Five Ways to Use Google Ads to Recruit Top Talent

The Great Resignation. At this point, almost everyone’s heard of it. 

It began in early 2021 and is an ongoing economic trend where employees voluntarily resigned from their jobs in masses. By the end of the year, 47.4 million American workers voluntarily quit– a new record for the United States. 

Some of the top reasons employees left their previous companies were low pay, no opportunities for advancement, and feeling disrespected or unappreciated. With an exponential amount of people now looking for new employment opportunities, it’s prime time for recruiters to take advantage. 

In this guide, we’ll outline five ways recruiters can successfully run recruitment Google Ads and source top talent. With our help, you’ll be well on your way to finding your next Employee of the Month. 

What are Google Ads 

In order to begin our journey, it’s essential that you know what Google Ads are. Google Ads is Google’s advertising platform which allows you to appear at the top of search results and gain clicks to your website. 

When someone searches for a keyword in your ad (we’ll dive more into those later) Google will pick relevant, sponsored results to appear at the top of the page. These ads look the same as normal search results, except that they are labeled as sponsored posts. 

Source: Sharetribe 

And we get it, you may be thinking to yourself that no one clicks on these sponsored ads. But that’s simply a myth. According to Searchengineland.com, Google makes $100M per day from successful Google Ads. The key to getting people to click on these ads is to make them high quality and extremely relevant to your target audience. 

1. Create employee personas 

Before you begin creating your ad, it’s important that you know exactly who you’re looking for. This is where creating employee personas comes in. 

In marketing, buyer personas are fictional characters that represent your potential customers. They provide a detailed outline of who the person is that needs your product or service. What are their characteristics? How old are they? What problems are they hoping to solve? These are all questions you must answer to target them directly in your marketing campaigns. 

For recruitment purposes, the idea is the same. Creating employee personas helps you better personalize and tailor your specific needs for the role and, therefore, create more targeted Google Ads. 

Think about the characteristics, wants, needs, and attitudes of the person you’re trying to hire. You want somebody who will excel in the position and also fit in seamlessly with the company.

Source: Desk Alerts 

Once you have a deep understanding of who you’re looking for, you’ll be able to create more relevant job descriptions and increase applications, align your sourcing strategies, and understand which recruiting channels (Google, LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.) will target the candidates you want.  

1. Identify and use the right keywords 

When running successful Google Ads, you need to keep SEO in mind. The start to any great SEO strategy is conducting keyword research to know exactly what keywords you need to use to get your advertisements seen and your potential employers reached. 

To begin, brainstorm which words you think job seekers will use to find you online. When you have a list of potential keywords to use in your ads, you can use tools such as Google Keywords or Ahrefs to figure out which terms you should bid on and put in your campaign. 

Source: Wordstream

It’s important to note that popular and competitive keywords will cost more for you to use in your ad. Consider choosing less popular, more specific keywords and even incorporate long-tail keywords to reach more niche audiences directly. 

Using broader, more competitive keywords may get your ad seen by a larger audience, but it runs the risk of sapping your budget and not reaching your previously identified employee personas. 

When using keywords in your ad, try placing them in the URL, headline, and description. Placing your keywords strategically in your ads will improve your ad relevance and Quality Score, as it shows Google that your ad is incredibly relevant to a user’s search. 

Source: Siteimprove 

1. Improve conversion with landing pages

If this is your first time running recruitment ads, you might think that your best option would be to simply link your ads to your business’s homepage. However, the key to creating ads that work and actually get potential employees applying is to link the ad (or ads) to different landing pages. 

These landing pages should reflect directly what you are advertising. If your ad contains search terms such as “marketing”, “communications coordinator,” and “remote” then your landing page should also contain these terms. Google will crawl the text of these landing pages to make sure they match your ad and are relevant, which will help show the ad to more people. 

Make sure that your landing page contains:

• Clear messaging directly related to your employee persona 

• Keywords and information that is important and vital to the potential employer taking action to apply (job description, location, salary range, benefits, etc.) 

• Strong headlines, graphics, and branding that correspond with your business and the rest of your website 

• A clear call-to-action– most likely “Apply here” or “Apply now” to take candidates to the application

Source: Carrot Creative 

4. Understand the difference between text ads and display ads 

Display advertisements can consist of videos, images, text, and audio. For your Google Ad, you will only be able to use text and you will have character limits. Your ad will need to stick to: 

• Headline 1: 30 characters
• Headline 2: 30 characters
• Headline 3: 30 characters
• ​​Description 1: 90 characters
• Description 2: 90 characters

Therefore it will be important to craft your copy wisely and make sure every word has a purpose. When writing your ad, you can include: 

• Your business name 
• Job title 
• A brief summary of the Employee Value Propositions (aka the “set of monetary and non-monetary benefits provided by an organization to its employees in return for the skills, capabilities, and experience they bring and the contributions they make to the organization”) 

5. Continuously track the progress of your ads 

It’s important to remember that your ad campaign might not become successful overnight. It’s a process that takes time, finetuning, and changes along the way. To monitor your ads, Google provides conversion tracking tools. 

You can also track your conversions manually by monitoring the number of applications you end up receiving from your ad. If you’re receiving many applications from high-quality candidates, then you’ll know that your ad is reaching the right people. If not, then you’ll know you need to go back and fix your copy and keywords. 

Let’s Get Started 

We understand that setting up Google Ads can be tricky, but in the long run, it will be worth it for your team and your business overall. And, if you’re struggling, our paid media experts are here to help. Reach out today for a free 30-minute consultation! We’re prepared to craft your ads on Google and beyond and meet all of your recruiting needs. 

If you’re looking to hire for remote roles, we know that your needs will be different from those hiring in-person positions. Check out our guide on hiring tips for remote companies here!