Are Outdated Recruitment Practices Hurting Your Business?
Good employees make all the difference in a company’s culture, productivity, and growth. Yet a growing number of companies are struggling to attract and retain talent. While the causes of recruiting challenges are complex, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many employers are hindered by their own outdated recruitment practices.
The problems with traditional recruitment
Traditional recruitment strategies are designed for quantity, not quality, of applicants. The result is a high volume of candidates that take time, money, and manpower to sift through. This encourages hasty hiring decisions in a rush to fill positions and makes it harder to find a perfect match amidst the noise.
Furthermore, traditional methods like job boards primarily reach candidates who are already job searching. But what about potential applicants who aren’t actively looking but are open to new opportunities?
Why recruitment marketing is the future
Recruitment marketing takes a different approach to talent acquisition. Instead of casting a wide net, recruitment marketing goes deep to strategically attract ideal candidates. The benefits include shortened time to hire, higher-quality hires, and a better recruitment ROI.
What is recruitment marketing anyway?
Recruitment marketing doesn’t wait until a company has a job opening. Instead, it builds an employer brand that resonates with top talent and generates interest among passive candidates before the recruitment process begins.
The goal of recruitment marketing is to create a pipeline of ideal candidates. Ideal candidate profiles are similar to the customer profiles used in sales marketing. Instead of asking who wants to buy your product, hiring committees ask what skills and qualities they want to add to their team.
One thing an ideal candidate profile shouldn’t address is demographic information. Demographic characteristics like race, gender, and disability status are off-limits when making hiring decisions. Instead, companies should focus on the talents, behaviors, and culture drivers that make a candidate a good fit.
How to build a recruitment marketing strategy
Recruitment marketing involves more than advertising job openings in the right place. These are the top strategies for effective recruitment marketing.
1. Build your recruitment marketing team
Recruitment marketing teams combine HR and recruitment professionals with the expertise of digital marketers.
Hiring teams can work with in-house marketing and hiring teams or outsource to specialized marketers and recruiters. A marketing agency like Stokhaus Media can help a company develop its employer brand and implement a marketing strategy while a staffing agency pre-screens candidates and develops a shortlist of top matches to interview. Recruitment marketers should possess strong skills in social media marketing, content marketing, SEO optimization, and pay-per-click advertising.
2. Define your employer value proposition
An employer value proposition or EVP answers the question, “Why should top talent want to work here?” An EVP distinguishes an employer from its competitors and defines what a company offers in exchange for candidates’ time, skills, and experience. This includes:
Compensation and how it compares to the market average.
Work environment, including flexible work options.
Corporate culture and values.
Promotions, professional development, and other opportunities for growth.
Stability and job security.
3. Write transparent job descriptions
Job descriptions shouldn’t leave candidates guessing. The best job descriptions speak to the ideal candidate profile while weeding out candidates who aren’t a match. Replace buzzwords, vague or subjective descriptors, and needless requirements with descriptive job titles, precise wording, and important search keywords. If a company advertises flexibility or other in-demand perks, they should define what that means in terms that matter to workers.
4. Enhance the candidate experience
Overly complicated or slow recruitment processes deter top talent. A positive candidate experience, on the other hand, demonstrates that an employer values its people and their time.
Clear expectations, frequent communication, fair processes, and expediency are the backbone of a positive candidate experience. Other steps to improve the candidate experience include streamlining the application process, automating time-consuming processes, optimizing for mobile, and following up with non-hires.
5. Build an online presence
After refining the employer brand, the next step is building awareness. This starts online with a company’s career website, social media presence, and online content. Brand awareness campaigns generate awareness in a company’s role as an employer rather than promoting a specific role.
Awareness messaging focuses on delivering content that’s relevant to ideal candidates and promoting the employer brand. Content should showcase a company’s values, build a human connection, and provide a behind-the-scenes window into the work environment and culture.
6. Invest in social recruiting
Social media is a key component of an employer brand’s digital strategy. Not only does social media allow for natural exchanges between candidates and employers, it also provides powerful tools for targeting candidates based on location, interests, job title, and other attributes. A company’s social strategy should include both organic reach and paid advertising to proactively share content and job posts with candidates.
7. Capture and nurture candidate leads
Capturing leads turns awareness into ongoing engagement. Employers can encourage leads to volunteer contact information by offering digital downloads, hosting events, workshops, and webinars, or inviting candidates who aren’t ready to apply to join the employer’s talent network.
The key to converting leads is nurturing relationships without being overly solicitous. This is where mapping candidate journey comes into play. By understanding where candidates are and what they’re looking for at each point along the journey, employers can deliver personalized content and messaging to drive conversions.
8. Measure results and adjust
How do employers know if their recruitment marketing efforts are working? Thanks to the data-rich nature of digital recruitment, tracking recruitment marketing metrics is relatively straightforward. Key metrics to track include reach, engagement, click-through rate, cost per click, spend per hire, and time to hire.
Top candidates have their choice of employers. To recruit top talent, employers have to do more than list job openings and wait for applications to roll in. Employers must demonstrate why their company is a great place to work and reach candidates where they spend time. Through this proactive approach to finding, engaging, and converting high-quality talent, recruitment marketing benefits an employer’s bottom line while building a talent pool that empowers growth.