You run Meta campaigns for your vacancies and they work: you reach people who are not looking. But the candidate who types 'vacature monteur Eindhoven' tonight never sees you. That is the most qualified demand in the market. Below is a step-by-step setup for a search campaign.

Search captures demand, Meta creates it

On Meta you interrupt someone who was thinking about something else: you buy attention, and by definition part of your budget goes to people who will never apply. On Search you only pay after someone has expressed intent themselves. That changes what you measure.

On Meta you steer on reach and cost per application across large volume. On Search the volume is smaller and the click more expensive, but the average click is worth more. So never compare the two channels on cost per click, compare them on cost per placeable candidate.

Search also has a ceiling Meta does not have: you can never reach more candidates than there are searches. Past a point, extra budget buys nothing. It is an addition, not a replacement. The broader trade-off is covered in the piece on Meta ads versus Google ads for recruitment.

Keyword structure: job title plus region

The building block is job title plus town or region. 'Heftruckchauffeur Tilburg', 'verpleegkundige vacature Zwolle', 'elektromonteur banen Brabant'. That is how candidates actually search: they know what they can do and how far they are willing to drive.

Modifiers and long-tail

  • Vacancy words: vacature, vacatures, banen, baan, werk, gezocht
  • Location: town name, region, province, and variants like 'omgeving Breda'
  • Contract type: fulltime, parttime, weekend, evening shift, rotating shifts
  • Level: junior, senior, apprentice, experienced, career changer

Stack those layers. 'Monteur vacature Tilburg fulltime' gets fewer searches than 'monteur', but everyone typing it is exactly your audience. Sixty specific combinations outperform ten broad terms, because your ad can literally echo back what was searched.

Which head terms to skip

  • 'Vacatures', 'banen' and 'werk zoeken' on their own: expensive, national, no direction at all
  • 'Uitzendbureau' with nothing attached: it mixes candidates, employers and people wanting to start an agency
  • The job title without a region, if you only place people in part of the country
  • 'Werken bij' plus a large employer's name: you are paying for someone else's brand

Match types and why broad burns your budget

Start with phrase match as your default and use exact match on the terms that have proven they convert. Move to broad match only once you have a tight negative list, smart bidding running on a real conversion, and the discipline to read the search terms report daily.

Broad match turns 'monteur vacature Tilburg' into 'opleiding monteur', 'wat verdient een monteur' and 'monteur gezocht zzp' as well. Students, curious browsers and freelancers. On a daily budget of 25 euros you can burn hundreds of euros in a week on traffic that never produces an application.

A starter negative keyword list

  • Training and explanation: opleiding, cursus, diploma, studie, betekenis, wat doet een, taken, functieomschrijving
  • Salary: salaris, loon, wat verdient, uurloon, salarisschaal, cao
  • Wrong employment type: zzp, freelance, bijbaan, vakantiewerk, stage, vrijwilliger, vrijwilligerswerk
  • Employer side: personeel zoeken, vacature plaatsen, uitzendbureau starten, recruitment software
  • Competitors as a category: the large job boards and the agencies in your region, by name. Someone searching 'vacatures bij agency X' wants agency X
  • Town names outside your service area

Apply this at campaign level as a shared list, so every new campaign inherits it immediately. Read the search terms report weekly for the first month and monthly after that.

Ad groups and ad copy

One job family per ad group: technicians in one, forklift and logistics in another, healthcare in a third. Five to fifteen keywords per group, all pointing to the same landing page. That lets the ad match the query exactly, and it lifts your quality score.

What belongs in headline 1

  • Headline 1: job title plus town, nothing else. 'Vacature Monteur Tilburg'. Pin it to position 1
  • Headline 2: the single hard fact that earns the click: salary indication, permanent contract, shift allowance or hours
  • Headline 3 onwards: response time and ease of applying, such as 'Reply within 24 hours'
  • Descriptions: what the work involves, what you need to be able to do, what the next step is

Fill all fifteen headlines, but do not let Google shuffle everything: without a pin the job title drops out of view. And cut the recruitment prose: 'we are looking for a driven team player' appears in every competing ad and costs you the click.

Extensions worth filling in

  • Sitelinks: 'All vacancies in the region', 'Salary indication', 'How it works', 'Contact us directly'
  • Callouts: 'Reply within 24 hours', 'One fixed contact', 'Travel allowance', 'Route to a permanent contract'
  • Location extension if you have a branch in that region
  • Call extension during office hours: a share of candidates would rather ring than fill in a form

The ad lands on the vacancy, never on the homepage

This rule has no exceptions. The 'heftruckchauffeur Tilburg' ad group lands on that specific vacancy page. Not the homepage, not the overview. Anyone forced to search again for what they just searched for drops out. On top of that your landing page experience falls and your cost per click rises.

Above the fold: job title, town, salary indication, hours, contract type and a short form. How to build that page is covered in the article on a vacancy landing page that converts. If you do not have a separate page per vacancy, use at minimum a filtered overview per job title and region.

Conversion tracking: the event on the thank-you page

Without conversion tracking Search is a black box: clicks say nothing about candidates and smart bidding has nothing to steer on. Set this up before you switch the campaign on, not after.

  1. In Google Ads, under Goals, create a conversion action of type Website and name it 'Application'
  2. Redirect the form after submission to a separate thank-you page with its own URL, for example /sollicitatie-ontvangen. No pop-up: you need a unique URL
  3. Place the Google tag on all pages and fire the event only on that thank-you page, or use a Tag Manager trigger on that URL
  4. Set 'Application' as primary, count 'one' per click, conversion window 30 days
  5. Add a click on the phone number or WhatsApp button as a secondary conversion
  6. Verify with Tag Assistant that the event fires before you spend a single euro

After that, feed back which applications turned out to be placeable, through offline conversions or a monthly manual count per source. Otherwise you are optimising for forms instead of placements. See the piece on running the numbers on your recruitment funnel KPIs.

Deriving your budget instead of guessing

Do not start at 'we will spend 500 a month'. Work backwards from a single placement. You need three numbers: your cost per click, the conversion rate of your vacancy page and the number of applicants per placement.

Suppose: your cost per click is 2.50 euros, your vacancy page converts 6 percent of visitors into an application, and 1 in 6 applicants is placeable. Note: these are assumptions to show the arithmetic, not industry figures.

  1. One placement requires 6 applications
  2. 6 applications at a 6 percent conversion rate requires 6 divided by 0.06, which is 100 clicks
  3. 100 clicks times 2.50 euros is 250 euros of media cost per placement

Put that 250 euros next to your margin on one placement. If you are comfortably under it, the only question left is how much volume exists. The same sum sets your test budget: you need roughly 100 clicks per ad group before the numbers mean anything. Three groups times 250 euros is 750 euros a month, roughly 25 euros a day. Below that you are not testing, you are looking at noise.

When Search is simply the wrong channel

Search only works if people search. Check the combined monthly volume of all your job-title-plus-region combinations in Keyword Planner before you build anything. If it adds up to a few dozen searches, you cannot fill a funnel with it.

  • Niche roles or internally invented job titles that candidates never type
  • Senior and management roles: those people are not searching, they have to be approached
  • A small service area where the volume is too thin
  • A vacancy paying below market: on a results page the alternatives sit right next to yours

Then Meta, sourcing and multichannel distribution do the work, and you let Search run on a minimal budget against your own brand name. That is not a loss, that is budget moving to the channel where the candidate actually is.

Conclusion

Google Search fills a gap Meta cannot: the candidate who has already decided today that they want to move. The campaign is not complicated, but it does have to be precise. Job title plus region, phrase match, a negative list from day one, one job family per ad group, the job title pinned in headline 1, landing on the vacancy itself, an event on the thank-you page, and a budget derived backwards.

If you want this running alongside your Meta campaigns without sitting in the search terms report every week yourself, have a look at what we do for staffing and secondment agencies on the services page. We will work through the three numbers together.