Do you also suffer from a tight labor market?

We increased our candidate pool by more than 400 percent in a single day, by reaching a group that cannot be found on job boards: passive jobseekers.

The group you are missing on job boards

According to Statistics Netherlands' quarterly figures, about 10.4 per cent of the labour force is actively looking for a new job: 3.5 per cent unemployed people plus 7.1 per cent of people who are already working.

Research by organizations including Intelligence Group and &Work shows that approximately 48 per cent of working people are latently looking. They are not actively searching, but seriously consider it as soon as an opportunity arises. That is therefore a group of potential candidates at least four times as large.

The problem: that 48 per cent do not look at job boards. If you only post your vacancy there, it does not exist for this group.

Three ways to actually reach them

• Personal approach, as recruiters do. That can be effective, but it is labour-intensive: continuously searching, sending messages and chasing up.
• Networking and referrals, as large corporations do. You ask your own staff for recommendations and offer a referral bonus. This works if you already have a large, satisfied group of staff.
• Advertising via social media on the latent jobseekers in your sector. That is what we did.

Here is how we'll tackle it

According to figures from Newcom Research, Facebook and Instagram have 7 million and 5 million daily users respectively in the Netherlands. With that, you reach almost the entire working population.

By using the advertising and targeting options of those platforms, you bring your vacancy to the attention of at least four times as many potential candidates as via a job board. People who would otherwise never have seen the vacancy.

There is another advantage that is often forgotten: you are not competing. On a job board, your vacancy stands alongside dozens of similar ones, and a visitor works through them in order. In a timeline, only your vacancy appears, seen by thousands of people who are not comparing at that moment.

What needs to change about your message

This is the part that is most often overlooked. Someone who is actively looking for a job wants to know the job requirements and terms and conditions; they are already comparing options. Someone who is looking passively is not. They scroll past your job advert whilst thinking about something else, and first need a reason to even keep looking.

A job advert that works fine on a job board performs poorly in a timeline. What works there is making the situation recognisable before you mention the role. Anyone who doesn't feel addressed in the first second will never read the requirements.

Is this suitable for your vacancy?

This approach works best for roles where there are enough people in the target audience to target, and where it matters that you reach people who are not yet actively looking. How we set this up on an ongoing basis is explained on the page about Recruitment Advertising.