Candidate Retargeting Through Content Marketing (Part 3)

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

In the first two parts of this series I shared what candidate retargeting is, why it’s a valuable tool and a few specific strategies for retargeting candidates. The particular strategies we discussed in part two of this series can be especially useful when combined with the tool I’ll be talking about today.

Pay-per-click advertisements have long been used by companies to drive traffic to their website but when companies began combining them with retargeting, it allowed them to see the full benefit of their initial pay-per-click advertising investment. The fact is, less than five percent make a purchase the first time they visit a website, and similar rates are seen by job seekers as well. Consumers have grasped the collaborative effort of retargeting and pay-per-click advertisements and now many large, high profile companies have as well.

Combining retargeting with pay-per-click advertisement is the logical next step to enhance your retargeting campaign but it’s sometimes not the first effort to come to mind when recruiters are seeking new candidates. Reaching so far into the world of advertising may seem excessive for hiring as you may think only those attempting to sell a product need both, but it’s the best way to make the most of your efforts. In all actuality, retargeting without pay-per-click advertisements makes things harder because you need the first impression before you can go after the second, third and fourth.

There are many types of pay-per-click advertising you can utilize as you seek to attract new candidates, so it’s important to know the types of candidates you wish to attract. For instance, you could strictly utilize job boards that will feature sponsored jobs on a pay-per-click basis, which are five times more likely to be clicked on than organic job search results according to some job boards. However, you could also utilize social networks like Facebook, professional networks such as LinkedIn, paid search on search engines like Google or even advertisements on websites completely unrelated to job search. It doesn’t hurt to diversify your pay-per-click advertising, but each channel you use should be a well-considered part of your strategy.

The strategies these companies are using are both complex and simple at the same time. The retargeting vendors they hire use complicated algorithms to determine which ads to display on which websites but at the end of the day, it’s all about attracting customers to your careers page or even better, to your talent network, with pay-per-click advertisements and then reaching out to them again in other places on the internet. When you break it down, it’s really just a more technological version of what you do every day as a recruiter or hiring manager: make contact with new candidates and continue to build a rapport with them over time.

Does your company utilize both pay-per-click advertising and retargeting? If so, have you seen more success with both than just with one or the other? Let us know in the comments below.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

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