Creating an Effective Recruitment Funnel With Indeed Advertising Experiences

Today’s hypercompetitive labour market has prompted many organisations to rethink their approach to recruitment. Given the fierce competition for available talent, successful recruiters are using a variety of analytical and technological tools that promote their companies and burnish employer brands – including taking a page from their marketing colleagues’ playbooks to build 'recruitment funnels'.  

Like a marketing funnel, which takes customers on a journey from having awareness to purchasing a product or service, a recruitment funnel is designed to move quality jobseekers from having awareness of a job to becoming newly hired employees. Let’s look at how thinking more like a marketer can help you fine-tune your recruitment strategy.

Upgrade your recruitment funnel with advertising technology

A typical recruitment funnel is built on the basic steps of the hiring process: awareness, attraction, application, prescreening, interviewing and hiring. A good recruitment funnel is also well defined, with clear processes, benchmarks and goals at every stage, allowing employers to build replicable and scalable objective-based campaigns. 

In the earliest stage of developing a hiring campaign, employers identify objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) – for example, the number of desired applications or cost per application. Recruitment teams then craft job posts, whether by generating new ones or extracting existing posts from an applicant tracking system (ATS). 

Once these job posts are ready to share, it’s time to think like a marketer and strategically target jobseekers’ awareness of this hiring content. A marketing funnel uses metrics, such as clicks, views and engagement, to inform strategy, place content and build audience awareness. A job post is simply an advertisement for an open role, and targeted advertising is the first tool in fine-tuning your recruitment funnel. By combining Indeed’s simplified campaign interface with ad targeting based on specific recruitment goals and KPIs, companies can strategically place postings where they’ll reach the right audience of jobseekers. 

What’s more, Indeed’s optimisation technology automatically uses multichannel placements to promote job postings. Moving from time-consuming, limited manual placement to automated placement that targets the best channel, time and audience not only streamlines recruitment but gives hiring campaigns an extensive reach: Glassdoor and Indeed receive over 67M visits each month, and Indeed’s Trusted Media Network reaches 120+ partner sites. 

Build quality candidate attraction by targeting your ad strategy 

When talent professionals can place ads in front of the quality candidates who are most likely to apply, they’re better able to hit campaign goals. Indeed Targeted Ads | Brand (ITAB) adds additional focus to targeted ads. 

By adding ITAB to your portfolio of Indeed advertising tools, you can increase jobseeker attraction by customising banner ads, which appear on the right-hand side of job search results, to fit the target audience by sharing information such as company details, open roles and photos. For example, if you’re hiring for a managerial role with flexible hours, ITAB promotions can include information that helps define 'flexible' at your company. You can even add a customised call-to-action (CTA), such as 'search for open roles' or 'receive ongoing updates.' 

Another component of Indeed’s advertising experience that enhances jobseeker attraction is Sponsored Jobs, which uses nearly two decades of jobseeker insights and proprietary data from 225 million CVs and 25 million worldwide job posts to target job postings and provide increased ad visibility. Users surveyed report that these premium listings improve the next step in the recruitment funnel – application – delivering 40% more applicants on average than posting a job for free alone and increasing the likelihood of successfully hiring someone by 500%. 

Turning jobseekers into applicants through better brand building

Turning views into applications involves more than posting open roles. In fact, more than 60% of job candidates look for more information about a company after reading a job description. This is where brand building takes centre stage, especially as an employer’s brand becomes more important in career choices. A recent Indeed whitepaper, 'The Impact of Employer Branding on Recruitment and Retention', reports that '79% of people surveyed consider a brand’s mission before applying for a job and more than half of workers say that, when it comes to job satisfaction, company culture is more important than salary.' 

A positive first impression about your company’s mission and culture is, therefore, crucial to engaging jobseekers. You may be aware of Indeed’s Company Pages, which are available to all companies with jobs on Indeed; last year, jobseekers used an Indeed Company Page to research a company more than 1.5 billion times. What you might not know is that your company can now enhance and fine-tune that basic brand messaging with the Select Branding Bundle, an expanded service through Indeed’s partnership with Glassdoor. 

The Select Branding Bundle upgrade combines Indeed’s and Glassdoor’s reach – 55 million jobseekers monthly on Glassdoor and 250 million global monthly unique visitors on Indeed – through increased options for brand promotion and campaign oversight. Through the Select Branding Bundle, for example, you can invite employees to post reviews, effectively acting as 'talent ambassadors' by showcasing their experience; highlight company culture through the 'Why Work With Us' multimedia section; integrate social media accounts; and more. Plus, you can view and respond to all of your Indeed and Glassdoor reviews in one place. 

The Select Branding Bundle also comes with data-based insights, such as 'follower' reports by location, job function and email, or keywords used in reviews, which use word clouds to build visual representations of pros and cons. Analysing these insights can develop actionable items for improving your brand perception – and an appealing company story can shift talent from 'just looking' to actively applying. In fact, employers who use the Select Branding Bundle report, on average, an increase in views across their Indeed and Glassdoor profiles (12%), job clicks (27%) and 'apply start' clicks (34%). 

Get to hiring faster through better candidate experiences

No matter what role you’re filling, the goal is keeping quality talent progressing through the recruitment funnel – prescreening and interviewing – and to the hire. Waiting can be the hardest part of any job search, and too long a timeline creates an HR 'black hole', causing quality talent to disengage and give up. 'Ghosting' (a term from online dating that refers to disappearing from a relationship without warning) has become a standard hiring experience that’s only increased since the pandemic’s onset. In fact, Indeed’s research reveals that 51% of jobseekers believe employers are ghosting more during the pandemic – and that may be due to overwhelmed recruiters. 

Indeed Hiring Events, with its automated CV screening and interview scheduling, speeds up the recruitment process by reducing the amount of time spent on repetitive processes and workflows – eliminating up to 90% of manual recruitment tasks from hiring teams’ to-do lists and driving faster, more efficient candidate prescreening. 

Fine-tuning hiring processes through automation can free up recruiters to spend more time nurturing candidates through quality communications. Jobseekers and employers alike believe communication problems are one of ghosting’s biggest drivers. For example, some jobseekers who ghost employers at the interview stage say anxiety played a role. Through more empathetic and nurturing interactions with employers and recruiters, jobseekers can open up about needs (breaks between interviews, necessary accommodations for required travel or technology concerns) and reduce stress.

These essential human touches help provide better candidate experiences – as does efficient, effective interviewing. Indeed Hiring Events is built for effective virtual interviewing, and recruiters are seeing gains in candidate experience: 90% of jobseekers rate their experience with Indeed Hiring Events favourably. 

Making the most of your recruitment funnel 

Thinking like a marketer can help expand your hiring campaign’s reach and deliver more competitive outcomes at each step of your recruitment funnel.

Whether you’re building awareness, driving attraction, increasing applications, or making prescreening, interviewing and hiring more efficient and timely, identifying and using the right tools and technology can fine-tune your processes and maximise outcomes. 

Pairing Indeed’s automated ad experiences and employer branding services means employers and recruiters can more strategically address goals and KPIs. And while a successful recruitment funnel starts with putting job postings in front of quality jobseekers, hiring teams need comprehensive solutions that simplify, optimise and improve their recruitment funnel to deliver the right talent in the best way possible. 

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¹  SimilarWeb, Average Monthly Total Visits, Q3 2021

² Indeed data (UK)

³ Indeed data (UK)

⁴ Glassdoor/Harris poll, Sept 2019, US

⁵ Google Analytics, Visits represents peak monthly visits in CQ3'21

⁶ Google Analytics, Unique Visitors, February 2020

⁷ Indeed and Glassdoor data (worldwide), May 2020 – May 2021

⁸ Indeed and Glassdoor data (worldwide), May 2020 – May 2021

⁹ Indeed and Glassdoor data (worldwide), May 2020 – May 2021

¹⁰ Indeed data, average time savings (US)

¹¹ Indeed data (worldwide)