Unique digital display ad. targeting for recruitment.
Back in March 2019, Facebook agreed to overhaul its targeted advertising system, following a lawsuit in the US around accusations that landlords, lenders and employers were using the platform to discriminate. The lawsuit compels Facebook to withhold some detailed demographic data from advertisers who are looking to market jobs, property and credit services.
This would appear to constitute a paradigm shift for Facebook, whose business model has always been based on monetising this personal data. At least some of these changes were implemented in December 2019, and although currently limited to the US, it will be interesting to see what the longer term impact might be within the Recruitment Industry in the UK.
Clearly, Facebook has become an important channel for some employers to market job openings, but does it offer the most effective means of targeting the best talent and will future changes lead to degradation of targeting opportunities? Yes, they currently offer some great tools, but there are very few businesses who can rely on the platform as their sole candidate source.
There is in fact a multitude of other marketing channels that employers might choose to use, all of which have their own strengths and weaknesses. Job boards can be a useful and relatively cost effective way of marketing opportunities to active jobseekers and with the growth in programmatic, the return on investment can be more closely managed. However, as a marketing channel, it is not a particularly good way of accessing passive candidates, who are unlikely to be presented with the live job opening.
Of course, LinkedIn and many of the Job Board operators provide access to databases that potentially allow ‘passive candidates’ to be identified. This of course comes at a cost, both from a license perspective and the investment in time, resulting from search activity and the communication with potential candidates.
Geo-targeting of digital display job ads would on the surface appear to offer employers an interesting way of reaching talent working for their competitors. However, low ad serving volumes resulting from only being able to serve ads when someone is in the targeted area pushes up the cost and the inability to refine the perimeter of the location being targeted creates significant wastage.
In January 2020, Crooton launched it’s Employer Fencing product, that for the first time allows employers to access talent in a much more targeted way. This new product opens up the opportunity for specific locations (businesses/competitors) to be ring-fenced to the nearest metre, and ads to be served to anyone entering the area. This audience can then be served these messages for a period of 28 days after they have left the fenced area, allowing ads to be presented to potential candidates when browsing the web at home etc.
This new approach to accessing talent creates some very significant benefits and allows some of the problems with other established channels to be overcome.
- Ability to present jobs to the best talent working for your competitors.
- Access a larger pool through the targeting of attendees of trade events (whilst at the event and for 28 days afterwards).
- Effectively target students attending educational establishments
- Remove wastage through the exclusion of short-term ‘visitors’ to fenced areas
- Ability to create employer ads in multiple formats to maximize the opportunity to serve the ads
- Message presented to the audience multiple times over period of campaign, increasing awareness and propensity to click
We believe this exciting new service opens up access to a large talent pool that would have previously been very difficult and expensive to access.
For the time being, no single channel is likely to provide the complete solution to delivering the very best talent for employers; but with crooton’s Employer Fencing product, used in conjunction with its Job Board Advertising, Search & Screening Services we certainly think we can improve your odds of finding some amazing candidates.
For further info. Please give us a call on 0208 124 2558