Submitted by Avionte

Love it or hate it, marketing is one of the core functions of every staffing and recruitment firm but it’s often the department with the least amount of dedicated resources.

When you’re short on budget, staff or resources, your options for expensive marketing tools are thin. The good news? There are quite a bit of awesome and free marketing tools.

Here’s our list of six powerful (and free) recruitment marketing tools that you can start using today to help your business grow.

1.Google Analytics– This website analytics power tool is one of your best friends in recruitment marketing. The best part? It’s 100 percent free and even offers complimentary training programs. If you haven’t already, be sure to download Google Analytics and dive into the beginner’s course to get the basics down.

While we could easily write an entire blog series on Google Analytics and the many recruitment marketing ideas it offers, let’s take a gander at three questions that Google Analytics can help you answer with data.

Q1: Which of your social media platforms are driving the most traffic?

To determine this, all you need to do is go to your Master View of your Analytics dashboard, select Acquisition, then Social and finally Network Referrals. In the example below, we can see that YouTube was easily the highest driver of web traffic. Knowing that helps understand where you should allocate the most of your social recruiting and which channels to avoid.

Q2: Which of your pages (excluding the homepage) is driving the most candidates to your website?

For this example, we’re going to look at the Behavior tab and under Site Content, look at the Landing Pages section. This will show you where your traffic is “landing” or entering your website for the first time. In the Google Test Account, we can see that the redesign/apparel page drives the most traffic. Using this information, you can tell what source(s) brings traffic to your website and what pages don’t, helping laser-in on which pages to spend the most time optimizing.

Q3: In terms of geography, what US state brings in the most users?

Select the Audience tab and go under Geo. Drilling down even further, select location. A map will appear of the world, click United States (or whatever country you’re recruiting in) and then look at which state has the most users. In this example, California has the most. If you click California, you can zoom in further to discover which cities bring in users. Having this geographic knowledge allows you to run more targeted ad campaigns.

2. Google trends– Surprise! Another Google tool. This time we’re looking at Google Trends, which analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. In a nutshell, Google Trends helps recruiters (among many things) determine:

What job titles are higher searched (copywriter vs content specialist)

Which states have a higher concentration of job search (are people more interested in copywriter jobs in Georgia vs Minnesota)

In this example, let’s say you’re a multi-branch professional staffing firm that’s looking to fill a copywriter position. Using Google Trends, you want to find out what title resonates better with candidates. Will job seekers search for “copywriter jobs” or content specialist jobs”? After entering the comparison, you discover that copywriter was the clear winner. Having this information makes it easy to post jobs with terms job hunters are actually using.

In the next example, let’s say you’re looking to fill a remote copywriter job. Using data from the previous example, you know that the job title, “copywriter” is more searched but now you want to take it a step further and see which state has the highest number of people searching for copywriter jobs. In Google Trends, you enter the query, “copywriter jobs.” With one quick search, you notice most searches occur in New York, which empowers you to have a more targeted search area. While this example is very basic, exploring around with Google Trends will help uncover meaningful marketing data – all for free!

3. Keywords Everywhere – Search engine optimization (SEO) is more important than ever considering the average person conducts 3-4 Google searches every day. Determining what keywords your candidates are searching for can help optimize your content, which is where Keywords Everywhere comes in handy. For those unfamiliar, Keyworks Everywhere is a free Chrome extension that automatically populates keyword research anytime you search in Google. While limiting, this tool can help uncover related keywords to help boost your SEO efforts.

In the example below, we simply Googled, “copywriter jobs” and if you look to the right side of the screenshot, you’ll notice a detailed list of related keywords complete with information on search volume and difficulty to rank for (Comp).

4. Drift– Recruitment chatbots are a phenomenal way to connect with candidates, streamline the recruiting process and drive engagement on your website. Drift is a chatbot tool that’s easy to install (just a copy and paste of code to your website) and allows you to interact with website visitors – all in real time. The best part is that you can start Drift for free. 

5. Canva– Canva is a fantastic free design tool that’s super easy to use and even better for making quick advertisements. Best part? You don’t need graphic design experience to make masterfully crafted ads. The example below literally took 45 seconds to create a professional graphic for social media that highlights a job opening. Canva Social Image Example 6. Facebook Insights – This free tool is something you probably already have (assuming you have a business Facebook account). Insights is simply a platform where you can monitor your competitor’s social presence, create Facebook ads, and get basic analytics on your social posts. It’s easy to use and helps track ROI on social advertising.

6. Facebook Insights - All of these free recruitment marketing tools can be used individually or collectively for powerful marketing results. If you’re familiar with Avengers Endgame or Infinity war, think of these marketing tools as infinity stones. Once you’ve collected them all, you’re virtually invincible in your marketing efforts. Just be sure to measure ROI on your recruitment marketing so you can tell what’s working and what’s not.

If you need more recruitment marketing ideas, check out our blog on 8 Marketing Strategies Your Staffing Firm Can’t Afford to Ignore for more ideas.

Click here to view the article on Avionte's website.