Best Recruiting Practices
High-quality candidates not beating down your door these days? If not, it might be time to brush up on modern recruiting practices.
Below, we review the 4 elements of recruitment marketing and share best practices for implementation to improve your strategy – and results.
The 4 Pillars of Recruitment Marketing
Any time the talent market is tight, it’s important to be proactive so your staffing firm can engage with as many job seekers as possible. If you’re wondering how to find exceptional candidates, it’s time to revisit the basics of recruitment marketing. When you want to engage with job seekers, remember that a strong plan includes the four pillars of recruitment marketing (CASE):
- Career website
- Advertising
- Social Recruiting
- Employment Branding
All four pillars, when working together, will help you attract more applicants and higher-quality candidates.
Your Career Website
Did you know that many staffing firms lose anywhere from 50-75% of website visitors? Your career website should be a destination that converts qualified candidates. If you are losing people, the problem could be your career site, not job seekers’ interest levels.
Plugging a “leaky” career site is essential for recruiting. How can you do that?
- Make your jobs sound appealing. Grab attention quickly, be transparent about pay and benefits and address company culture. Provide your clients with market data so they understand where their salary and benefits packages fall in your area and work with them to increase pay and/or benefits if necessary to attract applicants.
- Write effective job posts. Candidates won’t apply to a two-line job posting that doesn’t address their needs or priorities. Remember, a job post is an advertisement, so you want to quickly address the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) for job seekers.
- Streamline your job application. Applicants do not want to spend all day applying for one job. Every question over 3 reduces the number of applications you will receive. Keep your applications short and do not ask for highly personal information like SSN right away.
- Get on board with one-click apply. Because candidates want a streamlined process, take advantage of one-click apply options on social media and job sites. Nearly 75% of all applications come from one-click apply.
- Use calls-to-action on your blog posts. People need to be directed to next the step. Never assume they will take the action you want them to unless you tell them what that action is. Calls to action can increase conversions by 19%.
- Open up as many channels of communication as possible. People have different communication preferences and the easier you make it for candidates to stay in touch, the better. Leverage text, job alerts, talent communities, company newsletters, chatbots, etc.
Job Advertising
Strategic placement is necessary for success, but the options for job advertising can be overwhelming. It’s important to dig in and understand where you’ll get the best ROI for your ads.
First and foremost, you need to know your numbers. Metrics like cost-per apply, applies per job, the number of applications required to fill a job, and hard costs are necessary to understand which sites are giving you the best return and which sites are a waste of money.
Next, incorporate free advertising on social media, job boards, email lists, text lists, etc. These should not be your only means of advertising, but you should be maximizing them.
It is also important to re-engage with talent who may have visited your site but have not applied. Again, leverage your staffing firm’s database to send out job blasts, use newsletters to stay top-of-mind and use retargeting on Facebook and Google to stay connected.
Finally, incorporate programmatic job advertising. Programmatic is rule-based job advertising that allows you to better control your spend, reduce costs-per-application, increase the number of applications and improve the ROI of your job advertising.
Social Recruiting
Posting your jobs to social media is great – but it’s not social recruiting. Social recruiting is about having a strategy in place to attract and engage qualified applicants and passive candidates. This means you must have strategies for both active and passive job seekers. Social recruiting should also include:
- A communication strategy. When people reach out via social media, whether through direct messages or commenting on posts, they expect an answer. Someone should monitor and promptly respond to every message.
- Conversion paths. Again, direct social media readers and followers to the next step. Send them from social to specific website content where a CTA directs them to your jobs where it is simple to apply.
- Paid advertising. Building an effective organic presence takes time and your reach will always be somewhat limited. Paid advertising instantly increases your reach while also allowing you to target your ideal candidates.
- A good mix of formats. If you’re only posting text-based communications to your social media feeds, people will get bored. Leverage video, infographics, images, blog posts, job posts, etc.
Employment Branding
None of the other three pillars will matter if your company has a bad reputation. That’s why you must also focus on building a strong employer brand. You can start to do that by:
- Defining and clearly stating your employee value proposition (EVP): Why would someone want to work for your staffing firm? Define the unique value you bring to the table that none of your competitors can offer.
- Get exposed. Make sure your company is using both online and offline marketing strategies and that your messages are consistent across the board.
- Be a great place to work: You can’t just talk the talk, you must walk the walk. If you offer a great place to work, word will spread.