Your employees are the lifeblood of your business, but finding quality hires can be a daunting task. It’s harder than ever to find the right people for your team, especially when your local competitors are competing for top-tier talent.
The solution? Geofencing. When you’re looking to recruit local job candidates, geofencing for recruitment can help you find the right people with laser-targeted, hyper-relevant messaging. Chances are, your marketing team is already using location-based targeting to capture the attention of local customers, but it’s also an effective strategy to hire top candidates in the modern job market.
Geofencing goes far beyond your basic advertising strategy. By targeting traffic that passes by your organization, you can boost your return on investment—all while filling your open positions with skilled workers. Here’s how to take advantage of local foot traffic with geofencing.
What Is Geofencing?
Before we dive into location-based targeting, let’s start with a definition. Geofencing uses data from users’ mobile phones to pinpoint their location. As a popular type of location-based targeting), geofencing enables advertisers to target users and devices within a given virtual perimeter.
Geofencing might sound complicated, but it’s simpler than you might think. Imagine a border (or a “geofence”) around your business. This border is created when you set up targeting for programmatic ads. Whenever a potential job candidate enters the border, they become targeted for the ad—and when they leave the border, they stop being targeted.
Whenever you scroll past an ad for a local business, that ad typically is targeted to a specific area around the business. Advertisers can set virtual perimeters around their business with a Global Positioning System (GPS), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Bluetooth or WiFi technology, or cellular data.
Here’s a basic guide to how geofencing works in a demand-side platform:
- A potential job candidate opts into a campaign and gives consent to share their GPS data.
- The candidate enters the geofence around your business, and their mobile carrier locates them.
- The demand-side platform receives information that the candidate is located within set targeting parameters.
- Your recruitment ad is served to the candidate on their mobile browser or within an app.
Benefits of Geofencing for Recruitment Marketing
Contrary to popular belief, the benefits of geofencing don’t end with traditional marketing. It’s a powerful tool to reach on-the-go job candidates—whether they’re heading to work, visiting your business, or just passing by.
According to marketing statistics, geofencing is compatible with 92 percent of smartphones, and 71 percent of consumers prefer personalized ad experiences. So, what are you waiting for? Here’s how geofencing can fuel your recruitment marketing efforts with top-tier talent.
Reach Qualified Candidates More Easily
With geofencing, you can reach candidates when they’re close by or likely to visit your business. And when you target job candidates who pass by your business regularly, you’ll already have a warm audience of prospects who are familiar with your brand.
You don’t have to limit geofencing to areas around your business, either. When you’re planning on visiting a job fair or industry event, you can use geofencing ads to capture the attention of active and passive job candidates that might be interested in joining your team.
Provide Personalized Ad Experiences
With so many organizations competing for top talent, personalization is more important than ever. You need to serve relevant ads that resonate with your prospects, tap into their pain points, and highlight your unique value proposition—and that’s where geofencing can be your marketing MVP.
Because geofencing is all about offering a personalized experience, you’ll want to go the extra mile to research your target audience and create targeted messaging. By creating personalized ad experiences (and maybe incentives to apply, like a sign-on bonus), you’ll stay top of mind with potential candidates and build familiarity with your employer brand.
Gain an Edge Over the Competition
Need a competitive advantage in the war for talent? You can use geofencing to target job candidates when they’re passing by your business to draw them away from your local competitors. And if you want to take your recruitment ad strategy to the next level, you can serve geotargeted ads to target employees at your competitors’ workplaces.
How to Build a Geofencing Strategy
Now that you know how geofencing can ignite your recruitment efforts, how can you incorporate location-based ads into your marketing strategy?
Start by partnering with your marketing team. Geotargeting is one of the oldest features that were present in demand-side platforms and other online advertising platforms. Location is a common attribute that advertisers use to segment their audience, so marketing should already know how to implement location-based targeting within your advertising platform.
Geofencing is a relatively newer feature that entered the marketing landscape a few years ago. Not every ad tech provider offers geofencing, but the industry is expected to grow rapidly over the next few years.
With most ad tech platforms, you’ll be able to choose the city where you want to create a fence, and then choose spots on a map to define the radius of your fence. From there, you can add geofencing parameters to specific advertising campaigns to target the right people, at the right time, with the right message. You can also set multiple geofences to target with different ad campaigns (for example, if you’re hiring for multiple locations).
Next Steps: Optimizing Your Recruitment Ads
Congratulations! You’ve honed in your targeting strategy so you can capture the attention of local job candidates with relevant, personalized ads—but geofencing isn’t a “set it and forget it” approach. Here’s how to make the most of your recruitment marketing ads with geofencing best practices.
Choose the Right Size
It might be tempting to cast a wide net around your business, but it’s important to remember that you’re serving highly targeted ads. To drive the best return on investment and convert qualified candidates, you should avoid setting a geofence that’s too broad.
Not sure where to start? Most marketers recommend staying within a four- to five-minute travel radius (walking or driving). If you notice any erratic results, consider expanding your geofence. Geofence technology uses low-power methods to determine users’ locations, so a geofence that’s too small may lead to users being constantly checked in and out of the boundary.
Write a Clear Call to Action
Whether you’re encouraging users to click on your website, fill out an application, or check out your open job positions, you need a clear and compelling call to action to top off your ads.
Just like any other ad, your call to action should be short, sweet, and concise. At the same time, it should encourage your audience to take immediate action. Why? It’s simple: High-caliber candidates rarely last long in the open job market, and you need to kickstart the process quickly if you want to lock in top talent.
Craft a Comprehensive Strategy
Your recruitment strategy shouldn’t end with geofencing. Instead, experiment with other marketing strategies to drive the best results for your organization. Depending on your recruitment goals, you might try:
- Contextual targeting: Contextual targeting shows an ad that’s relevant to the content on a web page. For example, if your audience is reading a blog about manufacturing trends, you can serve a recruitment ad for open manufacturing positions on the same page.
- Retargeting: Retargeting shows ads to prospective job candidates who have already completed a specific action—whether that’s visiting your website, visiting your business, or engaging with your social media posts.
- Dayparting: Dayparting (AKA ad scheduling) targets job candidates at certain times of the day. For example, you might target prospective candidates after work hours or on the weekends when they’re more likely to fill out a job application.
Target Qualified Local Talent
When done right, geofencing can significantly increase brand awareness—all while serving as a powerful resource to attract, recruit, and hire talented workers.
Ready to take your recruitment strategy to the next level? At Main Street Recruitment, we take an omni-recruiting, or multichannel, approach to recruitment marketing so you can meet your ideal candidates where they are online with the right message at the right time.
We’re here to help you craft tailored strategies for your organization, from effective geofencing ads to high-converting landing pages. Download our self-audit checklist and schedule a discovery call with our team to take the next step toward successful recruitment.
