Last week I was contacted via Google Adwords in regards to comments I made on ERE, about using Adwords as an alternative to job boards to find candidates. So as to pre-empt Google’s questions, I thought I would re look at my campaign and fill you in on how it all worked out.

The funny thing was it was just a trial initially to see if it would work, partly because my normal route via the Job Boards wasn’t working. What did amaze me was not only did it work but how quickly it produced suitable candidates.

Probably first I should explain how Adwords works to help you grasp the concept. Google as I am sure you are aware make’s its money from advertising, by clients paying for links that appear on the right hand side of each search, or they appear on various websites like mine. (If you look below you should be able to see them).

Now what is clever, is those ads should be relevant to the website or the article such as recruitment or Adwords, the client then only pays if you click on their ad, which then redirects to a web page, in my case it was the vacancy page, simple really!

What makes this so good for recruitment is that for a nominal amount, you get your recruitment advert in front of 100’s or 1000’s of relevant candidates instantly, and you only pay if the candidate is interested. In my case I wanted to find welders, so I wrote a small ad and chose key words, which would prompt my ad to appear, such as “jobs for welders” or “welding”. Now what is interesting is this technique finds passive candidates also. To get passive candidates is actually fairly easy because your advert is appearing where candidates are reading, maybe a technique on welding in my case. Now if the welder did click on my ad, it would then redirect to me for a cost of 13 pence or about 25 cents (Please note some key words or phrases can be more expensive).

What is good here, is you can set a daily amount to spend and a maximum bid price thereby keeping costs down. So just to give you some figures, from my campaign I advertised for 2 months and during that time the ad appeared 46,000 times, 3,335 people clicked on the ad and just over 120 people registered. As a result it cost me £3.73 per candidate registered and they all were relevant.

My only word of warning is that if you are not careful you can spend more than you should, so set your daily budget and keep an eye on costs and also be aware you can also target region.