Everyone wants more free candidate traffic—it's like the holy grail of an inbound recruiting strategy. To help you implement, operationalize and measure your organic success, here are our latest DOs and DON'Ts.

In our last post, we explained how adopting an organic-first strategy can take your easy-to-fill jobs off the table with zero media investment.

That leaves your budget to be tactically deployed, focusing on jobs where there is a high competitive demand for candidates or where your reach has to be extended beyond what the organic sources will natively provide.

While this sounds like a no-brainer, the operational details of how to get organic candidate traffic at scale are considerably more complex. How you go about it means the difference between a slow candidate trickle and a firehose!

It's worth learning the rules. Executed properly, an organic-first strategy could fill between 50 and 90 percent of your jobs without any media investment. Your organic candidate traffic will increase significantly, the quality of hires will go up, the velocity of hires will increase, and most importantly, you'll meet your hiring goals

Let’s dive in.

How do job boards think about organic listings?

Job boards use organic listings in three ways:

1. To fill a gap. These are jobs that serve a group of candidates that come to their site or that they want to come to their site, but there isn't enough paid job inventory to cover the demand.
2. To drive a behavior change. Sometimes, job boards will use the “carrot” of organic traffic to make employers change their posting behaviors. For example, by cleaning up titles, adding salary information, formatting shift data, or leveraging the native apply buttons, those employers are rewarded with free candidate traffic.
3. To enhance their offering. Job boards will also use organic traffic to provide additional value and make their overall suite more valuable, aligning with their customers’ business goals.
   

Most job boards will approach organic from more than one perspective. Often, you can figure out what the motivation is based on what sort of guard rails and results you get from the organic listings.

But the main point here is this: job boards deploy organic strategically. And that means you need to approach your acquisition of organic traffic strategically as well.

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