Creative recruitment marketing is the practice of putting your job ads where your ideal candidates already are, and making it effortless for them to apply. Done right, it lifts candidate conversions, raises candidate quality, and cuts your advertising spend. Here is the best example I have seen in years, and I found it on the inside of a port-a-potty door.
What do port-a-potties have to do with recruitment marketing?
Over the summer I was driving my high-school daughter to band camp through the Redwoods north of the San Francisco Bay Area. When we arrived, I needed a bio break, so I headed for the port-a-potty. That is where I found one of the most cleverly targeted recruiting ads I have ever seen.
With unemployment near a 50-year low when this ad ran, job seekers had options and talent acquisition leaders had to think like marketers. What worked last year stops working. If you have had the same hiring problems for five years running, it is time to think creatively, or to look at new tools. To do that, you have to think and act like your ideal candidates.
So, back to the port-a-potty. I opened that flimsy plastic door, took a seat (if you dare), looked up, and saw a glorious "Now Hiring" sticker on the inside of the door.
You won't believe what's in the port-a-potty!
At first I did not know what to think. That is the weirdest thing ever, right? Is it a good idea? Does it work? Who are they trying to hire? And since I was already in the thinker pose on the plastic throne, I started working through the whole campaign.
Who is United Site Services trying to hire? Drivers, hourly workers, and equipment technicians, the same people working on construction sites or delivering materials to them. The same people who use a port-a-potty every day. Bingo.
Why is this such a highly targeted recruitment ad?
United Site Services is one of the largest construction-services companies in the US. They rent and deliver construction equipment, including hundreds of thousands of port-a-potties. Placing "Now Hiring" stickers on the inside of those units is cheap, hyper-targeted, and reaches an audience that is, let's say, sitting still with a moment to read.
Kudos to the United Site Services team. They did a great job of reaching their potential workforce, and doing something different always carries risk. But good targeting alone does not make a campaign great. To be great, a campaign has to work. It has to generate qualified candidates. That is the part every recruitment marketer, TA leader, and employer-branding team has to get right.
In a tight market, make it easy for candidates to apply
The single most important rule of creative recruitment marketing is to remove friction. A brilliant, well-placed ad still fails if the path from "interested" to "applied" is hard. Speed and simplicity win: applications that take under five minutes see a 12.5% apply rate, versus just 3.6% for applications that take 15 minutes or more, according to Appcast's multi-year analysis.
Look at the ad again. As a piece of creative, it checks every box:
- A photo of someone actually doing the job. Check.
- "Now Hiring" text that stands out. Check.
- Benefits stated in plain language. Check.
- "Full-Time / Permanent Positions" highlighted. Check.
Everything a candidate needs to get excited is right there. And then you get to the call to action.
But what about the call-to-action?
The call to action is where this great ad falls apart. Look at the bottom right corner, in the smallest font on the entire sticker: a career-site URL. No emphasis, no shortcut, no easy path in.
A beautifully targeted, uniquely placed ad, undercut by a call to action nobody can act on easily. A far better CTA would be Text to Apply paired with a QR code, or another text recruiting campaign that lets a candidate start applying in seconds from the phone already in their hand.
Follow the real candidate journey, no shortcuts
The only way to know if your call to action works is to complete it yourself, exactly as a candidate would, on the same device they would use. So I pretended to be a job seeker, took out my phone, and tried to reach the career site from the sticker. The print is tiny, so I kept looking up at the sticker and back down at my phone. Eventually I gave up looking and typed from memory.
Fail #1: The brand name wasn't what I assumed
I typed careers.unitedrentals.com. Wrong. After squinting at the sticker, I realized it was not "United Rentals" but "United Site Services", two brands I did not know were related.
Fail #2: One wrong letter, start over
I typed careers.unitedsitesedvices.com. Wrong again. I had hit a "d" instead of an "r". A single mistyped character on a phone, and you begin the whole 30-character string again.
Five tries before I reached the site
I failed five times before I finally reached the career site, and by then I was frustrated. Typing 30-plus characters in exact order on a phone is not easy. Here is the part that should worry every employer: instead of getting candidates excited, a CTA like this frustrates them into quitting before they ever arrive. This workforce is mobile-first. Nobody walks into a port-a-potty with a laptop. When I finally reached the site, it was excellent and mobile-friendly, and probably cost six figures to build. None of that matters if candidates can't get there.
TIP: Walk the candidate journey yourself, on a phone, with no shortcuts.
If your workforce is mobile-first, they need a mobile-first path to apply. A 30-character URL is not it. Neither is a 20-character or even a 15-character one. Test the exact path a real candidate takes, and fix the first place they would give up.
Most career-site visitors never finish an application
For 20 years the default candidate journey has been "send them to the corporate career site." That made sense when candidates were plentiful. Today, most of the traffic you paid for leaves without ever completing an application.
Fewer than 1 in 10 career-site visitors complete an application (an ~8.5% visitor-to-application rate, per Jobvite and Appcast benchmarks).
Applications under 5 minutes convert at 12.5% vs 3.6% for 15+ minutes, per Appcast.
Nearly half of candidates say most applications are too long or complicated; a third abandon a bad process, per Indeed.
If you want more qualified candidates without spending another dollar on advertising, this drop-off is the first place to look. Track your visitor-to-application rate: unique career-site visitors divided by unique completed applications. Google Analytics is free, and most ATS and CRM platforms support it. A pretty six-figure career site that does not convert is not working, no matter how good it looks.
So what can you do differently? Use a recruiting chatbot
Instead of losing roughly 91% of prospective candidates at the career site, you can capture the majority of mobile visitors with an automated text conversation. A recruiting chatbot captures a candidate's name, phone number, location, and email, then pre-screens and qualifies them, over the phone they already have in their hand.
This works because texting is where candidates actually respond. SMS open rates run about 98%, and 90% of texts are read within three minutes. That is the opposite of a 30-character URL nobody can type. It is called Apply by Text, and once candidates are in the conversation, you can layer on recruiting automation, automatically scheduling interviews for everyone who qualifies and pushing them into your existing ATS through an integration, with no back-and-forth emails and phone calls.
So which campaign do you think generates more qualified applicants: the 30-character career-site URL, or a simple text-message application? The United Site Services targeting and creative were outstanding. Like so many candidate journeys, the call to action and the career-site apply process quietly killed what could have been a great campaign.
Creative recruitment marketing: common questions
What is creative recruitment marketing?
Creative recruitment marketing is placing job ads where your ideal candidates already spend time, and pairing them with an application path that is easy to complete. It borrows from consumer marketing: know the audience, reach them in context, and remove every point of friction between interest and applying.
Does placing job ads in unusual places actually work?
Targeting an unusual placement can work extremely well when the audience matches, like a construction-equipment company advertising jobs inside its own port-a-potties. But placement only delivers if the call to action is easy to act on. A great placement with a hard-to-use CTA still loses most candidates.
How do you increase career-site application conversion?
Shorten the path to apply. Applications under five minutes convert far better than long ones, and letting candidates start by texting a keyword removes the need to type a long URL on a phone. Track your visitor-to-application rate, then fix the first step where candidates drop off.
Which campaign would generate more qualified applicants?
See how GoHire turns a mobile-first ad into applications with Apply by Text, a recruiting chatbot, and automated interview scheduling, all connected to your ATS.
