As a recruiter, your media planning and strategy will be the starting point from which you acquire job applicants that your hiring managers want to meet. It should include research into likely advertising platforms and budget allocations, while allowing some room for flexibility once your plan is implemented. 

Once you have formulated your strategic media planning, media buying follows. This phase involves regular monitoring to determine whether adjustments to your plan are necessary to meet your goals and targets. 

Your aims include targeting the most fruitful media opportunities, maximising your return on investment, reducing time to hire, and attracting strong applicants whose profiles match the skills you are seeking. Since media planning strategies are crucial to your success, this article focuses on how to develop a recruitment media buying plan. 

What should a recruitment media plan include?

Your media planning aims to become a vehicle for fulfilling hiring objectives, so stating these clearly will be a starting point. Objectives give rise to key performance indicators (KPIs) that may include the number of qualified candidates you hope to attract, a timeframe in which this should be achieved, and the budget your campaign should adhere to. 

For effective targeting, define the audience you hope to attract to your ads. This will provide insights as to where adverts should appear as well as the keywords that should feature in online ads. When defining audiences, remember that they may be broader than you expect, so be cautious about using any demographics that could give rise to bias, such as age, gender, or race.

Use data to inform your media plan

Data-driven strategies will always be preferable to sheer guesswork. Even if you have never advertised posts in a particular niche before, you can research platform trends to uncover where other recruiters already advertise similar posts. Although you may face competition for candidates, this also assures you that you are identifying platforms that people within specific fields are likely to watch. 

If you have already recruited in similar fields, your internal data on past campaigns will prove informative, and you can even take a broader view, identifying media that generally deliver good results. This process doesn’t have to be complicated.

Your applicant tracking system (ATS) should offer the analytics needed to assess performance and set benchmarks for measuring your recruitment process. An AI-driven programmatic advertising platform can help you identify programmatic publishers based on its data. This allows you to gather information beyond what you may find in your records.

How to build your media planning strategy

Once you have all the necessary data to develop a strategy, follow these steps to create a media planning strategy that your media buyer can use to guide their efforts.

Step 1: Define hiring objectives

List the roles you have been tasked with advertising and the number of people that will be required to fill them. Set a realistic timeline for each. For example, if you are targeting scarce skills, you may need to spend more time finding the right applicants. Timeframes can be shorter for more generalised or junior roles.

Step 2: Profile your targeted candidates

Profiles should be skills-based. Avoid self-limiting or discriminatory demographic profiling. If qualifications are not strictly required to fill certain roles, avoid listing them. Specifying geographical locations can help reduce advertising costs, but it can also limit your candidate pool. Weight the costs versus the potential benefits.

Step 3: Select the right media channels for each role 

Although you will face budgetary constraints, choose channels that have a good chance of delivering the right candidates. For example, if you are hiring healthcare personnel, there are niche boards that cater to your ideal audience. 

General boards with high traffic may also be fruitful, but remember to target passive candidates through social media, particularly LinkedIn. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) recommends programmatic advertising as a cost-effective and highly efficient option, so consider incorporating it into your recruitment marketing mix.

Step 4: Allocate your budget

Various factors may influence the budget you set for advertising different roles. These include the criticality or urgency of a hire. When this is an important feature, you will likely spend more over a shorter time. If roles are senior or candidates in a field are rare, costs are often higher. Your data will indicate which channels are likely to perform best, and these channels should be prioritized.

Step 5: Set campaign timelines

Set an overall timeline for each campaign, specifying start and end dates. Within this timeline, schedule the period during which your ads will appear on each targeted channel, taking your budget into account throughout. Even the best plans may require adjustments to optimize the efficiency of your campaign, so set review dates that allow you to evaluate and adjust each ad placement based on your key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Step 6: Set clear campaign KPIs

Set quantitative and qualitative key performance indicators that will allow you to track performance, both during and after your campaign. This helps you to adjust your campaign when you notice underperformance and evaluate your overall performance once it has ended. Key elements to measure include the cost per applicant per platform and overall, the time it took to fill the post, and the quality of applicants and hires.

Tips to strengthen your media plan

After you have undertaken the media planning process a few times, you can use your results as a benchmark for continuous improvement. Always analyze how your plans worked so that you can fine-tune the thinking that went into them and the methods you employed. General tips include:

• Start small and scale once you have performance data. Once you know what works, you can allocate more of your budget to the channels that deliver results. 
• Don’t copy and paste the same plan for every role you seek to fill. Each role has unique features, and each media planning strategy should be tailored accordingly. Even when roles have similar features, you should seek to improve on the results of your last strategy. 
• Align messaging to the audience and the platform. For example, advertising on your own website can be detailed and extensive, while job board ads must be comparatively succinct. Hiring creatives? Your tone will differ from the one you would use to hire financial managers. 
• Collaborate with hiring managers to ensure alignment with their objectives. Ensure that you receive detailed instructions on the role to be filled, the qualities candidates should display, and, when applicable, the qualifications they should have. Involve hiring managers when evaluating the results your media planning strategy delivers.

 

When to get help with media planning and buying

Planning and strategizing can be time-consuming. Leverage tools like your ATS and an ATS-compatible programmatic media buying platform to support your efforts. These tools enable precise targeting and greater efficiency, potentially saving hours or even days and improving your time-to-hire metrics.

A programmatic job advertising partner like Veritone Hire (formerly Broadbean) can make media planning and buying more effective. Automate ad placements, reduce costs, and manage campaigns with ease using real-time performance data. To learn more, explore our media buying services or schedule a demo.