Attracting passive and active candidates into your recruitment agency takes a constant flurry of activity and concerted effort. Whether it’s sharing your job URLs across all your social channels, creating great adverts for the right job boards, or sending out a bulk email campaign to your candidates, there’s plenty to think about. One frequently untapped resource when sourcing candidates are job alerts, and it really is a secret weapon that the top performing recruiters use to make more placements.
Job alerts are a simple way to send out a notification to relevant candidates as soon as you post a job. These alerts are controlled by the candidate who can opt in for relevant updates as and when they occur. This means you can send out alerts when a specific company, job type, salary banding, location, or key skill that matches the type of role the candidate is looking for comes up. The main thing to note is that job alerts are sent out to candidates based on information they have provided to you. With all that in mind, here are seven good reasons to use job alerts in recruitment…

1. Keep Candidates Up to Date

The average recruiter works from a database that is, on average, 85% full of dead data. That means most of their data belongs to candidates they’ve not been in contact with for over two years. Job alerts let you reach out to those candidates and keep them engaged with your agency. If you use the profiles they’ve created, allow them to update their salary requirements, type of roles, disciplines and locations that they are interested in, you’ll only send them job opportunities that they’re interested in.

2. Don’t Insult your Candidates

There’s nothing worse than receiving untargeted emails or getting a call from a recruiter about a completely inappropriate job because they’re working from a CV that’s ten years out of date! It wastes everyone’s time, and it harms relationships too. This won’t happen with job alerts as the candidate is in control of the frequency and the type of roles they’ll hear about.

3. Make it Easy for Candidates to Apply

Not every candidate has the time to check job boards and social media sites every day. Many, however, are quite happy to keep an eye on what sort of opportunities are on the market. The best way to think of job alerts is by looking at how Amazon works. It remembers what you have looked at in the past and suggests items you may be interested in in the future. Job alerts are relevant to the candidate, and they make it easy for them to apply for the vacancy.

4. You Can Track Everything

Job alerts show you how engaged a candidate is. You can view their journey from opening the alert, through clicking on the link, to applying via the advert page. This is hugely valuable to a recruiter as it allows you to focus on candidates that are interested in your role. You can follow up with candidates with relevant information at the right time, increasing your chances of a candidate hitting apply. Couple this with your CRM activities and you can start to predict when candidates are likely to come back on to the marketplace again, alongside when they stop looking. In a sense, job alerts function like a database survey, letting you see which candidates are engaged and looking for a new opportunity.

5. Promote Your Agency and Its Brand

It’s important for your agency to stand out. So, make the effort to ensure your alerts are nicely branded, and the key information is easy to see. As this alert is going out on a daily basis, it is also a god idea to think about what other links you could put on the alert. For example, we have clients linking to a refer a friend scheme or a list of similar vacancies in case a candidate missed a posting in the last few days.

6. Job Alerts are a Great Selling Point

For a candidate inputting their details and CV into your database, the ability to opt in for job alerts is a great selling point. It takes much of the guesswork and legwork out of the job application process, and these candidates know they can simply sit back and wait for a relevant job to come up. This also means that they’re likely to recommend your agency to friends and colleagues as you’re providing a relatively pain-free option for job hunting.

7. You Will Win More Business

Unless you are doing something different to the in-house recruiters, why should a client use you to work on their roles? Well, there is nothing more compelling than telling a client that you can instantly reach thousands of relevant candidates who want to hear about their role. You can be more specific too, explaining that you have x number of candidates that are actively looking right now and x number of candidates that are immediately available. This is what joined up job alerts and a recruitment CRM can do for you!

Job alerts are a real win-win for both recruiters and candidates. It makes it easier to find the best people for your clients’ jobs, and on top of that, it automates much of the legwork when it comes to maximising the value of your recruitment CRM. It’s controlled by the up to date information that a candidate provides, and this ensures you’re only reaching out to candidates who actively want to hear from you. That’s one of the main reasons why job alerts are great for recruiters.

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