5 Black Friday recruitment steps for your business (Emerce)

Black Friday recruitment in 5 steps? You will find them here. Because chances are your business will also need extra hands for all the hustle and bustle this day brings. So forget that expensive temp agency and use job marketing to top up your workforce quickly, creatively and efficiently for Black Friday and the rest of the holiday season.

Black Friday is the official kick-off of the holiday season. Because of the lockdown, it is expected to be even busier than in previous years. Commercially, a great opportunity for e-tailers. But at the same time, this huge surge in orders also brings stress.

Because who is going to process all those orders and make sure Barbies and Nintendo consoles end up in the Sinterklaas shoe or under the Christmas tree on time? And how will you make sure there are enough colleagues available to answer customer questions at customer service? Black Friday recruitment can save you a lot of stress, if you approach it smartly and in good time.

1. From marketer to recruiter in a few steps

Traditionally, most companies turn to a temp agency in these months. It is a quick way to get staff, but it comes at relatively high cost. An option that more and more e-tailers with their own warehouse, and logistics companies, are using is job marketing. With ads on social media you can recruit people under your own name. This way you cut out the temp agency as an unnecessary link in the chain, because interested candidates apply directly to your organisation. An added bonus: you also become known in the wider area as an attractive employer, because job marketing campaigns also build your employer brand.

There are agencies that set up job marketing campaigns for companies, but SMEs with their own marketing department can often get a long way themselves: a job marketing campaign via Facebook and Instagram is not that different from a targeted e-commerce campaign.

2. Make sure you stand out

Just like in your marketing campaigns, at times like these, when demand for logistics staff and customer contact staff is high, you want your messages to stand out. That is why it is important to put your organisation's pull factors front and centre. Perhaps you pay above the collective labour agreement (cao) at this time of year, which can be hugely attractive to candidates. Just like with marketing campaigns, A/B testing is important. Draw up at least three of these pull factors and work them into your ads. That way you know exactly which pull factors drive the most conversions. Besides giving you insight into why applicants choose you, this also lets you measure the success of your campaign straight away.

3. Aim your Black Friday recruitment campaign at your potential employee

Once your ad copy is ready, you can build the campaign in Facebook Business Manager. One of the differences in a recruitment campaign is the targeting options. Here you will need to do a few things differently from what you are used to in an e-commerce campaign.

First, you adjust the geographical area. For a buyer of your product it does not matter whether you ship from Goes or Amsterdam, but for a potential colleague it is decisive whether they live within a reasonable distance of work. As for audience selection, make sure the demographic characteristics of the target group match the person you are looking for. Facebook Business Manager offers a wide range of occupations, so you can specify very precisely who gets to see the ad with your vacancy.

4. Screening

The next step in your Black Friday recruitment is screening the applicant. For a marketer, every paying customer is welcome, but in a recruitment campaign you want your staff to meet a number of requirements. It is a good idea to draw up a list in advance of hard and soft requirements an applicant must meet. With a simple call script you can then determine whether he or she meets them. If you are enthusiastic, you can invite that person on site to start the onboarding period. With a good job marketing campaign, you can be sitting down with potential new colleagues within 24 hours. Fast, right?

5. Save money when recruiting staff

An important KPI for measuring the success of a job marketing campaign is the CPA (Cost Per Applicant). You calculate it by dividing the total advertising budget by the number of applicants received. Say 81 applicants have signed up for your job marketing campaign with a budget of EUR300, that works out at a CPA of EUR3.70. To illustrate, based on current market data, this is the average CPA for four relevant profiles:

• Customer contact employee: EUR2.50
• Order picker: EUR1.50
• Driver CE: EUR3.20
• Driver B: EUR1.07

On average, about 18% of applicants turn out to be qualified for the job after screening. So based on the intake you want, you can work out exactly how much advertising budget you need to get the required number of applications. Job marketing is an excellent way for companies to gain more control over their own recruitment. Because you do not pay a temp agency markup or a recruitment and selection fee, the total recruitment costs are on average only a fraction of what you pay a traditional recruitment agency. That is how smart entrepreneurs make the lucrative Q4 even more lucrative.

This blog was published on 10 November 2022 on Emerce.nl