Recruiting Session 8:

Hey guys, it’s Matt. In the last Session, we discussed the need to develop a good advertising mix to increase the visibility of our driving jobs. And we began looking at specific types of ads to include in that mix. In this session, we’ll pick up right where we left off with Remarketing Advertising.

Yes, remarketing is an odd name, but it actually makes sense. It’s a way of marketing to someone a second time. This form of advertising is also part of Google’s Adwords platform, and it lets you show ads to people who have visited your web pages. When people leave a landing page without applying, for example, remarketing can help you reconnect with them by showing relevant ads as they browse the web or use mobile apps.

No doubt, you’ve encountered this. Any time you’ve gone to a site and then noticed ads for it following you around the web, that’s remarketing, and it offers three notable, or you might say, remarkable, advantages in getting re-seen.

First, you can attract attention by using pictures. Unlike text-based search ads, remarketing ads are designed to be visual banners. You can create and upload these on your own or use Google’s Display Ad Builder, which is free and user-friendly.

A second advantage of remarketing is its far reach. Your ads appear across Google’s large scale Display Network. This includes over 2 million websites and smartphone apps visited by more than 80% of Internet users.

The third advantage of remarketing is that you can focus on a very precise audience. Instead of advertising to every site visitor, you can narrow the viewership as much as you’d like. So, you might choose visitors from a specific city who went to a particular landing page at a certain time, but didn’t apply for a job. This level of precision lets you direct your ad dollars where you need them most. And since remarketing uses a similar auction and pay-per-click model as we discussed previously, it’s also a budget friendly option.

Before moving on from remarketing, I just want to repeat something I mentioned previously about Search Ads–that there’s a lot of technical wizardry behind the curtains with these Google advertisements. And I recognize I might have raised as many questions as I answered. If that’s the case, know that you can find in-depth explanations at Google AdWords Support.

But in addition to that, know that you’re also welcome to contact us at Ramsey. We’re a certified Google Partner with AdWords experts on staff who’d be glad to help.

And with that, I think we’ve stayed in the wonderful world of Google long enough. Let’s click our ruby slippers and head to the next online advertising destination, aggregators. A job aggregator is simply a search engine for jobs. It collects, or aggregates, openings from across the web and makes them easily searchable for job seekers. You’re probably familiar with the big aggregators like Indeed or SimplyHired.

So how do these fit into our advertising mix? Well, chances are, they’re already in your mix, even if you didn’t know it. Because aggregators collect job openings from as many careers pages, job boards, and applicant tracking systems as possible, your jobs are already appearing in search results. But as we discussed previously with Google, unless someone is searching for your company by name, you’re probably way down in the list.

So you can do a couple of things to boost your visibility. First, you can establish a formal relationship with an aggregator and set up a direct job feed to get your jobs listed on their site faster. This costs you nothing. Second, you can pay to promote some job posts. This works almost exactly like search advertising with Google and can be a good option to increase awareness for important or hard-to-fill positions.

So, those are job aggregators; now let’s talk about job boards.

It certainly pays to find the right talent, which is why companies are willing to buy placements on job boards like CareerBuilder. It’s probably the best known board, there are literally thousands of them and thousands more people who use them. A lot of that traffic comes from web searches, but it’s also not uncommon for people to have favorite boards where they go to job hunt.

So how do we know which, if any, of these to use? We’ll that answer will differ for every carrier, but here are six questions any of us can ask when we’re checking out a job board or when we get contacted by one of their sales reps.

Question #1: Is the job board general-purpose or industry-specific? Is it for any type of job opening or only truck driving positions? I’d caution you here that if it’s a general purpose job board that’s not widely known, it probably won’t deliver the results you need.

Question #2: If the board is specifically for driving jobs, is it for every kind nationwide or does it cater to a specific type of driver, load, route, or region? You’ve just gotta know who you’re targeting.

Question #3: Does the board use a multi-carrier or a direct application? Think of this as online dating. With a multi-carrier app, a driver completes his online profile and then gets matched with every compatible carrier. You and a dozen others might receive that same application, so the driver’s not interested specifically in you, just in finding a job. That means it’s a race between carriers where those fastest to reach the driver will win.

A direct application is the opposite. The driver is pursuing you. He’s applying directly for your job and company, and it’s just a matter of responding.

So which option is better: multi-carrier or direct? Well, it just depends. Either will generate leads, but the most common trade-off between them is quantity vs. quality. Multi-carrier will generally give you more applications, but direct will generally give you better ones. Of course, in either case, the driver has to find the job board first, which brings us to question #4.

Does the board pay for any external advertising to promote itself and your jobs? Common examples would be search ads on Google or paid posts on Indeed like we’ve discussed previously.

Another way to find out what sort of visibility and results to expect is by asking question #5:

Will the board give you a list of current customers so you can contact them for reference checks?

And finally Question #6: Will they give you a free trial or, at least, an initial discount? Even if they say, “no,” it doesn’t hurt to ask.

So, those are six questions for evaluating job boards, and before any of us gets bored with this topic, let’s move to our last online advertising option: Craigslist.

If there’s one of these sites that’s not like the others, it’s Craiglist. It just marches to its own hippy beat. But one thing it does have in common with the rest is that a lot of people go there to look for jobs. And as we’ve helped carriers advertise over the years, Craigslist has consistently provided lots of leads, so it’s worth considering for your mix. But as you do, remember a few things.

First, Craigslist is for local classifieds. That means if you have jobs in different cities and regions, you have to go to the sites for those locations to post your jobs. You can’t do it from one central location.

Second, Craigslist lets you list jobs for free in many places, but charges a fee for posts in large cities. And you pay that charge up front regardless of the results.

Third, it can be hard to stand out on Craigslist. Each site has a page specifically for transportation jobs, but it’s usually full of openings, and the most recent show up first. That means if it’s been a couple of weeks since you listed your job, it’s probably buried under new entries, and the only way to get back to the top is to relist it.

Speaking of lists, that brings us to the end of ours for this Session. We’ve looked at some of the best and most prominent ways to advertise jobs: options that would make a good mix for any carrier. But I want to emphasize that we certainly haven’t covered every type of advertising. There are other that can make good additions to a mix.

So that begs the question: among all the options we’ve covered and the others we haven’t, how can you be sure to choose the right mix? Well, you could certainly enlist the help of a professional ad agency with a proven track record.

But even then, the only sure-fire way to get your mix right is to continually measure results and make adjustments.

And that’s what we’ll talk about in our next Session. Until then, I’m Matt.