your opening. The university at buffalo is a great example. They have an online portal in which alumni can create an account and post a job that they are hiring for, or find roles posted to apply for. Connect with the alumni office at your targeted institutions for more information.
I’ve also used programmatic advertising in the past with a tool called AppCast. I set a budget for each open role, and AppCast would distribute it to it’s network of job boards it felt would be most effective based on what the role was looking for, what level it was, etc. Using a tool like AppCast can be really helpful if you don’t want to manage log ins or relationships with multiple job boards. AppCast can pick those for you, send your jobs there, and direct candidates back to your online website link to apply.
There is so much to think about when advertising your role. As we just discussed, there are some great websites, platforms and tech tools to help you do this! But now, I want to dive into how to leverage your personal brand and your employees to get the word out! Don’t forget about this part 😊
Utilize personal branding and employer branding
The first piece I want to mention is the recommended posts feature on LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn company page admin can create recommended posts, and then employees of the company can visit the company page and share those posts to their personal pages. This helps give employees content for them to share to keep their profiles active, and they are much more likely to share if you’ve started the process for them. Sometimes thinking about what to write and post from scratch can be overwhelming, so people put it off and never post!
Another idea is to create job posting templates for employees. Here at Lighthouse, we have a word document for our team to access of different types of job posting templates that they can copy and paste when creating a LinkedIn post. This way our Lighthouse brand and brand voice is consistent and gives employees a starting point. And then they can add in their unique personality and voice before hitting post! We encourage them to add why they think the role is exciting before posting to their networks. We provide training to our team on how to access these templates, post, and share with their networks. My colleague Joe Ray and I are experts in training managers and employees on employer branding and social media best practices. If we could help you with this at your organization, please reach out!
Recruiters and HR pros listening, this is the time to leverage your personal brand! You likely have a strong network of connections. If you are going to encourage hiring managers and employees to post the link and spread the word with their networks, make sure you are leading the way and posting as well! Be the example and help others gain confidence and skills when it comes to sharing on social media.
Leverage referrals
Last but certainly not least, don’t forget to ask for referrals! Referrals are employee powered hiring. There is awesome technology out there, such as Erin that makes referrals fun, easy, provides streamlined tracking and payouts, and gives your employer brand a boost in the process! Even without a technology tool like Erin, it’s totally do-able to build a referral process and manage it in house. Encourage current employees to send in referrals, and pay them a competitive referral bonus to incentivize them! I actually just finished building out this process at Lighthouse, so if you want to talk referral programs, send me a message.
Working with a recruiter
Depending on how quickly you need the role filled, and the strategic impact of the role, consider working with a recruiting partner like Lighthouse Technology Services! Let me explain further – say you have a critical role that you need filled quickly. Maybe it’s covering someone who’s going out on leave, or you unexpectedly have an opening that is client facing and impacts if your business can even be open. It’s the type of role that’s going to have a big impact on the business if it’s not filled timely.
And then what I mean by strategic impact of the role, means this is a position that is likely going to be hard to fill, is a niche skill set, or is a higher level position that greatly impacts the organization. Working with a recruiting partner can help you get good candidates in quickly, or provide you that targeted sourcing for those high strategic impact roles. The right recruiting agency has the knowledge and skills to jump in and assist right away – besides, it’s their full time job! Feel free to reach out to me to discuss our recruiting process and expertise further.
Wrap-up
Remember, this season of Claire Shares is all about talent attraction. Next time you have a job posting and a job description ready to go, spend the time to plan, prepare and think about where to distribute it to. You don’t want to do the “spray and pray” method. Taking a step back now to make a thoughtful plan, will allow you to move faster through the recruiting process with those ideal candidates. Spraying and praying may mean you have to adjust the search to be more targeted later on, which could be wasting valuable time. This week, think about how you distribute your job postings to attract your ideal candidate to apply.
Thank you for being here with me and joining me for these bite size videos all about all things talent attraction, talent acquisition and talent retention. These areas of HR and People Ops are my favorite and specialty, and I’m so excited to dive in with you. This work is what I do, if you need help with the tools, technology and process around how you attract, acquire and retain talent, reach out to me and let’s talk!
Claire is Coaching 