Like with every aspect of your recruitment strategy, you want to get the most out of your job advertisements. It’s one of the most important ways to reach potential candidates, and you want to make sure you’re maximizing your ROI and staying on track for your recruitment goals. The best way to wring every bit of value out of your job advertisements is to set clear campaign objectives.

Start With A Clear Vision Of Your Ultimate Campaign Objectives

Before you start posting ads, your first step should be coming up with a comprehensive plan, with a clear view of what you’re trying to achieve with your job advertisements. “Better candidates” or “good ROI” is a good start, but you should have specific, measurable campaign objectives in mind, such as:

• Reduce cost-per-placement by $X.
• Increase impressions by X%.
• Get X more clicks per ad.
• Improve ad engagement by X%.
• Fill a position in X days.
• Find X more candidates with a certain level of experience.

These goals should be specific to your job advertising—not the recruitment process in general. It’s also important to have a clear sense of your previous (or current) results and metrics from your job advertisements. If you’re starting from scratch, estimates are fine, but if your organization is already using an AI software platform or other programmatic recruiting tools, you should have that data at your fingertips to establish a benchmark.

Keep An Eye On Costs

Chances are, you don’t need to be reminded to be cost-conscious at any point during the recruitment and hiring cycle (show me an organization that isn’t constantly trying to improve the numbers!), but for many organizations, the cost is the defining factor in job advertising campaigns.

Before launching any campaign, know what your costs already are for similar campaigns: cost-per-applicant (CPA), cost-per-hire (CPH), and cost-per-click (CPC) are often the most important metrics in measuring an ad campaign. Cost-per-click is usually the easiest and most straightforward metric since the data is usually readily available to compare against your costs. These metrics can be hard to trace with an ad campaign that involves third-party sites, agencies, or applications, but AI platforms can help by aggregating this data for you.

A cost-centric advertising campaign should include aggregating user data from end to end, including identified touchpoints, time spent at each touchpoint, drop-off rates, and the number of clickers/viewers at every step.

Set Volume Goals

If cost campaign objectives focus on your investment (or input), volume campaign objectives are more about the output of your efforts. If your primary goals are to increase the number of users interacting with your ads or the number of click-throughs, the metrics are a bit different. Consider the following:

• Clicks, or a straightforward summary of the number of times people clicked on your ad, where they clicked, whether they dropped off, etc.
• Applicants, or people who entered your hiring tools through a particular job ad or engine.
• Hires, or people who are ultimately hired after engaging with your job ads.

This information can also inform your cost-centric campaign objectives, working together to create a comprehensive view of how your job ads are performing.

Set SMART Campaign Objectives

This is why your historical campaign data (or similar campaign data, if your organization is essentially starting from scratch) is so essential. Like most goals, you want your ad campaign objectives to be SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-based

If you’re not starting with campaign objectives that are realistic and achievable, your campaign is headed down a frustrating path. As you look to optimize your processes, having a clear idea of where you’ve been, what you want to achieve, and what your ongoing investment is will help you craft a campaign that meets your recruitment needs.

Using the above guidelines when setting ad campaign objectives will help you set clear, smart goals that are budget-friendly.  These tips, in conjunction with tools such as programmatic recruitment software, will set your campaigns up for success and allow you to make quick and effective adjustments when needed.