Talent shortage is the worst nightmare for recruiters around the world, especially in the past two years, when resignations have reached an all-time high. To overcome the challenges and attract the right talents in the ever-competitive market, it is necessary for recruiting professionals to come up with efficient recruitment strategies that bring results.
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Publishing job advertisements across online platforms like social media and job boards without a specific target is not a sufficient recruitment approach. A recent study shows that only 39% of companies target specific audiences on social media platforms. Blindly sending your job vacancies out to the infinity of the internet and waiting for job seekers to cross paths with job advertisements like most companies do is not the most reliable strategy to source potential candidates.
Job seekers are now filtering their job application decisions in a manner similar to what consumers do before they decide to buy certain products. They typically take several steps to be informed before deciding to apply, researching and weighing their decisions based on reviews.
Many recruitment professionals are aware of this behavioral change and have started to study a variety of approaches geared towards convincing the consumer to buy-in. It’s no different with recruitment these days. With a multitude of channels - both professional and social - ‘recruitment marketing’ has become increasingly popular amongst companies and recruitment agencies today.
To those of you who are looking for a new and efficient strategy to engage and attract the right candidates, we would like to invite you to take a journey through the definition of recruitment marketing, what needs to be done, and the best recruitment marketing practices that you should follow.
What Is Recruitment Marketing?
Recruitment marketing is a talent strategy that aims at approaching, attracting, and building relationships with candidates by presenting a company’s value proposition, employer brand and core values.
Recruitment marketing is typically launched in the early stages of talent acquisition. The strategy involves creating a strong impression the moment candidates are exposed to your job advertisements, inspiring candidates to seriously consider your organization when they research your company and see your employer brand, leading candidates to develop an interest in applying for jobs at your company.
The key catalyst in executing an effective recruitment marketing strategy is the relationship between companies and potential candidates- recruiters must develop an approach that is appealing and aligns with the preference of the target audience.
If done well, recruitment marketing can give you many advantages over competitors - from better candidate engagement, a pleasant and complete candidate experience, access to a wider talent pool, and more.
The Recruitment Marketing Funnel
Let’s break down the steps of recruitment marketing and see what needs to be done in each stage.
Step 1: Increase Awareness
It is important to keep in mind that there are both active candidates - who are on the lookout for job opportunities - and passive candidates, who are not actively searching for jobs, but are open to new opportunities that offer them greater growth potential. Now, as a company or recruitment agency, you have to make sure that your content or message reaches both of these types of candidates.
A good starting point for you is to target the platform that your potential candidates are spending the most amount of their time on - whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or others. The goal is to market your organization as a credible potential employer while establishing a strong brand awareness by sharing content that showcases your culture and leadership.
You have to put your mind and company values into the making of the content. This must be something that your audience would actually like to spend their time reading, or watching rather than being filler content that does not show anything but a shallow message. Relevant and meaningful content helps make you stand out as desirable in the eyes of candidates.
Step 2: Generate Interest
Once you have caught the attention of potential candidates with good content, the next step is to generate interest in your organization. The next batch of content in your pipeline must be able to maintain the dynamic between your company and the candidates.
It is important to note that consistency is key. While there might be a tendency for teams to produce a few good pieces of employer branding content and then go quiet, leaving a long gap in your content calendar. This is especially true when you are competing for mindshare in the saturated world of digital content and advertisements. Inconsistency could result in candidates forgetting your brand. This is why your messages need to be published consistently, while still being aligned with your employer brand.
To efficiently generate interest, it is wise to map out a content publishing calendar. Why? Because it is a way to make sure that your key employer branding messages are continually being passed to both passive and active candidates.
Step 3: Nurturing Relationships with the Target Audience
At this stage, potential candidates have seen your posts and engaged with your social media sites. They have consistently shown interest in your content. The next step is to lead them towards your job openings. To bring them closer, it is essential that you make your job opportunities stand out among other companies.’ How? Remember the first step where you push out content about your company? Now is the time to ramp it up.
As soon as you engage with potential candidates who are interested in your employer value proposition, provide more details about your company so that candidates have an even closer look at your organization. Let them know the benefits that come with the jobs, as well as the compensations, growth opportunities and other important factors for candidates, such as work hours or your location.
Step 4: Close the Job
You might be thinking that the last step does not require much work as the foundation has been laid in the prior steps. Candidates have interest and are now deciding to apply for jobs at your company. However, you still have a lot of work to do.
Applying for jobs is quite troublesome. It takes a fair amount of candidates’ time to set up logins, create role-specific CVs, write cover letters, prepare portfolios that might never even be seen by recruiters, and answer screening questions.
You need to make sure that the application process is simple and takes as little time as possible. Take your time to cut down unnecessary steps and simplify the whole process using a reliable applicant tracking system.
Manatal simplifies the recruitment process tremendously and makes both you and candidates cruise along the application funnel and the recruitment pipeline with ease by centralizing everything onto a single platform.
Now, keep in mind that all those candidates who made it to the application phase but failed to pass the interview should still be added to your candidate pool. If a current job opening is not suitable for them now, something else more fitting to their skills and experiences may come up in the future. Keeping these candidates in your database will ensure that your talent pipeline is strong and reliable.
As strategic business partners, recruiters who are aware of the organization’s growth plans would be able to forecast the kinds of skills needed over time. This will, in turn, inform the way you segment future candidates who have already interacted with you but did not make the cut this time.
Recruitment Marketing Best Practices
Now that you have an idea of recruitment marketing from start to finish and how to properly accomplish it, let’s dive into the best practices to make sure you have a successful recruitment marketing campaign.
1. Establish Strong Brand Image to Attract Talents
The fact is, there are many companies that present similar brand images. The first practice towards successful recruitment marketing is to know what differentiates your brand from other players in the field. The best way to execute that is to make your employer’s brand image stand out for both consumers and especially potential candidates.
For instance, your employer value proposition could be the chance to work in a diverse, multicultural environment, where cross-functional opportunities are plenty for those who wish to build a career in your industry. For candidates with a strong growth mindset, a proposition such as this would be attractive.
Establishing a strong employer’s brand image is a long-term strategy that focuses on bringing value to the target audience. This practice is very important as the majority of active job seekers research companies’ online presence before deciding to apply for open positions.
As a company, the first place to look at is your website. This is essentially your online identification document. It is the first thing job seekers would find when they search for your organization. Moreover, your social media channels, SEO, and job boards all lead potential candidates straight to your web page.
Your website must be able to guide visitors to the company’s information and job openings with ease. At the same time, it must provide easy application steps for potential candidates. Here, user experience is key. Ensure that your website reflects your brand image, and highlight the key messages from your employer brand - what does your business stand for, and in that regard, how important are your people in this mission?
It is critical to integrate a career page into your website to promote your company culture and provide potential candidates with your history, core values, goals, and a glimpse of what it’s like to work under your brand.
Warren CAT, a large heavy-duty equipment dealer, took this practice seriously and created a career page that leads its visitors to current job openings and pages that promote its employee training programs as well as employee benefits.
Manatal gives users the ability to create a customizable career page that represents the essence of your organization and inspires potential candidates to become your employee. This is an essential step, especially for small businesses or startups that are building their employer brand.
2. Improve Candidate Experience
Candidate experience represents a huge factor when it comes to potential candidates making decisions to apply for jobs. Over 83% of talents say that negative experiences affect how they perceive employers that they had previously liked.
Remember that the process of recruiting top talents begins even before candidates click “apply” on open positions, and their experience begins from the moment they see your job advertisements.
A good start towards a positive candidate experience would be to present straightforward job descriptions. Avoid being vague about the job title and description, as it would likely cause candidates to misunderstand what you are actually looking for.
Job descriptions should sum up the main responsibilities, qualifications, and skills that certain positions require, top with the pros of the jobs. Provide enough information that could help candidates make decisions whether or not it fits them, and always keep your job description consistent across each platform.
At the same time, provide candidates with answers they are likely to frequently ask. Take your time to determine what applicants would like to know more about the recruitment or even about your company and create a comprehensive FAQ page to support them. Also, implement a chatbot on your website and set up instant auto messages on your social media channels to provide candidates with instant feedback.
Philips is an example of a major brand that follows this practice by creating a FAQ section on its career page to provide answers to visitors on what it’s like to work for the company.
Another important component in a good candidate experience is consistent and timely communication. It is crucial to keep them in the loop. You must make sure that candidates are informed about the recruitment process as they go along.
Manatal can help you reach candidates and keep them up-to-date by allowing users to keep track of the process and send out emails to candidates via a centralized platform. Opening multiple tabs at the same time won’t be necessary anymore. The best part is, you can customize email templates and save them for future use.
3. Strengthen Relationships with Candidates Through Social Media
Today, social media has become one of our everyday essentials. Currently, over 4.62 billion people across the globe access social media, with an average time of two hours and 27 minutes spent on platforms.
It is no surprise that the potential candidates are waiting to be found through social media. Professionals use social media to follow companies to keep up with their recruitment process. This is a solid opportunity for you to strengthen relationships with candidates through your social recruiting strategy.
First of all, you need to choose the right social media channels to reach out to candidates and promote your brand. LinkedIn, for example, is a go-to platform for professionals across multiple industries around the world, while Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram enable you to connect with potential candidates on a deeper level as these channels allow you to see more of candidates’ personal sides.
Your social recruitment can be even more efficient by integrating an Applicant Tracking System (ATS.) Manatal ATS allows you to publish job ads across multiple social media sites at once. Strengthen relationships with candidates in a few clicks.
At the same time, Manatal also enables you to get to know candidates better with its social media enrichment feature that extracts relevant and important information of candidates from their social media profiles and consolidates them in a single platform.
4. How About Hosting an Awesome Recruitment Event?
Events - physical or virtual - are a good way for you to showcase your company as an employer and be visible to a broader talent pool. At the same time, you will be able to engage and get to know candidates beyond just what’s on their CVs.
To plan a cool recruitment event that would complement your recruitment marketing strategy, you must first set your goals and identify what kind of an event would fit your organization.
For example, if you are a small business that is looking to establish warm and friendly relationships with candidates, you could go with an open and informal type of event. The goal for you then would be to create a vibe where your guests will feel comfortable to have a conversation and get to know your team members.
For larger companies in industries such as engineering or IT who employ more people regularly, a job fair might be suitable. Larger events mean more details to pay attention to. Create promotional materials that attract and inspire guests to apply for open positions almost immediately.
The next step is to create an event page on social media channels and spread the word out via email invitations, social media posts. Be sure to advertise your event consistently across all of your online platforms until the event day arrives.
After the event, we recommend you collect the information and analyze the results. Why? It’s because having hundreds of guests does not always indicate success. Has the event helped you raise brand awareness or attract enough applicants to meet your target? Looking at the event’s performance will help you understand what works and what doesn't for future events.
5. Go After Both Passive and Active Job Seekers
To achieve successful recruitment marketing, you should go after both passive and active job seekers. Now, using social media to attract active job seekers is a strategy that would give you results. As for passive job seekers, just because they are not constantly looking for job opportunities does not mean that social media couldn’t do the trick. An appealing employer brand that speaks to their aspirations is a huge factor that convinces passive candidates to consider your company.
To do it effectively, simply expand your brand image promotion on social media, but this time make your content even richer - understand what passive candidates in your sector might be looking for and craft your messages to resonate with them.
Just keep in mind that the process of turning passive job seekers into applicants doesn’t happen overnight. It takes multiple attempts. So, be patient. Each time you publish content, tell more stories about your organization. Add variation to your content. This will help keep your social media timeline fresh and interesting while consistently drawing attention from both passive and active job seekers.
Conclusion
To successfully acquire the right talents, it is wise to structure a strong recruitment marketing strategy. In the digital information age, carrying out recruitment marketing via online channels is one of the best ways to approach both active and passive seekers. Building a solid employer brand while sparking interest with informative and exciting content and providing candidates with the best experience can produce greater impact.
However, doing all of that without a powerful tool could mean a waste of your time and effort. And since time is one of the most crucial factors in recruitment, it is very important to back yourselves up with an efficient digital solution that enables you to jump from one step to another quickly without breaking a sweat.
Manatal’s simple and robust AI-powered applicant tracking system and CRM can help guide you towards successful recruitment marketing within a few clicks. With Manatal, you can strengthen your brand image with a customizable career page and get to know candidates better with the social media enrichment while offering them a satisfactory experience with the mass emailing capability.
Start your 14-day Free Trial now and explore more of our innovative features that will optimize your recruitment campaign while streamlining the whole process. Discovering the right talents can be easily done with the help of Manatal!
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