Radio + Recruitment = Smashing Success

If I had to pick three things that radio is best for they would be branding, event marketing, and recruitment. Wait. What? Radio recruitment? Really? Yes. Here’s why.

When you’re looking to hire employees for your company, where’s the first place you turn to? A decade ago, it would have been the help wanted section of the newspaper, a recruitment service, or local help wanted magazines. Today, there are dozens upon dozens of job search websites. There are websites for specific industries, income brackets, and everything in between.

Advertising for job openings on the radio is one of the best avenues to consider in your marketing strategy. When you place your listing in the newspaper or on one of the hundreds of job search websites, you’re only reaching candidates who are actively looking for a job. In essence, you’ve narrowed down your audience to the current unemployment rate. Which, currently in Minnesota, is at 4.1 percent as of April 2021. That’s an awfully small percentage of the populace you’re reaching. 

Why Radio for Recruitment

When you use radio to advertise your job openings, you’ll reach everyone. Reaching everyone is powerful. Instead of talking to those who are out of work and/or looking for a job, you reach those who are gainfully employed, and may be persuaded to switch careers if the right job comes along. Although someone may not be actively looking, it doesn't mean they’re not interested in a career change either.

The best workers are already working. There are those out there who fell upon hard times and lost their job for whatever reason. But, by and large, the best candidates for your job opening are already employed and doing a great job for their current employer. 

Wouldn’t you love the chance to talk to them? Radio can do that. Not only will you reach those who are in need, but you’ll also reach those who aren’t but could be swayed by your compelling offer.

A Few Tips

Before you jump in head first and run your next recruitment campaign on the radio, here are some tips you should consider.

Stick with one job opening per ad. Radio works best when you can dramatize a single idea. Choose one of your openings and dramatize the benefits of the job and why working for your company would be the best decision the listener ever made. If you have multiple openings available, either create separate ads for each, or prioritize them by order of importance.

Avoid lists of qualifications. It can be easy to take your newspaper listing and turn it into a radio script. Listing out qualifications and required experience is boring. Find a way to say those things creatively. Make the job sound fun and exciting, get the listener eager to apply. Don’t worry, we can write the copy for you.

Have a clear call-to-action. When listeners want to apply for your job, your ad should give them a clear place to do it. It’s hard to remember email addresses or phone numbers, so I suggest having them visit your website to apply. Setup a landing page for the job and have the user go there. Use an easy to remember URL too, like mywebsite.com/apply. Your webmaster can help set that up.

Speaking of your website...

Use Digital Display Advertising to Supplement Your Radio Schedule

While radio is a great tactic to reach a lot of people at the same time, you should still employ more targeted tactics to reach the right people you're looking to hire. Be sure the online display banners use the same messaging and calls-to-action as your radio ads to keep everything consistent. Plus, if the radio station you're running ads on also offers website placements, take full advantage of it.

You can also run display ads on just about any website. Here are a few tactics we've used with our clients and had great success:

• Search & Keyword Targeting - this tactic will serve your employment ads to users searching for and reading about the jobs positions you're looking to fill, or just those whom are deemed to be "in market" for a job change.
• Geofencing - Remember how I said above that the best employees are already working? With geofencing, you can serve ads to people who frequently enter competitors' locations. All we need is their street address. What better is that once the software has identified a user, it adds them to an audience and uses sophisticated cross-device matching to serve them ads even when they're not at work.
• Address Curation - Similar to geofencing, we can target individual households where people live who meet certain criteria. For example, let's say you're looking to hire a few sales associates for your sporting goods store. With address curation, we can find households of people who are interested in sports, camping, and outdoor activities. There are literally thousands of criteria available to find the best match for just about anything.

Those are just a few of the tactics we can employ to supplement a radio recruitment schedule with a display ad schedule. Doing this also has the added benefit of both mediums boosting each-other: radio creates awareness, so when a user sees a display ad for your company, it's much more likely to resonate, which works in reverse as well.

Use Radio (And Digital!) to Find Your Next Great Employee

Please consider radio advertising in addition to whatever else you’re doing as a part of your overall recruitment marketing strategy. 

A well-executed recruitment campaign works wonders on the radio. We have dozens of clients who’ve trusted radio to help find their next great employee. Won’t you do the same?