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Obama vs. McCain, Jobs and the Role of Advertising on the Winning Candidate

By Lou Adler, October 22, 2008

Are you aware that there were 101 million searches conducted last month on Google with the word "jobs" in the search string? Here's the link to Google's AdWord site to verify for this for yourself.

While this article is not a political treatise on how advertising influenced who you will vote for (or have voted for), it is an article on how recruitment advertising is rapidly coming of age and what you must do to attract top applicants for your job openings. It's also an article on introducing our annual Compelling Advertising Contest for 2009, but more on this in a moment. Search engine optimization will be a critical new aspect of our search contest this year, so a little background on this is in order.

Read more articles by this author.

Related Topics:

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By the way, using the same Google tool noted above it seems like the term "Obama" was used in 1.1 million searches last month in comparison to "McCain" at 550 thousand. While unimaginable, this seems to mean that people are 100 times more interested in learning something about their jobs than in their next president.

The point of all of this is to make the case that advertising is critical and what your candidates search on will have a direct bearing on your recruitment advertising results. This is at the heart of using Search Engine Optimization techniques for recruitment advertising. The title you use in your job posting is a critical part of this. Generic and boring titles will not attract much interest, nor get to the top of the listing. Part of the purpose of the title of this article was an admittedly low class and indirect way to get your attention. Last month we wrote an article in this newsletter titled McCain vs. Obama Using the 10-Factor Candidate Assessment Scorecard and unexpectedly had twice the number of readers we get for our typical recruiting and hiring articles.

At the time, many people were Googling for articles that offered advice on how to predict the presidential race. Based on current polls the predictions I made in the article were totally without merit, but the article nonetheless underscored a major advertising point - great titles using appropriate search terms will get noticed.

With this in mind, here is my new number one secret of online sourcing success:

Make sure your ads can be easily found and the titles so compelling that a good person will find your ad on the first day they decide to look for a new job.

Being found first is critical. Being found on the first day is even better. This is a huge competitive advantage as long as you call the person within a few hours after the person applies. The reason being found first is critical is that few top performers will hunt and peck through a major board or company career site to find your ad, especially on day one. To test how well you're doing on this "found first" criteria make sure that when you contact your candidates ask them how long they've been looking for a new position. Recognize that if it's been longer than one week, your ad positioning is not good enough.

Note: for those of you who inadvertently stumbled upon this article and were expecting something other than how to use advertising to find more top talent to fill your open positions, you can bounce out now. However, if you're looking for a job or know of someone who is, you might want to send them this podcast on how to ace the interview. If you're a recruiter you should make sure your candidates follow the rules exactly as described. It will help them do better on their interviews and increase your odds of a placement.

Now back to the ad contest and the primary point of this article. We want you to write a great ad, try it out, improve it, and get as "first" as possible. When you feel you've done as well as possible send us the ad and a short paragraph on your results and the process you used. This is all you need to do to enter our annual ad writing contest.

Last year's winner was looking for some esoteric optical defense geeks and wrote an ad on a niche site that pulled in great talent within hours after posting. This year's winning ad will win a fellowship to any of our live or online programs, plus full year access to our Recruiter's eLearning center. The top runners-up will get a signed copy of my book, Hire With Your Head, and my 60-minute audio CD, The Basic One-Question Interview.

Here are the basic instructions from last year on how to write compelling ads and how to position them to be found. If you want to turbo-charge your advertising and see more top people before tomorrow this is a must-read, even if you don't enter the contest.

The point of this annual contest is to demonstrate that a creative and compelling ad written from the perspective of a top performer who is casually looking will have far more drawing power than traditional job board advertising. Here's a companion article on taking the idea of great advertising one step further by thinking like a top candidate who is fully employed, but having a bad day at the office. Advertising written from the perspective of your ideal candidate will dramatically increase the response rate of any ad. This is what empathy is all about.

Last year we focused more on the compelling nature of the ad rather than if it could be easily found. This year we're going to judge the ad's effective on both categories. To get you started with the ad contest, here are the quick instructions:

1. Write and post an ad following the guidelines in the basic instructions article. The most important part of this is YOU MUST NOT LIST SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE requirements as part of your ad. Instead, you must describe what the candidate will learn and do in the job and why your job is important to the company. If you feel compelled to put in a few skills, include them as part of a project. For example, "Use your GUI design skills to create a state-of-the-art online eCommerce site," would allow you to list your skills and have good drawing power, too.
2. Post your ad on a niche site and craigslist.com. You can use a major board if you'd like, but this is unlikely to be very effective.
3. Make sure your ad is also found by an aggregator like SimplyHired.com. Aggregators are the Google-like search engines for job boards and career sites.
4. To get to the top of the list and be found first, reverse engineer the ad once it's officially posted. This means you'll need to try and find it using common key words your ideal candidate is likely to use. Try this on Google, directly in the search section on the site where the ad is posted, and at Simplyhired.com. There were 101 million searches last month with the terms "jobs" on Google, so this is rapidly becoming the first step most people use when they begin looking for jobs. For example, if you posted a maintenance supervisory job for a plant in Akron, try to find it on Google using something like "manufacturing jobs Ohio" as your search string. You might even want to use the pay-per-click approach to make sure your ad is seen in the sponsored search category.
5. Compare your results to a comparable traditional ad posted on a major board or your career site.
6. Send us the creative ad along with your results. A few paragraph description of the process you used to position your ad to be more easily found would be helpful to the judges.

While winning the ad contest will be a nice pat on the back, entering it, and learning what it takes to write better ads is what this is all about. The real win, of course, is seeing some great people you wouldn't have seen otherwise.