Evergreen jobs are positions at your company that are always open, either because they are high turnover positions or because they are positions for which you have many employees in the same role. As a recruiter or hiring manager, these are the roles that you are constantly filling, spending your time interviewing, and trying to reach the job candidates that fit the job description.
Manufacturing Jobs by the Numbers
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing employers created 20,000 new jobs in December of 2018 and 13,000 new jobs in January of 2019. While these numbers are slightly down year over year due to shutdowns in the automotive industry, manufacturing consistently sees steady growth for evergreen jobs. In fact, as of July 2018, manufacturing jobs over the prior year grew at the fastest pace in over 20 years, adding 327,000 jobs, the most of any 12-month period since April of 1995 when 345,000 were added (source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor). This means that, while your company’s labor needs are increasing, so are your competitor’s. It’s more important than ever to find ways to make your job postings stand out in a crowded market.
Job postings are generally created for a period of time with a specific beginning and end date. Evergreen postings are different in that you’re not just creating a job posting or description, but landing pages that will exist for long periods of time on your career site. These pages must be designed to engage and foster relationships with candidates for the long term, which makes search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing strategies crucial.
Keeping Your Evergreen Manufacturing Job Postings From Stagnating
In order to keep up with hiring demand for your evergreen positions, it’s important to develop a content and recruitment marketing strategy that is adaptive with a strong focus on long-term strategies like SEO. It also means thinking differently about how to create buzz for your manufacturing job openings, engaging your ideal candidates, and reaching passive candidates through relationship-building and nurturing campaigns.
Consider your career site
Keeping the content on your job postings (and job descriptions) up-to-date will help your manufacturing roles relevant to search engines. When’s the last time your team reviewed the job titles for your evergreen positions? In some cases, especially with the rapid development of technology, titles are not the same as they were 10 years ago. If you’re hiring for a mechanical engineer (general), but your job description aligns more closely to a title like design engineer, you could be missing out on valuable search traffic. As your evergreen roles in manufacturing evolve, it’s important to change your job titles to match what your ideal candidates are searching for online.
The same goes for the descriptions you link to your job titles and postings. If you’re not updating them based on job requirements, you’re going to get a lot of unqualified applicants. It’s important to be specific in your job description, and updating this content on a regular basis also makes search engines happy. Use BLS job titles, keyword tools (there’s one built in to Google Ad Manager), or simply search for your own job titles to see what comes up. Modify your job titles and descriptions based on what your ideal candidates search for and you can improve your ranking in search and increase traffic to your career site pages for these roles.
Increase visibility
On your career site and off, once you’ve created a schedule for regular updates to your job titles and postings, the next step is to improve your visibility to potential candidates. If you’re not already using images and video on your job postings and social sites, it’s one easy and inexpensive way to increase engagement. Job postings with videos are viewed 12% more than postings without video. On average, employers receive a 34% greater candidate application rate when they add video to their job postings.
Related: How Video Can Transform Your Recruitment Marketing
We’ve mentioned how valuable video content can be in previous posts, from improving candidate engagement to increasing SEO rankings. But it’s also an inexpensive way to create a buzz around your job postings on your site and social media. Consider employee testimonial videos, event videos (team or company events), and other visuals that give candidates a memorable look into what it’s like to work for your company. Adding a Q&A with a hiring manager video to your evergreen job postings can boost engagement and add a personal touch to your employer brand that makes you stand out from your competitors. Make the content easy to share and relatable.
Targeted content
Your evergreen job postings and descriptions are landing pages. Treat them like marketers treat landing pages – which means setting up a recruitment strategy that begins at the top of the funnel (awareness and consideration) and moves candidates to the bottom of the funnel (application and action). You can do this with content marketing, such as email nurturing campaigns to re-engage applicants that were at the top of a hiring manager’s list but not hired, employee referrals, and social media followers.
Online ad campaigns can be a powerful tool to target your landing pages only to candidates that meet your qualifications, streamlining your hiring process by eliminating unqualified candidates before the application stage. Campaigns like these are buzz-generators, especially when you can target geographically, by skill level and education, and required certifications.
You can even use targeted campaigns to engage candidates at competitor companies or those who are interested in completing a required certificate. For example, Talroo offers a robust set of talent attraction tools to help elevate visibility for your job posting and hyper-target qualified candidates. Using a data-driven talent attraction solution allows you to optimize a paid campaign in real-time, amplifying what’s working and turning off what doesn’t so you get the most out of your recruitment advertising budget.
Finally, a reminder that the millennial demographic is now 25 to 40 years of age. Our “new” digital generation is not so new anymore, and they’re more mature, educated, engaged, and seeking better opportunities. If you’re not using a first strategy for your manufacturing jobs, the result can be a dwindling talent pool and sharp reduction in candidate interest. While you’re reworking your current strategies to create buzz for your company’s evergreen jobs, consider the upcoming generation (post-millennial or generation Z) who has never experienced a job market where you couldn’t easily apply to a job online or find more information about a potential employer from a career site.
