What is Recruitment Marketing and How Do the Best Employers Use it?
Recruitment marketing emerged as one of the top trends in HR in 2018. We take a look at three essential steps that drive a successful recruitment marketing strategy.
As talent management goes digital, the lines between marketing and recruiting are becoming increasingly blurred. The rise of social media, the shift in workforce demographics, and easy access to information have transformed how candidates approach employment prospects.
Do you remember the last time you made a big-ticket purchase? Did you explore other options and pricing before buying it? Or did you immediately engage with a sales rep? In all likelihood, you didn’t need a sales rep to help you make your decision. Online content today gets customers 60 percent (Click here to read about The Disappearing Sales Process) of the way through the sales process before they actually engage with a salesperson. Customers no longer need to rely on sales reps to learn more about the products they want to buy.
Well, it’s no different in the talent management word, either. Candidates now have access to platforms like Glassdoor that offer insights into an organization’s culture, benefits offered, and even information on the kind of compensation you could expect. Social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn have opened up new channels of communication that can help shape candidate perceptions of their prospective employers. There is no doubt that recruiters and talent acquisition leaders must now start thinking like modern marketers and learn a lot of the same skills.
What is recruitment marketing?
Recruitment marketing applies the principles of modern marketing, such as omni-channel communication, analytics, hyper-targeted messaging, and technology-enabled automation to attract, engage, and nurture passive talent by reinforcing the employer brand or the employer value proposition (EVP).
Recruitment marketing takes a holistic view of operationalizing the entire candidate journey the way marketers approach their customer journey. So, let’s take a look at how the most successful talent acquisition teams implement an effective recruitment marketing campaign:
- Attract: Notice how most casual conversations about Google ultimately lead to their work culture? No, it’s not the free food or the hours or the futuristic Googleplexes that gets people talking. **Most of Google’s success in attracting top talent comes down to their employer branding, their reputation among potential candidates and employees**.
Imagine a typical “Careers Page” on a company’s website. Your mind invariably drifts to stock images of grinning employees in an office space. Career sites like these do little to differentiate the employer from thousands of their other competitors trying to reach the same talent pool.
The show, don’t tell approach by companies like Google demonstrate their employee value proposition through real-life stories, videos, and professional tips.
Smart use of social media platforms for content sharing also is a potent tool to reinforce the employer brand and drive awareness.
Here’s a great example of how SodaStream, an Israeli sparkling water company, fused key elements of employer branding with smart messaging:
- Assess: The second step in the recruitment marketing funnel is engagement. Once you’ve established a strong employer brand, you’re likely to receive a lot of attention from potential candidates. Talent analytics coupled with your trusty old companion – applicant tracking systems will help you evaluate the good-fits, the best-fits, and the misfits.
Evaluation is crucial to building desired candidate personas with the right skills, experiences, and cultural fit. As you would expect, data plays a pivotal role in this process. **Successful sourcing relies on having rich and updated databases, that can be used to rank and score candidates** (like lead scoring in marketing).
Now that you have your target candidates (active talent) in sight, the next step is to segregate the good fits and the best fits into different talent pools for further engagement and nurturing campaigns. Email and drip campaigns are great ways to establish a real, human to human relationship with your talent pools. - Engage: Houston: You’re now cleared for takeoff! With your talent pipeline in place, your comprehensive recruitment marketing campaign is ready for launch. It’s now time to think about creating memorable candidate experiences and building long-term relationships with candidates. This process is also driven by data collection and analytics. **Talent analytics will shape the candidate experience you deliver**.
Think back to every cold call you’ve received from recruiters that made you feel if they read your resume at all; Analytics dashboards and a unified vision of the candidate pipeline is essential to developing a winning candidate experience. Converting interested, qualified candidates into hires depends on how efficiently to manage your talent pipeline.
Also Read:
What is recruitment? Definition, process, techniques and methods with examples for 2020
The success of any recruitment marketing strategy relies on the effective use of recruitment tools and data analytics. However, true adoption of new technology – especially a disruptive one – needs a well thought out change management strategy and implementation plan. Finally, determine the success of your recruitment marketing strategies by calculating pre- and post-conversion rates, time-to-hire, and cost-to-hire and comparing them against industry averages.
