Picture the scene. You’ve multiple roles to fill. You need to hire quickly. And with a diverse range of vacancies, you need to attract and engage with a wide pool of people.

Recruitment advertising will play a significant role in your talent attraction strategy here. But it can be eye-wateringly expensive, can’t it?

Here’s how to reduce your recruitment advertising costs using an Applicant Tracking System.

1. Improve your candidate journey

The candidate journey covers each step a candidate takes, from the moment they land on your careers page to the moment they hit ‘submit’ on their application.

To us, a strong candidate journey is one that makes the process simple, quick and enjoyable for potential candidates. It includes an engaging and attractive careers site, which reflects your employer brand, communicates your working culture and clearly lists your live vacancies.

It reduces unnecessary steps for candidates – so they can go from browsing job opportunities to hitting ‘Apply now’ in one straightforward motion. And it features online application forms that work across desktop, mobiles and tablets to encourage more candidates to apply.

Implementing a simpler and sleeker candidate journey should increase direct applications to your organisation – thus reducing your reliance on traditional recruitment advertising avenues.

2. Increase your reach with social media

Does your ATS offer a range of social integrations?

Options such as automatically posting jobs to your professional networks, sharing on your personal social channels and using a Facebook portal to engage with potential candidates and promote your vacancies can be invaluable in increasing exposure of your jobs.

There’s great scope for an increased organic reach as users can share vacancies with their own networks. What’s more, social integrations could enhance your connection with millennial candidates.

If your ATS can integrate with a range of social media platforms, you can reduce your recruitment advertising spend through clever, targeted social posting and encouraging potential candidates to share with their own circles.

3. Direct your spend at effective channels

We’re often told that knowledge is power. When you’re trying to reduce your recruitment advertising spend, this knowledge comes in the form of source reporting.

The insight given by your ATS source reporting should enable you to understand which channels are proving most effective in delivering candidates to your vacancies.

Equipped with this knowledge, you can then make informed decisions about which recruitment advertising platforms you focus your spend on.

Source reporting can also help strengthen your social strategy, as you should be able to see if Facebook performs better than Twitter for certain roles, for example.

Do ensure you cross reference your source reporting with other reports, such as ones which allow you to see how many candidates progressed to interview or were hired.

Without this additional insight, you may be pouring resources into recruitment advertising channels which are delivering a high volume of candidates, but candidates who don’t have the skills or experience you need.

Reducing your recruitment advertising costs

Using an ATS, we’d expect to see your print and web recruitment advertising spend to reduce by 20% in your first year of usage, and to 50% by the third year.

With an improved candidate journey, you’ll be receiving more direct applications and losing fewer applicants along the way. With social media integrations, you’ll be expanding your organic reach amongst a diverse pool of potential talent. And with source reporting, you’ll be able to reduce your spend on ineffective campaigns.

Your ATS not delivering the savings you’d expect on your print advertising? You know what to do… 🙂

Find out more

Three ways to measure your recruitment ROI

Can you fix a broken recruitment process?

Volunteer recruitment – does candidate experience matter?