Subject lines make all of the difference when you’re hiring on Indeed. Here’s how we know.
Indeed has moved to a pay-per-click (PPC) model that charges you for leads that they generate. What does that mean for employers?
You have to treat it just like a paid search campaign. It has to be designed for clickability and conversions. You have to go where your audience is and speak their language.
Who do you want to hire?
The person you’re hiring starts out as a customer. What they’re shopping for is a place to work. LinkedIn and Indeed know this.
If you use Indeed correctly, the cost can be extremely reasonable. But you have to create the right campaign – and each campaign will cost a different amount depending on how well-targeted your campaign is.
What if your shop is near a college campus with lots of recent graduates? UC Berkeley, with 28,000 students, for example.
Wages and competition for workers are high in Oakland. The labor market is tight, and working in a screen printing shop isn’t appealing to everyone.
But the shop wanted to find a younger person to fill the sales development rep role. They started by offering higher-than-average wages ($20 an hour) and making sure the role was something that wouldn’t bore or scare off recent college grads.
If you’re looking for production staff, you might want to look for people that aren’t on Indeed or LinkedIn. The shop talks about using demographics to target your hiring efforts – and looking for Spanish language workers – in this video.
Writing a great ad for Indeed: what not to do
“Sales development representative” makes sense to a shop. But it doesn’t seem to make sense to the “customers” on Indeed.
$75 later, he got 9 applicants with 76 views. It cost $8.50 per applicant – and none of them even made it to a phone screening.
You’re paying per-click. You’re not supposed to spend $75 and get zero value out of it!
So what to do? Change the title, and try again.
Understanding search intent improved the value of our Indeed campaigns
What does the person with the skills you want actually search for? They’re probably using simpler language than you think. A Chrome plugin like Keywords Everywhere can help you determine simpler search terms to use for job listings.
The shop decided to change just one thing about the job listing and try again. So he changed the job listing’s title.
The shop put “Marketing Associate – Recent College Graduates Wanted” instead of “Outbound Lead Prospecting: Sales Development Representative.”
It’s easy to see why one works and the other doesn’t: they’re using two totally different sets of vocabulary. The words were misaligned with the audience. They didn’t understand what the job meant!
With the change to the title, there was a dramatic improvement in the performance of Indeed hiring campaigns. Instead of $8.50 per applicant, the shop paid $3.08 per applicant and $0.38 per view. He scheduled phone screens for 40% of the applicants.
Conclusion: Test and learn.
Design, test, and measure your results – then revise and try again.
Keep the audience in mind – your potential employees – and remember that the way you’d phrase a job’s title may be very different than what a perfectly good candidate would search for. Understand the intent behind their search and cater your job listing to those terms.
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