The recruitment industry is booming.
In the US, is it estimated that 24% of workers change jobs every year, meaning around 40 million people are searching for jobs and being employed every year in the US alone!
This represents huge revenue potential for your job board. But, as you'd expect, it has not gone unnoticed. There's been a rise in the number of companies looking to take advantage of the opportunities presented by online recruitment. As a result, the market is becoming increasingly competitive.
Large, generalist aggregators are securing business by undercutting the competition on price, meaning that the smaller, more niche job boards need to come up with smart ways to stay ahead when selling adverts.
Social media has also created another challenge for your digital sales teams. Since buying LinkedIn in 2016, Microsoft has started integrating the professional networking tool into its existing product portfolio, bringing jobs directly to potential candidates. One example is Resume Assistant, which flags up relevant job listings as users update their resumes in Microsoft Word.
Facebook also recently launched into the employment space, in a bid to compete in the blue-collar, local recruitment space.
Another disruption to the marketplace is Google for Jobs, which is changing how search engine traffic can be directed to your job board. Madgex job boards are fully integrated with Google for Jobs, and our initial findings suggest that this new way of search directing traffic to job boards has been positive. However, longer term, Google could decide to monetize this new feature, similar to how businesses currently pay for AdWords space.
All of these factors could impact your sales.
So, what can you do to increase your digital advertising revenue in this highly competitive environment?
The Right Tools
The number one thing you can do to alleviate these challenges is to ensure your team has the necessary analytics tools for them to answer any objections when making a sale.
Tracking and reporting ROI (return on investment) will provide insightful information about your job board’s performance, enabling sales executives to give an accurate picture of what potential clients can expect from their adverts. It also enables them to provide a consultative sales approach when managing their client base, which will help with upsells. This personal service is something the big guns simply don’t offer. Their ‘pile it high and sell cheap’ approach means recruiters and employers deal with faceless organizations, which have no niche or quality behind them.
Your sales team can personalize the sales package according to each client and provide hard facts to back up their pitch. Don't just tell them you have great candidates – prove it.
Proven Upsells
A great way to increase revenue is to upsell features that can be added to a standard job listing, or other products on your job board. These include banner ads, featured jobs on the home page, highlighted job posts, or paying for keywords to ensure the advert appears higher up the listing.
Make sure you invest in a technology provider that provides a platform with a host of proven upsells that provide great results. This links back to data and analytics, as they enable your sales team to see exactly what works and what doesn’t. When they are upselling a product they can clearly show a client: ‘If you buy that, you will get this result.’
Effective Marketing
The key to any successful business is effective marketing. Whether you are opening a shop on the high street or running a job board, you can stock it with great products, provide world-class service, and promise value, but if no one comes through the door – or visits the website – it will go out of business.
As a job board owner, you have access to a niche, highly qualified audience, but you need to create an effective marketing strategy to engage with them.
- Encourage people to sign up to your email alerts and newsletters
- Develop an SEO strategy
- Advertise offline at relevant events or in publications
- Get busy on social media
- Develop a strong content strategy to raise your profile as the number one job board for your niche
By driving candidates to your job board, you will maximize your sales team’s potential and help them prove the value of what they are selling.
Be Flexible
The power of the data you collect changes according to your job board. It’s about leveraging the thing that is unique to your brand.
For example, Madgex recently launched a job board for professionals that work in the cryptocurrency industry. The people searching for those jobs are incredibly specialized – you won’t find them looking for jobs on Indeed. The focus here is quality and not quantity; it’s about who the candidates are and whether your job board can attract them.
Niche job boards might not always offer the largest number of applications per job, so the data that matters is your conversion. Your client may only get five applicants, what your sales team needs to prove is that they will end up hiring one of them.