Organisations cannot build successful teams and high-impact workforce with obsolete recruitment techniques. That’s why the demand for individuals who are talented is high and HR teams are pressured to constantly search for an improved way to hire employees.
According to most HR managers and talent acquisition experts, the most difficult part of recruitment is identifying top quality talents from a large pool of applicants. This is because many of them still use obsolete recruitment techniques. On average, recruitment experts spend about 15 hours weekly trying to get the best candidate for a particular role. Fortunately, recruitment marketing offers more effective strategies to streamline and modernise your hiring process.
Marketing is one of the essential facets that add to the growth and success of a brand. Marketing is used to publicise a business through various campaigns to create awareness over the service provided, and the existence of the business to the public
Over the years, recruitment has advanced due to the swift growth in technology. There used to be a time when recruiters depend heavily on newspaper and bulletin board to announce or advertise available positions. However, the success of recruitment today depends on marketing campaigns, changes in the behaviour of candidates, and modern technology. This makes marketing a vital aspect of recruitment functions.
What is Recruitment Marketing?
The process of enticing and cultivating talented individuals to your organisation using various marketing strategies is called Recruitment Marketing. The main objective of recruitment marketing is to motivate individual talents to apply for open positions in your organisation. The earliest stage of talent acquisition is recruitment marketing.
There are two basic types of recruitment marketing ─ inbound and outbound recruitment marketing. These two basic types of recruitment marketing both focus on the different phases of the candidate’s journey. However, they both have different recruitment marketing philosophy, approaches, and tactics used to hire the best candidate.
Inbound recruitment marketing
This is a marketing strategy where candidates are proactively and continually attracted with the goal to make them take up your offer as their next employer. The goal behind this recruitment marketing strategy is to lead the candidates through three stages of a candidate journey which are Awareness, Consideration, and Interest.
The goal of this recruitment marketing strategy is to ensure clients determine their own pain points through reading contents that are relevant. Those pain points may include a lower than desirable salary and bad cultural fit. Candidates who have figured out their pain point will realise that your company is a better fit for them when they read your content, employee testimonials, company success stories, and benefits. This recruitment marketing strategy uses various online marketing techniques such as social media marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, content marketing and many more. Recruiters use this strategy to attract prospects, convert them to website leads, and nature these leads into candidate or clients.
Outbound recruitment Marketing
Is a strategy for recruitment marketing where recruiters search and contact candidates when there is a new job opening. The goal of this marketing strategy is to jump directly into the application stage and offer the position. This recruitment marketing type uses the same method as outbound sales in which candidates who are perceived to be a good fit are sourced out by recruiters. After that, candidates are invited to determine if they have a pain point or not.
Most recruitment agencies are familiar with these marketing techniques which include bulk emails, billboards, video ads, cold calling, advertising, and so many more. Although, these techniques have a stigma attached to them for being intrusive or disruptive, however, you can achieve significant success with these techniques. It is a game of numbers─ the more people get to see your services; the more likely it is that they will use your services.
Importance of Recruitment Marketing
Reduction in the costs of Hiring
Every business wants a return on every investment made. As a recruiter, you invest lots of money in other to ensure that you hire the best employees who will help your organisation grow. With recruitment strategy, you can analyse the cost of job advertising, figure out where your money is spent, and reallocate resources when necessary.
It’s not easy to track if the money spent on talent attraction is wasted or not. I’m not talking about the money spent on recruitment agencies or job boards, rather the money spent on graduate programs, careers site, events, and anything designed to create awareness for your brand and generate applications.
Rather with a consistent marketing technique, you will reap the reward of attracting top talents with natural traits. Not only will recruitment marketing help in tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns, but it will also help in ensuring that the investment of your time and resources is prioritised.
When you have a pipeline or pool of talent that you can choose from when you need any, many costs will be alleviated ─ you do not need agencies and ads if you are able to find the talent you want in your database.
Improvement in the Quality of Candidate
When it comes to the recruitment of people quality always outplays quantity.
The problem lots of organisations have is that top talent who actually visit their website and browse for does not apply. These people are not ready to face the stress that comes with application processes. They might have the interest to learn more about your organisation, but they have no interest in applying
You can win big when you set up a recruitment marketing network that will convert some of these quality candidates into leads. You shouldn’t overrate the difficulty in getting people to come to your website. You need to do everything you can do to convert them to leads because you are not guaranteed that they will come back. For your marketing strategy to work, you have to carefully plan what will happen next. You need to make plans on how these candidates can be nurtured and how they can be moved through your funnel application.
Also, in recruitment marketing, you shouldn’t underrate the supremacy of big data. The foundation of an AI-enabled technology used for recruitment is data. With big data, you can target people who meet your standard and hire only quality candidates.
Tactical Alignment
Recruitment marketing helps in planning for the long term. You should search for candidates who can make ten times impact in your company not just available candidates. Recruiter place more focuses on quality candidates, and your success relies on the tactical building personas of the kinds of individuals that are a perfect fit for your company.
You can end up hiring these candidates in the future, or you might not. Either way, you should have sufficient candidates with high quality that you can benefit from when you build relationships with them.
Improved diversity
There is lots of research with results which shows that teams that are culturally diverse are more effective. Research by McKinsey shows that a team that’s culturally diverse has about 35% probability of performing better than gender diverse team.
However, recruiters face a tough situation when trying to attract candidates that meet their diversity requirements. With recruitment marketing, recruiters can become more proactive when chasing after their talent personas.
Strong Company Branding
These days, you hardly see people who apply to only companies, they apply to brands. They apply to organisations that have objectives, vision, and mission in common with them.
When you look at the world biggest recruiters such as McDonald’s, Walmart, and other top organisations; they all have one distinctive thing in common– it’s their brand identity. Although you might not be on the same level field as these top giants, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t build a strong brand identity for your company.
People surely return to a brand that’s recognisable, so, if you want candidates to invest their time in you then, you need to spend more time on putting the right content on your blog and social media. Job applicants will look elsewhere if they search for your company’s name on Google and they see an empty Facebook page and a poorly maintained website.
The way your brand is projected and marketed to the public is very important. With recruitment marketing, you can get a good combination of a strong brand identity and a strong online presence. Your business will benefit judiciously when you constantly expose your business by having more advantage over your competitors. Even if your business is still at the startup phase, you can stay in the eyes of the public and in the mind of a larger audience when you continue to give them fresh contents. You need to put the right content on your website’s career page, use the right message for your employee value proposition. To do this in a measurable and scalable way, you need recruitment marketing.
Reduced time to hire
With recruitment marketing can reduce the time taken to hire a candidate by building a pipeline of talents that are a better fit for your company. For instance, your HR team won’t have to start from scratch when recruiting for a new position. They will have a pool of engaged talents.
There is more to recruitment marketing than advertising your company’s brand and having a pool of talent. The efficiency at which your open positions are filled depends on your recruitment software. With a clear strategy on recruitment marketing, you will be kept up to date with the latest and innovative software in recruitment. For instance, you can save time and money by performing manual tasks with recruitment software that are AI-enabled.
Better Candidate Experience
The relationship between an applicant and a company is built the first time they come across your brand not when they applied to your company. The experience a candidate has before applying is very important. The pre-applicant stage is the time where candidates evaluate your company whether they should apply or not. With recruitment marketing, you have the ability to personalise how you communicate to people and the content you give them at this stage the application process. You can customise the content you give people based on who they are, their relationship with you and their engagement level. If you’re concerned about the experience of your candidates, the recruitment marketing is for you.
Attract Modern Minds
Recruitment marketing helps in attracting candidates who are up to date with the latest trends online and recent technologies. With recruitment marketing strategies you can quickly identify how often and efficiently they use these technologies. Recruitment marketing will help you attract modern minds and encourage them to apply to your company. Use this marketing strategy and social media to build your company’s reputation.
In conclusion, it is essential to develop and maintain a recruitment marketing strategy that’s effective if you want to experience the important benefits mentioned above. Your candidates will have an improved experience and your hiring process will become better and smoother when you embrace recruitment marketing.
Recruitment marketing is about sharing a well-cultivated message at the right time with the right audience. With the current low employment rate, it is important for you to highlight the amazing benefits of your business and also outshine your competitors for reputation and brand visibility. As a recruiter, you need to adapt to the changes of recent times. You will find more it difficult to source for talented and successful candidates if you do not develop your brand presence digitally.
Make your company stand out from the rest of the industry by ruminating about your current recruitment marketing strategy, and what’s missing. You can also use good quality recruitment marketing to attract visitors who turn to leads and close a deal with a client. However, when you use a slack and careless method you might kill the deal and have less traffic on your website.
Staying on top of your game is not only crucial for customers, but it is also important for your prospective employees.
