When to use (and not use) targeted emails as part of your hiring strategy

Perhaps you know the cliché that a good carpenter has many tools in their bucket. Similarly, when you’re marketing employment opportunities, it is best to use the right recruitment advertising tool for the right job.

College Recruiter believes that every student and recent grad deserves a great career. Our customers are primarily Fortune 1,000 companies, government agencies, and other employers who hire at scale, meaning dozens or even hundreds for the same or similar roles. Over the year, more than 2.5 million students and recent grads from one-, two-, and four-year colleges and universities use our site to find part-time, seasonal, internship, and entry-level jobs requiring zero to three years of experience.

The employers who get the best bang for their buck are those who know which recruitment marketing products – delivered by us or another partner – best align with their hiring needs and budgets. For example, an employer who wants to hire 10 or 50 people will not be well-served by posting a job for 30-days for $75. Why? Because a typical, duration-based, job posting on College Recruiter or almost any other job board should generate enough applications that you can hire one person. Why only one? Because most employers only want to hire one when they post a job.

When should employers use targeted email campaigns to promote their job openings? When the need is urgent or you want to reach diverse candidates at scale. We have permission to email about seven million students and 10 million recent grads and can target those of certain schools, majors, degrees, years of graduation (2010-23), languages, diversity (race, gender, military veterans, disabilities), and more. We’ve delivered thousands of campaigns over the past 20 years and deliver a campaign virtually every week, often several. We almost always generate open (how many read your email) and click-through (how many go to your ATS) rates of 2-3 times industry average.

Our base package is an HTML email to 75,000 and we follow-up that up typically a week or two later with the same email to the same candidates as that doubles the response rate, so we deliver 150,000 emails. About 2,000 will click to your ATS to, hopefully, apply. The ATS companies report that roughly 10 percent of candidates for entry-level jobs will apply and five to 10 percent of those will be hired, so you’ll likely see about 200 applications and 10-20 hires from a $5,000 campaign. If you get even 10 hires, that’s only $500 per hire, which is about 1/7^th the cost of on-campus recruiting. Some of our customers hire about 50-70 people, so their effective cost per hire can be under $75. If you only need to hire a person or two, don’t use a targeted email campaign. It is like hunting a fly with a bazooka. Need to hire 10 or more? Let me know. Do you have an upcoming need like that?