How Webrecruit partnered with Coastline Housing to attract candidates via sponsored Facebook advertising campaigns
The Company
Coastline Housing Ltd is an independent, not-for-profit housing association owning and managing almost 5,000 homes. The company’s purpose is to build great homes and offer great services provided by great people.
The Challenge
We caught up with Zoe Collick, Coastline Housing’s HR Advisor, who has worked for the association since 2001. Zoe’s main challenge was recruiting for specialist roles across the Coastline Housing group, comprising Coastline Housing and Coastline Services.
“We recruit for such a wide range of roles across the group; some are very technical and specialist so that does prove to be a challenge. We often have to re-run adverts for these roles or go back to the drawing board in terms of essential requirements in order to attract specialist skill-sets.”
Prior to working with Webrecruit, Coastline Housing worked with an advertising company on a pay-per-advert basis, depending on which job boards they wanted to advertise their vacancies. The advertising company had also started to run sponsored Facebook advertising campaigns on their behalf. However, Zoe was looking for a more cost-effective advertising solution.
The Solution
Zoe and the Coastline Housing team began working with Webrecruit in 2018. Coastline Housing’s Client Relationship Manager devised a bespoke advertising credit for the organisation’s vacancies, comprising branded advertising on a selection of high performing job boards. Purchasing them as a package, rather than paying for each job board individually, helped to reduce costs.
“I think it was the value for money that drew us to Webrecruit’s credit-based advertising solution in the first place.”
Zoe and the team also purchased social media advertising campaigns via Webrecruit to complement their job board advertising campaigns. Each social media campaign would run for one week across Facebook and each advert was targeted at a particular audience, based on their location.
Adverts were fully branded as Coastline Housing or Coastline Services, depending on which division was recruiting, and featured corporate imagery of many of the Coastline employees themselves, which gave a personal touch to each campaign.
One of the benefits of sponsored Facebook advertising campaigns is the exposure to passive jobseekers, as well as active jobseekers.
“Facebook is great as you can target people who aren’t necessarily looking for jobs and the advert will just appear on their timeline. They might be attracted to the advert which might result in them making an application, whereas they might not necessarily have gone on to a job board to search for jobs.”
The Results
Since mid-2018, Coastline Housing has advertised over 100 vacancies using Webrecruit’s job board and social media advertising solutions and has achieved the following results:
• Reduced recruitment spend through Webrecruit’s package of job board advertising credits
• Increased candidate reach via sponsored social media campaigns
• Gained greater insight into audience demographics via social media reports
“We’ve definitely reduced our spend since working with Webrecruit and I think we’re probably reaching out to different audiences now as a result of using social media. It keeps us more up to date with the market, which is continually changing. We advertise such a wide range of roles but we’ve noticed the greatest success on Facebook with our trades-based roles.”
At the end of each Facebook campaign, Zoe was provided with an end of campaign reporting pack, displaying the total number of campaign views and clicks, as well as the demographics of the audience viewing the adverts.
“The reports have been useful – they’re so interesting and it’s helpful to see the audience demographic by age and gender and points during the week where people are actually viewing the adverts the most.”
Final Words
“I would definitely recommend Webrecruit to other businesses looking for a recruitment advertising partner – I have had a fantastic experience of working with both my Client Relationship Manager and Account Manager; they are so helpful and deliver quick and fast service.”
– Zoe Collick, HR Advisor, Coastline Housing
Want to learn more?
Find out how Webrecruit can help you to reach both active and passive jobseekers via our targeted online advertising and social media campaigns.
