How Employers Should Navigate The Digital Recruitment Landscape

Whether you’re a small startup or a large corporation, one of the biggest obstacles companies today face is positioning themselves as an employer of choice. Ever since the­ rise of Silicon Valley, even some of the most established firms find that being a household name is no longer enough to attract and retain top talent.

Not only is the recruitment war fiercer than ever, but also, the number of job platforms is vast and rapidly evolving. In short, it can be a pretty overwhelming space. Here’s an overview of the digital recruitment landscape to help you navigate the field and identify the best platform(s) for your talent goals:

Glassdoor

Launched in 2008, many industry experts consider Glassdoor the “job-seeker platform.” After all, Glassdoor boasts 60 million unique monthly visitors, 88% of whom use the site to search and/or apply to jobs. One of the main reasons Glassdoor appeals to job-hunters is you can see employee ratings across a variety of parameters including overall, work-life balance, career opportunities and CEO approval. Although Glassdoor is a powerful tool for engaging with prospective hires, it’s not the most global platform. The Glassdoor audience is heavily based in North America, with 40% of users residing in the U.S.

While a lot of Glassdoor’s allure is accredited to employee reviews, it’s still critical that employers maintain a clean profile with basic information about careers at the firm. Profiles should go beyond text and links and include multimedia such as photos and videos for optimal engagement. It’s also a great place to share people-related news such as employer branding awards and updates to parental leave policies. While having the basics here is a must, Glassdoor requires significantly less of an ongoing content strategy than its more traditional social network competitors such as LinkedIn. As with almost any of these recruitment platforms, Glassdoor offers additional paid offerings to interested companies, including a sponsored jobs feature, which helps target users searching for similar job openings and companies.

Comparably

Started in 2016, Comparably began as a compensation data and culture ranking site – think of it as a hybrid between PayScale and Glassdoor. That’s grown and evolved substantially today to where the platform has roughly 500,000 anonymous salaries and over 10 million employee reviews.

That said, Comparably is still very much the new kid on the block when compared to Glassdoor or LinkedIn. It doesn’t report monthly active users and it’s focused on North America, although a company spokesperson said they have plans to expand to Europe later this year. The platform pitches itself as more of an employer brand and recruitment marketing platform and less of a job portal than say, its primary competitor, Glassdoor. Unlike Glassdoor, Comparably only shows the past 12 months of employee ratings and reviews and enables companies to allow only verified, existing employees to leave public feedback. Another key distinction here is Comparably’s segmentation; users can search through ratings and reviews by experience, age, location and more. For this reason, Comparably pitches itself as a strong platform for recruiting women and other diverse candidates. In addition to these user features, the site sells interested employers a premium product where they can compare competitor rankings.

Fairygodboss

Launched in 2015, Fairygodboss is another user-generated employee review site positioning itself as an alternative to Glassdoor. With only 3 million monthly active users, it’s far smaller than Glassdoor but shouldn’t be overlooked based on numbers alone as it is an important platform for diverse hires.

While the site welcomes all users, its goal is to highlight women’s perspectives on their former employers, including topics such as maternity leave, work-life balance and more. For example, their resources include a personalized daily feed as well as crowdsourced databases ranking employers based on parental leave, equal treatment and more. While the majority of the content is user-generated, the site also sells corporate sponsorships, allowing companies to take ownership of their user-generated review pages.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn boasts 310 million monthly active users and is consistently ranked the most-trusted social network. Unsurprisingly, the professional network has a compelling recruiting proposition, with users submitting 100 million job applications on the platform every month. Another reason global companies should keep LinkedIn top of mind is it’s one of the only western social platforms allowed in mainland China (although it’s worth noting: video is still blocked in the region). LinkedIn’s offering is critical to employers in need of global branding and reach. 

When it comes to paid offerings, LinkedIn is also the most sophisticated of its recruitment peers. From InMail to sponsored content and sponsored job postings, the platform offers a paid product for just about everything. These advertisements also offer sophisticated targeting capabilities based on job title, employer, location, years of experience, skills and more.

While the targeting options on LinkedIn and traditional social platforms are highly sophisticated, employers should avoid running ads based on age and gender as these can lead to discrimination suits. Instead, employers should focus on targeting ads based on education, job title, employer and other relevant qualifications in hiring. Targeting look-alikes and retargeting users are other effective tactics to keep in mind. It’s also beneficial to remember that not every recruitment campaign needs to be highly niche – particularly for larger brands. Brand awareness campaigns aimed at reaching larger audiences can also be highly successful. For awareness campaigns, consider looking outside of recruitment platforms and leveraging traditional social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Here are some of the best practices and considerations for broader branding campaigns.