One of the most interesting findings to emerge from the focus groups I and my colleagues ran with successful and unsuccessful job hunters (as part of the ACE research project) was the apparently ineffectual nature of online advertising.

In one exercise, I looked over the shoulders of our research participants as they searched online for their ideal job. What was striking was the way they used search engines such as Google and those found on job boards to produce a list of job titles, salaries and locations; then picking some to read in detail. Nobody clicked on an ad banner or button. Worse, nobody even noticed them.

The future of employer marketing looked bleak.

Calm down dear, it’s only ‘search mode’
But looking more closely at what was happening produced a more subtle picture. Remember, the candidates were in search mode. The successful job hunters knew what they were looking for and knew how to find it efficiently. They would come to the Guardian’s job pages and make a beeline for the search box (having already decided what to type in). The only things they’d look at would be the results – and none of the ads around them.

Search mode is when you focus on what you’re looking for – and exclude anything you deem irrelevant. The employer response to search mode needs to be sales/fulfilment: you want technology consulting roles? Here’s a tech consultancy role. You want a well-known technology employer? Here’s a vacancy at Microsoft. That’s sales. But it’s not marketing. You’ve not influenced candidates’ search criteria; you’ve reacted to them.

That’s why a banner ad on a search page isn’t likely to work. Because clicking on the banner has a low chance of delivering a small number of relevant opportunities, while ignoring it and performing a search will bring up hundreds of results which are far more likely to be relevant.

But what about the casual browser?
Half of our focus groups were with unsuccessful job hunters – and the reason they remained unsuccessful, according to the research findings, was because they didn’t know what they were looking for. That meant that banners and buttons were irrelevant to them for a different reason: the balance of probabilities.

Quite simply, the chance of someone who doesn’t know what they want just stumbling over the right banner or button is vanishingly small. Especially when you consider that ads are placed on the assumption that the visitors to those pages are looking for the sort of thing offered in the ads. Not true for ‘browsers’.

I’ll tell you where to stick your banner…
It’s not that banners and buttons and MPUs are useless. The problem is, so many are in the wrong places, trying to do the wrong things.

Let’s imagine you’re a technology consultancy trying to hire big brains out of a bunch of vertical markets. The candidates think they’re looking for roles in FMCG, automotive or public sector – not technology consulting. When they hit their favourite search page it’s too late to say ‘technology consulting’ to them (the sales approach). But on every page they visit before that point – whether they’re keeping up with industry news, researching training courses, reading blogs or posting on forums – you’ve the ideal opportunity to say ‘technology consulting’. And that’s marketing.

What would Tesco do?
It’s silly and irrational, but nobody buys a perfectly unmolested tin of beans if it’s on the detergent shelf. People will go all the way to the tinned produce section to pick up an identical can. So if you’re going to run banners, button and MPUs on a search page, listen to supermarket wisdom and put the right message in the right place. Place your ads on a relevant search results page. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that your wizzy tech consulting banner will outgun the 300 FMCG general management roles the candidate asked to see. If, on the other hand, you happen to be Procter & Gamble then you might want to get out your chequebook.

So much for the Internet making life simple
The ACE research confirms that, credit crunch or no, neither the job sites nor employers are in charge; the candidates are. We’re no longer in the age when job hunters will turn a page and be intrigued by an employer and a role they’d not considered previously. Instead, we’ve the most sophisticated marketing tools any society has ever seen. And - too often – we’re not using them very proficiently.

As you’d expect, the survey respondents had a number of frustrations with the job hunting process as it stands and one of the most common was when they received misleading/incomplete/deliberately false information. 

This is a concern if only because we know that the ability to make decisions is something that sets the better candidates apart and because there is a clear correlation between decision making and availability of information with which to make them. 

And whilst there is a trend towards those that are able to find more information for themselves by way of asking and reading more widely, there is also a question to ask of employers who are not publishing clearly enough some relatively simple information. 

Salary is a good example.   

It’s what many people search on first and, not necessarily because they are mercenary but, in fact, because how people judge whether a role is suitable/appropriate for them is often based on how similar the salary level is to the job that they are doing now.  A little higher, for most people, is about right. 

In industries where new jobs with new job titles have been common, such as the environmental sector, the salary level stated is often of paramount importance in helping candidates determine suitability before any further investigation can take place.  This is also true for organisations that are not well known.  The size of the salary is a very good indicator of the size of the challenge. 

What this means for those that withhold salary details is that they lose out in a number of ways: 

• candidates cannot tell if they are at a suitable level, so overlook these roles
• the chances of a candidate applying anyway but declining later in the process are heightened
• some candidates read “£Competitive” as meaning “they’ll work you really hard to earn your money” – not as having a salary comparable to the industry
• candidates are less able to make a decision early and commit emotionally to that application
• job alerts are often set up on salary criteria, so without it in your advertisement you are unlikely to benefit from these alerts sent out on a daily basis

 In the current climate any new roles are unlikely to be sanctioned without a business case – that will inevitably include the proposed salary. 

So when 51% candidates who turned down jobs do so due to “unattractive terms and conditions”, it makes you wonder who exactly benefits from withholding such a simple piece of information?