So, how exactly do we define recruitment marketing?
Let’s start with a simple definition…
Recruitment marketing is the combination of strategy, tactics and touchpoints that impact the entire recruiting process including sourcing, engagement, hiring and on-boarding.
Modern marketers in staffing firms can deploy a number of tactics including job boards, email, text messaging or social media; all based in an organizational strategy to drive more hires through engagement.
In other words: intelligently communicating with candidates about relevant jobs when time is right
Recruiting has seen a pretty dramatic shift in the past few years. A new contingent workforce paired with technology advances has made some strategies and tactics antiquated and ineffective.
Candidates had long been seen as a commodity; always available and exceedingly easy to dismiss. But as the game has changed, so too has the dynamic between candidate and recruiter. Today we must reach candidates at scale, but remain highly personal while doing so. This seemingly impossible task is far more achievable than you might imagine, but can only be accomplished if a shift away from old school thinking is made.
This page will walk you through the strategies, tactics and technologies that new school recruitment marketing pros need to understand to pull ahead of the pack. While we aim to cover the basics and provide a framework to build upon, marketing is an ever-changing beast, and new methods, techniques and dynamics are being developed all the time. To stay at the leading edge, we’d recommend diving into resources like marketingprofs.com.
Recruitment Marketing Overview
The term recruitment marketing is rather self-explanatory: it’s simply the marketing tactics and strategies a candidate will encounter during the recruitment process.
But what does that really mean?
It may be easier to think of recruitment marketing as all the touchpoints a candidate will have with your firm throughout their career lifecycle; every step from sourcing to assignment or redeployment.
A touchpoint is any interaction a candidate may have with your firm. It could be applying for a position, receiving an email or filling out paperwork during onboarding. Every touchpoint should align with the overall strategy that a recruiting firm has committed to.
A touchpoint is any interaction a candidate may have with your firm. It could be applying for a position, receiving an email or filling out paperwork during onboarding. Every touchpoint should align with the overall strategy that a recruiting firm has committed to.
Creating a Brand
It’s all about branding.
The modern day marketer’s catchcry highlights the fact that these days perception is just as important as reality. Think of Apple as an example. Their carefully crafted persona of cool, cutting edge and designer belies the fact that they are manufacturing their product in pretty much exactly the same way as the cheapest electronics brand.
But what does creating a brand mean in terms of recruitment?
What is an employment brand?
“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
Jeff Bezos
Amazon CEO
1. Define Your Values and Vision
The first step to developing your brand is to understand exactly what you’re trying to develop. You can’t draw an elephant if you don’t know what one looks like. What does your firm stand for? What are your long term goals? Answering such existential questions can be tricky, so begin by brainstorming the following:
- What do you hope your firm will look like in 5 years?
- Why is your firm unique? What do you offer that your competitors don’t?
- If you were a candidate, why would you work with your firm? And why wouldn’t you?
- How have potential candidates heard about your firm?
- Use what you brainstorm to define your brand. This definition should be short and precise – an ‘elevator pitch’ – and should balance what you ideally want to deliver with what you will feasibly be able to. This elevator pitch will form the genesis of any brand communication that you produce.
2. Identify your audience
While your employment brand is aimed at potential candidates, the type of jobseeker that you target will be steered by your clientele. So, who are the customers that you hope to work with?
Gaining an understanding of the industries that your ideal customers work within will allow you to align yourself with the needs of those customers. The recruiting requirements for different industries vary greatly (compare the retail, manufacturing and health sectors, for example), and building a brand that serves a certain type of customer is important for your firm’s credibility.
Ask yourself:
- What are the core industries my customers work within?
Developing a Strategy
Marketing strategy.
To many, that’s just one meaningless word followed by another, which, when combined, form something even more meaningless. So let’s break it down.
Think of strategy as:
The plan to achieve a big goal or company aim
And marketing as:
Promoting and selling your products or services
Recruiters have a fairly unique challenge on their hands, as they not only have to develop a strategy that speaks to potential clients, but also one that speaks to potential candidates.
So marketing strategy is the plan you set in place to promote and sell your recruiting services. Recruiters have a fairly unique challenge on their hands, as they not only have to develop a strategy that speaks to potential clients, but also one that speaks to potential candidates.
How do you go about developing such a multi-faceted marketing strategy?
Identify your touchpoints
When do you currently make contact with your candidates and clients? If this is a difficult question to answer, your current strategy should be seriously rethought. Good marketing strategy is built upon consistent, quality communication, and having clear contact procedures in place.
Making contact with prospects when they first engage with your organization or checking in with existing consultants every Friday should be processes that are written into the DNA of your firm, not tasks that your team can opt in on if they so choose.
Strategically target your activities
Where do new candidates/clients come from? Where should they be coming from? Consider your target candidate and client, and how best to go about reaching both groups.
Depending on your ideal audience, the perfect marketing channel could be email, social media, print advertising, setting up a stall at industry events or encouraging word of mouth.
Use the right tools
Which marketing tools do you need to help execute your strategy? As technology becomes smarter, previously time-consuming and laborious tasks are being made far easier, and in some cases are being entirely automated. The tools you choose will be guided by the scale of the strategy, and your willingness to innovate. We’ll take a deeper look at marketing tech in the next section, but for now, ask yourself:
- Do you require basic tools, like those for website or brand development?
- Are you ready to utilize marketing-specific tools for things like email, text messaging, job distribution, etc.?
- Would less traditional marketing channels like social media influencer, branded content and AR/VR technologies hit your target market?
- Do local paid sponsorships make sense for your organization?
- Do you understand the need to measure and analyze your marketing efforts, and which tools will best help you to do so?
Measure and analyze
As the last dot point above notes, the proof is in the pudding. There’s no point in committing to a marketing strategy if you can’t figure out how effective it is. As such, your strategy needs to be measured and analyzed, and clear goals must be put in place from the outset.
Exactly how you measure the strategy’s effectiveness will largely be up to you, but may be steered by the tools that you choose to use, and the analysis they offer up. The most important question however, is relatively simple: What would you see as a good ROI?
Using the Right Technology
Good recruitment marketing relies on the use of good technology. With digital marketing now making traditional marketing all but obsolete, it’s important that a recruiting firm educates itself on the best tools to use, or brings in experts who can put the right tech and processes in place.
Website
A 2015 study by Verisign found that 9 out of 10 consumers relied on the internet to locate and evaluate goods and services, while Profitworks noted that 93% of all business purchase decisions begin with a search engine. According to those numbers, without a website popping up on that search engine you’re left selling to just 7% of the market.
The key to gaining access to that lucrative audience is to build a professional website that has been search engine optimized (SEO). Hiring a professional to construct or reconstruct your site is an investment that will pay itself back handsomely in time.
It’s also vital that you use a website tracking tool, like Google Analytics, that enables you to measure and analyze the performance of your site. Keep your website professional around to act on the insights that are generated.
Marketing tools
So which marketing-specific tools should your firm be looking at? The aim of any tool should be to minimize the amount of laborious, repetitive work that a recruiter has to do. Instead, your recruiter should be focusing on providing unmatched service to their candidates and customers, allowing them to build meaningful and lasting relationships.
With that in mind, your marketing tools should automate the small stuff. Provided your ATS is well managed, basic communications like emails and text messages can easily be personalized to each recipient and sent out automatically. In fact, even highly personalized content can be automatically constructed for individual candidates if you use a smart system like Herefish.
These marketing tools can be boiled down to three broad categories
Sourcing Tech
It's worth noting that sourcing is a critical step in the entire recruitment marketing process. Below are some obvious choices and perhaps a few you haven't thought of when trying to source niche candidates.
Measurement
As we’ve already noted, perhaps the most important step in recruitment marketing strategy is to measure and analyze its performance, and adapt the strategy based on the insights generated. This must be done both before you develop your strategy (to form a baseline from which you can aim to improve), and after the strategy has been put in place (to develop and adjust to change as required).
Three different aspects of your performance must be measured in order to form a complete picture of your situation.
- Internal processes: Use your ATS to understand key recruiting process metrics like placement rate, time to fill and candidate source.
- Website: Google Analytics allows you to understand how traffic interacts with your site, and where conversions (content downloads, job applications) have come from.
- Engagement: Email metrics like open/click/apply rates allow you to assess how effective your outbound communication is, and the contribution that marketing can make to the funnel. Digital marketing efforts like social media ads offer up a wealth of engagement information that can guide your strategy into the future.
Recruitment, like most other industries, is undergoing a period of massive change. Perhaps the difference for recruitment is that the level of change is amplified, as it must navigate all the changes of every other industry it deals in.
But by understanding the value of good branding, the importance of solid strategy, and the role of technology in delivering both, your firm will be perfectly placed to not only adapt to this continual change, but thrive in it.
Reaching candidates as scale, but remaining personal all the while. It’s not impossible. In fact, it’s more achievable today than it has ever been before. It simply requires a commitment of resources, a pragmatic approach, and a willingness to innovate.
