1. It is TARGETED

Search engine results are all about relevance. Paid search advertising delivers an active and targeted message to potential candidates.

Individuals who see your advertisement are actively searching for your indicated keywords – a generated list, based on your campaign purpose and audience profile, which could be about company brand, career opportunities, industry news, or even keywords about your competitors. 

 

 2. It is FLEXIBLE

Ad placements on traditional recruitment channels, such as job boards, are usually charged weekly or monthly, and they seem to be the easiest solution with a huge amount of eager applicants.

Geo targeting and flexible daily budgets enable recruitment campaigns on a small budget. There is no restriction on the kind of ads the company needs to buy. They allow you to focus in the areas where you really need candidates, or you want to brand yourself. 

An example of this would be for a global trainee recruitment campaign in five countries. You can expose the ads only in the cities your targeted universities are in. And once you have enough applications in a region, you can easily stop it, and then shift budgets elsewhere. 

 

3. It is PERSONALISED

Customised and dynamic ad description messages encourage clicks and also lead qualified traffic to your careers site.

Paid search advertising allows you to create ads based on exactly what you need. Of course, it needs to match the search as well. A customised landing page URL is essential to increase user experience on your career site.

Whether they are fresh graduates or experienced talent, sales or engineers, from Shanghai or New York, Chinese or English speaking, paid search can divide all these groups.

 

4. It is OPTIMISABLE

Imagine real-time optimisation in a traditional recruitment campaign. I doubt you can. After a campaign, reports are generated followed by improvement discussions, and then improvement decisions will be applied in the next campaign.

With search engine advertising, you can measure all the details of a campaign’s performance in realtime. You’ll know exactly which ad group generates the most qualified visits and which is underperforming. More importantly, you can instantly fix by adjusting cost per click bidding, adding negatives to block irrelevant traffic, setting ad scheduling, amending ad descriptions, or leveraging location targeting. Ongoing refinements and prioritising your top performing ad groups will help you to receive refined traffic.

 

5. It is COST-EFFECTIVE

You only pay when your ad has been clicked. Perhaps you already knew that. If a paid search advertising campaign is well managed, the campaign can earn maximised results with very reasonable spending. That is the value of optimisation.

 

6. It is FAR-REACHING

Search engine advertising reaches much more than traditional recruitment channels. In China, through search engines, you are communicating with 98% of Chinese Internet users, far beyond active job seekers. 

If you decide to use Paid Search Advertisement for your next branding and recruitment campaign, I have the following DOs and DON’Ts:

DO develop a mobile-friendly career site. Mobile searching is now faster than ever before, and the engagement of visits from mobile devices is about the same as PCs, but with lower conversion costs. 

DO spend time to improve content and user experience. Paid search ads rely heavily on relevance. Make sure visitors land on the right page for information they are looking for from the text ad, and simply guide them to take action for conversions (applications in most cases).

DON’T expect instant results in just two weeks. It is ongoing optimisation that makes the paid search ad so targeted and cost efficient. 

Paid Search Advertisement is a smart investment for employers. It helps you to expose your brand to those who don’t know you well, and also calls for action to apply for jobs in a recruitment campaign.