12 High Impact Recruitment Channels to Boost CV Acquisition

Think you can do better than job boards and social media? We’ll show you what recruitment channels will yield the best candidates.

It’s a candidate’s market. More often than not, the recruiter who presents the best candidate will be the one landing the placement. But despite the rise of digital marketing, many recruiters still rely on traditional methods to acquire candidates – the age-old newspaper classified advert has evolved to a reliance on job boards and more recently, LinkedIn status updates.

But these two recruitment sources limit your opportunity to attract top talent – either you recruit the same candidates to your jobs as everyone else, or you are only ‘marketing’ jobs to your existing social networks. Unless you engage in active sourcing (a.k.a. head hunting) activities, you will struggle to find the most sought-after and hard-to-find candidates – many of whom you’ve never met and lie outside of your immediate networks.

Identifying and maximising the right recruitment sources and channels will allow you to identify unique candidates and ultimately enable you to make more placements.

What is the meaning of recruitment channels?

A recruitment channel – or recruitment marketing channel – is simply a source of candidate applications and may include anything from a job board to digital marketing platforms, tools or initiatives to attract and convert potential candidates.

What are the different recruitment sources – aka ‘recruitment channels’?

Just like companies use digital marketing techniques to acquire customers, so too should digital strategies enable recruitment marketing channels – attracting more prospective candidates through a host of recruitment platforms. Recruitment channel examples include:

• Job boards: Perhaps the most common and obvious source of candidate applications, job boards (including generalist and specialist websites) have long been a source of candidates, where a recruiter or company posts a job and candidates apply. More recently, job aggregators like [Indeed] have provided an alternative platform where job seekers can search and apply for jobs
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Did you know that 75% of job seekers type their job search query into the Google search bar? Or perhaps they’re looking for information on salary and benefits or hiring trends as they are just kicking off their job search. SEO allows your website to be found online, allowing you to engage with and convert website traffic into candidates
• Google for Jobs: As a subsection of SEO, Google for Jobs crawls and aggregates job adverts from job boards and career sites (including recruiter and employer sites) to improve the job search experience and provide relevant job posts to match the user’s search query. It’s a ‘free’ platform, allowing you to optimise your website and job postings to enhance your visibility and positioning in search results. Interested in learning more? Visit our [Google for jobs] blog post
• Google Ads: The beauty of SEO and paid Google & Microsoft Ads (CPC/CPM) is that you know your audience’s intent – if they are typing a search into Google, you know they are an actively looking for jobs. If you’re challenged in ranking in organic (SEO) results however, then investing in pay-per-click (PPC advertising) – those ads that appear at the very top of your search results – may be an opportunity to capture some of this traffic. It is a marketing channel regularly used by many of the large recruiters or corporates such as Accenture or PWC, among others.
• Organic social channels: These ‘free’ social channels – including both company and individual accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. – have long been a mainstay for recruiters as both a tool to connect and communicate with candidates and/or broadcast status updates or searches to wider communities. While they can be an effective platform to communicate with connections on masse, they do have their limitations – for one, you are limited to your first degree connections and/or connections via people who engaged with (liked/commented/shared) your content, plus the algorithms within each platform often limit the visibility of your posts within your community. Check out these hacks on how recruiters can beat the LinkedIn algorithm.
• Paid social channels: The aforementioned algorithms may make it difficult to gain traction on social media, however, social media channels – particularly LinkedIn and Facebook as the most effective platforms for recruiters – have highly targeted and effective paid advertising options, allowing you to target precise audiences with specific messages. While paid social may be a more expensive option– especially for those highly sought-after audience personas like IT, marketing or medical professionals (among others) – it can be an effective way to attract and engage with more passive candidates who may not be in your immediate social networks.
• Content marketing: The rise of content marketing has played a significant role in the evolution of digital marketing and includes various forms of content including blogs, social media posts, thought leadership/reports, evergreen/cornerstone content, case studies/testimonials, video, email communications, executive profiling articles, and many others. While content marketing is generally more effective at the top of the sales funnel (driving awareness and interest buying behaviours), it can play an important part in providing multiple touch points and nurturing customers through point of ‘sale’ (aka a candidate application or client query).
• Database marketing: The most underutilised channel in a recruiter’s arsenal is his or her own database! These candidate-rich sources are often overlooked by recruiters always looking for ‘net new’ candidates, when the perfect candidate may already exist in your network. Utilising email marketing or marketing automation (nurture sequences) can reactivate and reengage candidates who may have originally applied months or years ago!
• Offline networking: Whether through hosting customer events or attending networking opportunities, one should never overlook the power of face-to-face interactions and the second, third- or fourth-degree referrals that can emerge as a result. While everyone is time poor these days, the secret is providing some form of measurement to ensure that you’re seeing ROI from time invested.
• Referral marketing: In ‘marketing speak’ this refers to a website, company or entity that literally ‘refers’ a customer – whether via a website visit or through an introduction. This may extend to commercial partnerships or simply word-of-mouth advertising and can be a powerful tool that yields substantive results as it relies on the trust established between individuals or groups of people.
• Video marketing: Technically more of a medium than a channel, video communications can be used across marketing channels including website(s), social media, email communications etc, and have risen in prominence in recent years. Not only does video play to the psychology and engagement of audiences, it is highly favoured by social media algorithms that prioritise this content ahead of static posts/images.
• Public relations/media relations: This channel typically refers to a company being profiled (whether directly or as a thought leader) through a host of off/online platforms including newspapers, radio, television and online. This can also extend to online ‘influencers’ who discuss/profile your business to their followers. For recruiters, however, (and especially in actively recruiting candidates specifically), this channel is generally not as effective as some of the others available.

What recruitment channel analytics should you measure?

The optimum recruitment channel metric is cost per acquisition which looks at the total cost per candidate conversion (aka CV or registration), considering the paid cost of the marketing channel (either direct advertising/job board costs or indirect costs like marketing head count or consultancy) divided by the number of candidate conversions obtained.

Once you ascertain your total cost per candidate acquisition, segment by each marketing channel, allowing you to figure out the cost per CV from each of your recruitment channels including SEO, paid advertising, content marketing and the like. Ultimately, the goal is to progressively lower the cost per acquisition (whilst maintaining quality), to a point where it becomes more cost effective to leverage (organic) digital marketing channels over job boards or paid advertising.

Cost per placement is an even more significant metric, looking at the cost per channel through to the final candidate placement, taking into account the placement fees and resulting revenue. While highly commercial, there are a lot of variables impacted by the sales process (business development, candidate management etc.) which makes this metric harder to measure as the result of pure marketing effort.

While there are a host of additional metrics – including website traffic, engagement and social media metrics, these should be considered indicators or factors contributing to the aforementioned conversion metrics. At the end of the day, it’s about marketing contributing to the sales function and delivering ROI, which should have a direct impact on revenue generation!

Ultimately, to optimise your marketing acquisition channels to deliver higher quality candidates at a lower cost, it’s essential to adopt a testing mentality, embracing a trial and error outlook and process while you determine which recruiting channels yield the best return. Thrive Recruitment Marketing can help! At the start of every engagement we will review your current metrics and channel strategy to identify what’s working and what’s not! Our retained marketing strategy provides the insight of a marketing director, identifying which channels are most effective, and developing a plan and strategy that’s tailored for each individual business. The result? More candidates, greater business opportunities and increased revenue. Simple.