Article: How do you practice ‘Recruitment marketing’ for hiring talent in your organization?

Talent Acquisition

How do you practice ‘Recruitment marketing’ for hiring talent in your organization?

Recruitment marketing emerged as one of the top trends in HR being practiced since a couple of years. Let us understand a few critical pointers that leaders can focus on to drive better results for creating a pool of talent for hire.
How do you practice ‘Recruitment marketing’ for hiring talent in your organization?

Companies are engrossed in responding to the growing challenges of attracting talent in this highly demanding job market with increased turnover rates. Higher volume of open positions in a given time frame is often found in industries such as retail and hospitality. McDonald’s made headlines recently in their high volume hiring of 250,000 employees. The need for such larger volume can be due to reasons like seasonal hiring, new store openings, or perhaps owing to rapid growth in the business line. To combat such waves of sudden pressure of meeting hiring targets, recruiters need to use the concept known as ‘Recruitment Marketing.’

Josh Bersin the Founder, Bersin by Deloitte rightly points out - “Recruitment has shifted from a “sales” focus to a “marketing focus” today. Companies that create a compelling, authentic employment brand, communicate their values and mission, and clearly articulate the nature of their workplace are winning out in their recruitment efforts." This is where Recruitment Marketing comes in. This strategy and tactics are used by organizations to source, manage, and nurture passive talent before they even apply for the job and is extremely critical to focus on.

Recruitment Marketing helps in generating awareness for prospective candidates; and creates interest amongst the candidates and for the company in general. Most of the recruitment marketers need to collaborate with the TA team and the employer branding function to build a pipeline of candidates for open and future roles along with keeping the candidates warmed up with the right set of targeted content.

However, it is a comprehensive approach that companies use to attract, engage and convert people into willing applicants and is an additive hiring strategy responsible for the top of the funnel. Hence, one must never replace it with other hiring tactics followed to drive candidates further down the pipeline.

To drill down further, here are a few critical pointers that you can focus on to drive better results by imbibing the concept of recruitment marketing in your organization:

  • Create an internal team that possesses the skills needed to be a recruitment marketer.  Skills in social media, employer branding, and content marketing is a must to help your company improve on how you attract talent.
  • Demonstrate employee value propositions via real-life stories and videos. The ‘show and don’t tell’ approach by companies like Google through the smart use of social media platforms for content sharing is also a potent tool to reinforce their EVP.
  • Make sure your branding truly reflects your culture, purpose, values, and mission. Do keep the foundational pieces consistent across all channels of communication.
  • Redesign your website or the career page if needed. Evaluate your current web analytics to determine what’s really important to your job seekers. Career page content must be optimized and should resonate with candidates.
  • Create social media campaigns that have a really good message for capturing the essence of the company’s mission and vision. How well you market and position it with your brand is deeply important.
  • Thanks to technology, nowadays hosting a live chat through careers site chatbot has become easier to implement. One can try to host a Twitter chat or a Facebook chat too where candidates ask questions directly to hiring managers on job roles and fitments.

However, all such strategies and initiatives need to be measured regularly to determine the success of the recruitment marketing framework. It is mandatory to demonstrate the impact of the implemented ones by optimizing and predicting results with the aid of data analytics. This shall encompass calculating pre- and post-conversion rates, cost-to-hire, time-to-hire, and then benchmark them against industry averages. However, often the team is not aware of which tools to use or what data is needed to be tracked. Some suggestive tools that can be used are:

  1. Use data visualization tools to make the insights more compelling and in case of budget constraints make use of Excel and Google Sheets to your rescue. Slicers, Regression Analysis, and pivot tables in Excel can help slice and dice data. However, using a data visualization tool like Tableau, Domo and Google data studio are much helpful for refined insights that help showcase the trends while churning the available data easily.
  2. The use of Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has been around for a while and can be used when it comes to data optimization for a campaign. However, a comparatively new technology called programmatic job ads is being used which is a real-time click and application conversion data to control and optimize the job campaigns that are run by the company.
  3. Also, using URL tracking tags helps to easily see how each recruitment marketing activity is being performed. And Google offers a simple URL builder tool too for adding links with tracking tags. Google Analytics dashboard too helps to track visitors and segmenting them from paid ads vs. organic traffic.

In short, always remember that your next hire will come from your ability to tap the right talent in this candidate driven world. Whatever tools one plans to use for recruitment marketing, it is recommended to foresee how they will help collect, organize and analyze data for carving an impact analysis. And all of these need a well-thought-out management strategy and implementation plan. Remember, this is the age of data-driven decision. And businesses have no choice left but to embrace strategies with the touch of data.

(Know more about changing TA landscape at the People Matters Talent Acquisition Conference 2019 on 29th May in Mumbai. Click here to register.)

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, #PMTAC

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