How Loud Is Your Voice?

As a recruiter, your task is to make your client's open position stand out in the crowd. You do this by making your voice louder than all the other recruiters and hiring managers to attract the best candidates.

Imagine you're scheduled to give a presentation in a large auditorium packed to the brim with people…and your microphone doesn't work. What do you do to make sure your
voice is heard by as many people as possible?

This challenge isn't so different from the one you face as a recruiter. Your task is to make your client's open position stand out among the crowd. You spend each day
trying to figure out how to make your voice louder than all the other recruiters and hiring managers out there so that you can attract as many qualified candidates as possible for your clients.

So what's the most effective way of doing this? The first place you can start is figuring out your share of voice – a concept that looks at how many qualified candidates you reach in the marketplace with your recruiting efforts. And in order to maximize your share of voice, you need to use a mix of both traditional recruiting tools as well as advertising to ensure you're reaching as many candidates as possible.

Estimating your share of voice is simple. Let's pretend you have an IT position for which you're recruiting, and your client has told you to make it a nationwide search. You've posted the position on online job boards, in newspapers and started networking for referrals.

If there are a total of 100,000 potential candidates out there, and you're reaching 20,000 of them using your traditional recruiting tactics, that means your current share of voice is 20 percent. The other 80 percent is out there for your competitors to influence with their share of voice. While you may not need the full 80 percent, reaching and staying top of mind with this talent pool helps build your pipeline for current and future job orders.

Why add advertising into your recruiting mix? Advertising increases your share of voice by creating awareness, which is essentially a gateway to action. The more awareness you create with one job candidate in the industry, the more awareness you create with others. Awareness then generates interest, which leads to motivation, which creates demand, which ultimately turns into action.

One thing to be aware of is that the effects advertising has on your clients may not always be immediately apparent. The reason is because advertising helps you increase awareness through direct and indirect responses. Both equate to more exposure for your company, but oftentimes, indirect responses can be overlooked because they're much more difficult to track.

A direct response is one that you can quickly and easily evaluate. For example, you can count the number of people who clicked on your banner advertisement on a Web site. On the other hand, you will also have indirect responses to advertising.

For instance, many of us have seen the infomercial with a toll free number to order. Most of us, however, did not buy the item directly from the infomercial. Instead, we later saw the item in the store, remembered the infomercial and bought it there.

This indirect response works in a similar fashion for candidates. Just because they didn't respond directly and immediately to an advertised job posting doesn't mean the efforts you have put forth didn't have an impact on them. It may just take these candidates a bit longer to act.

A good example of how a company has used online advertising to increase response is National City. National City has used a combination of different size banner advertisements to drive awareness for its hiring needs in a variety of locations. When it comes to the display advertising, they do a great job of highlighting specific benefits of working at National City, and they tailor it for their specific audience.

As a result of using best practices for creative and highly targeted recruitment advertising, National City increased the number of job applications by over 100 percent when running banners for those specific positions as opposed to when they weren't advertising with us at all. Just because you don't have that microphone doesn't mean you can't be heard in that auditorium. You just have to find ways to make your voice heard. So the next time you're about to launch a recruiting campaign for a client, ask yourself, how loud is your voice?

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