If you’re a human resources or recruiting leader in today’s pandemic-challenged economy, you’re well aware of the challenges of improving the U.S. employment rate and hiring remote workers and retraining recently retirees. There is an unprecedented need to do so. It may seem impossible to fill all the vacancies.
But the new time calls for new measures. Today’s human resources teams need to think like the advertising agencies behind those killer tourism marketing campaigns – only, in this case, the destination is your company. This approach of attracting candidates is called recruitment marketingAnd it is a must for HR leaders and their talent acquisition and recruitment teams.
“Today, a recruiter may still blindly post a vacancy on job boards and hope that qualified applicants will come to them, but this style of ‘post-and-pray’ recruitment is unreliable,” says Strategic Consulting. Said former vice president Rachel Waitko at Marriott International.
A recruiting marketing strategy is a far more proactive approach to hiring.
,[A] Recruitment marketing strategy is the approach you take to make your company culture visible and attractive to top talent. It’s a pull rather than a push strategy,” said Vance Garcia, general manager and head of culture at MarketGu, a self-service SEO tools provider.
While there are plenty of ways to optimize your recruitment marketing strategy, here are nine key steps to building the foundation.
1. Market Your Company as a Talent Destination
Going back to the tourism marketing strategy analogy, you wouldn’t expect a campaign to attract visitors to California to be the same as one to attract visitors to Iceland. Likewise, you’ll need to do marketing to make your culture unique. It takes care and attention.
“Companies need a way to differentiate themselves with potential team members who aren’t thin and speak directly to their ideal candidates,” Garcia said.
To that end, Garcia said it’s important to ask current employees what they love about working for the company. In addition, building an internal culture-building team will help develop what is organically built. That culture should be used as a selling point—especially in the context of matching ideal candidates with the culture, and generally in the context of having a thought leader, preferably a CEO, who talks to the media about your culture. can do.
Earning a reputation for the great culture you’ve built—for example, through social media, traditional media outlets, and sites like Glassdoor—is just as important. Part of this, said Garcia, is empowering your employees to be your best brand ambassadors.
2. Refresh Your Social Media Mix
If your social media recruitment strategy is still focused on some of the expected channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, it’s time to hit refresh and add them to the mix.
“Alternative social media consider sites like Mastodon and Gab instead of Twitter – Dailymotion instead of YouTube. They’re smaller but more exclusive, offer less competition and, coming in a hurry, there’s a chance you’ll be one of the Can be as big as the lead recruiter on the channel,” said Dominika Albotova, a former IT technical recruiter at PerceptionBox based in Israel.
“Sponsoring podcasts and vlogs, whether on YouTube or Twitch, can be a very cost-effective alternative to other advertising options,” Albotova said. She said that some YouTube vlogger channels have hundreds of thousands of views, but often have no sponsors. Vloggers may be reluctant to advertise products they don’t know, but “offering jobs that are suitable for a segment of your audience is a bonus to all.” She said advertisers get 15-60 seconds of air time when the vlogger references their offers and text, as well as a web link in the vlog description.
Recruiters should also consider the increasingly popular video-sharing platform TikTok, especially if they want to engage a younger generation of candidates.
3. Build and Manage Your Talent Pool
Managing the talent pool requires a number of tools – the most prominent being an applicant tracking system. Don’t forget to tap into candidate records that are already in your database. Use those more recent candidate files as a starting point for connecting with people, seeking referrals, and developing market intelligence.
Plus, collaborate with your marketing team to create a compelling career webpage that aligns with your company’s branding and promotes brand awareness.
“To encourage people to speculate and build their talent pool, there are clear instructions on how a candidate can register their interest. In a business that is growing, the careers page for applicants There should be a different place to learn about the company, its value and current opportunities. It may also be worth investing in a company page on Glassdoor, Xing and LinkedIn,” said Digitere, a software and data engineering consultancy based in London. People director Theresa Cantwell said.
4. Have an Employee Referral Program
An employee referral program helps with both recruitment and retention. Referral candidates are usually good choices for the company, so the ROI program is good. But these programs are also a great way to measure employee satisfaction, which helps with employee retention efforts. If employees are referring friends and family, it means they value the company.
“Employees should be [made] Referrals are aware of the program, so talk about it when new employees join, and mention the program whenever a new role is announced. Importantly, receive feedback from employees about the program. Is the reward forced? Will they refer people to the organization? We find anonymous culture engagement tools like OfficeVibe very useful in assessing employee sentiment and [employee] Net Promoter Score,” Cantwell said.
5. Understand the Role of Passive Candidates
One of the main reasons traditional recruiting practices have lost their luster, Vitko said, is that the best talent may not be actively looking for work given the low unemployment rate. The quest then becomes a matter of figuring out how to attract talent that is already happily employed.
Wytko warned that identifying passive candidates and making job offers could fail, as the same person could be bombarded with multiple offers. Job ads may also come up short “if they fail to be found”. [their] Potential applicants – way to places frequented by communities, websites or social and mobile forums that cultivate large numbers of people with common interests,” she said. “That’s where recruitment marketing strategies can help.” can.”
6. Know Your Ideal Candidate Personality
A good recruitment marketing strategy depends on your understanding of the candidates for any job.
“Know what your ideal candidates want and need, and create a target personality or ‘hiring avatar’ reflecting these insights and the needs of your company,” said Mads Heinelund, former consultant at Danish consultancy Nextwork A/S.
In other words, to accurately target your efforts, you need to know who you’re trying to recruit, where you can find them, and what they want from a new job or career change.
“We extracted some of the core values about his work and turned them into driving ad copy for the campaign,” said Matt Lee, former director of marketing at B2B digital marketing agency Adher Creative.
7. Use Job Listing to Attract Candidates
Even in a candidate-driven market, job listings are an important element of your recruitment marketing efforts. Candidates can check Glassdoor to see what your employees say about working at your company, check social media to see what your feeds say about your culture and LinkedIn connections. Turn to But how you present to the company and the job is likely to determine whether a potential candidate becomes an applicant. Bottom Line: Don’t miss an opportunity to sell.
“The way we handle it is that any job a job requires is through marketing,” said Louis Magalhees, director of marketing at DistanceJob, a remote recruitment company. “We try to sell and sell our open positions to our candidates just as we try and sell our candidates to our clients.”
“This means creating a beautiful, sexy job description that inspires the potential employee to read it, challenges them, but also provides an honest assessment of what it would be like to work on the position and what it would be like for them.” Why would it be good,” said Magalhos.
8. Use the Right Tools to Increase Your Talent Supply
Candidates find career opportunities in traditional online and mobile spaces, and those seeking in-demand skills can be extremely selective about what opportunities they pursue. Make it easy for candidates to find you on their favorite channels – such as social media outlets – and make it easier to communicate and execute applications.
That means capable small applications with handy, prefill fields — and even using text messaging to recruit — are smart moves.
“We implemented the ‘Text to Implement’ campaign, which was very successful,” Lee said. “More successful, however, was a brief look at the landing page that started the application process. We learned that internal recruiters only care about a handful of questions that assume [candidates] Eligible for the job or not. We focused on them and got rid of the rest.”
AI-enhanced tools can also make it faster and easier for you to find talent and for a candidate to have a great experience from your company introduction and so forth.
“For example, tools such as AI-powered candidate aggregators can automatically search digital sourcing channels to create intelligence about candidates in a fraction of the time required for human research,” Vitko said.
“In addition, algorithmic match models apply AI to link potential candidates with opportunities to identify skills and competencies that are actually applicable to the open role,” Vitko said. “Ultimately, new AI technologies can help automate manual and administrative tasks in the process, allowing recruiters to focus on building relationships and driving a positive candidate experience.”
9. Measure, measure, measure
For something to be managed well, you must have reliable metrics to show the reality of the current state of your efforts.
“Make sure you have clearly defined and measurable goals to see if your marketing strategy is working,” Vyatko said. “Companies that implement purposeful recruitment marketing strategies and measure their results will be the ones that win the battle for top talent and retain them as champions and advocates for their brands.”
Before you start implementing it, be sure to devote enough time to planning to create a complete strategy.
“To launch a recruitment marketing strategy, you need to figure out who will execute the process. Most people think that recruitment activities should be conducted by an individual or a team. But the truth is quite the opposite. can, a synergistic effort would be much more useful,” said Charlie Worrall, digital marketing executive at Imaginere Digital, a web design and digital marketing firm based in the UK.
