Recruitment marketing continues to become more important in the talent acquisition industry. With fierce competition and the battle for talent, it’s vital to focus on your recruitment marketing if you want to keep your candidate pipeline flow.
From developing an employer brand, to creating a simple application process, to engagement throughout the screening and interview process, the companies featuring the best recruitment marketing are winning the recruiting game right now (and will win even more in the future.)
Recently, I attended the TA Tech Recruitment Marketing Leadership Summit in Chicago along with 100+ professionals from around the country (and the world actually. One presenter flew in from Hong Kong!)
Let’s jump in to the biggest takeaways and how you can apply them to your staffing agency’s recruitment strategy.
RELATED CONTENT: {INSIGHTS} Podcast: Lessons from the TA Tech Recruitment Summit (14:15)
Recruitment Marketing Isn’t Just the Top of the Funnel
Admittedly, I have fallen into the trap of saying recruitment marketing is “everything it takes to get someone to apply for a job.”
But you know what, recruitment marketing never really stops. Let’s think about it.
Your company works really hard at getting an application. It places content in a number of locations. It has a great application. The candidate hits submit.
Then what happens:
- How quickly does your recruiter follow up? Do they follow up again if the first communication brings zero response?
- How quickly is an interview scheduled?
- How many interviews must the candidate go through?
- How often are you communicating the status of their application?
- When they receive an offer (or are declined), are you continuing communication?
All of those actions (and that’s a limited list) make an impact on the job candidate or the new placement. Their experience is shaped during those formative stages. Applications could come in but if your internal process isn’t good enough and leaves a bad taste in the mouth of a candidate of placement, they are going to leave and will probably share that experience with others.
The Candidate Journey Isn’t Linear
Want to guess how many different sources a job candidate considers before applying for a job?
Up to 18 (!)
A set path doesn’t exist for how a job candidate decides when to apply for a job. Let’s just compare a few examples:
- See a post on social media, drive down the street and see an advertisement, go to your website, see a remarketing ad, see an ad on a job board, hear local radio advertisement, apply for a job
- See a job posting on Indeed and applies
- Goes to your website because a friend told them to, see a remarketing ad, make their way to social media two weeks later, see your Facebook page, eventually applies for a job
- Comes to your website, talks to a chatbot, applies 2 days later
A great example from David Harden, the CEO at Recruiting.com, was how we consume content in our personal lives. The Netflix effect means we binge on content. The Amazon/Postmates effect means we want instant gratification. But we want it to be meaningful and personalized, which is hard. We have to automate personalization. (Think about that!)
We have to put content where people are spending their time and everyone spends their time in different places. Yes, it’s hard to keep up, but if you want to recruit talent, it’s vital to keep up.
Quick Wins to Improve Recruitment Marketing Today
Recruitment marketing is the long game.
But, there are some quick changes you can make to your recruitment process today that will help increase conversions right now:
- Chatbots are very helpful. Use them in the right places, especially your website!
- Put the length of time to complete your application right at the top? Why? This manages expectations
- Look at your website and include more calls-to-action. Put a fly-in on the home page or Careers page. Have a bright button in the header of your website that says “Apply Now”
- In your emails, put a recruiter’s name in the “From” field, put an actual email address in the “From” field, find a way to include the recipient’s name in the email
RELATED CONTENT: For a quick recap on these quick wins, head over to my #MattMinute video on LinkedIn!)
Talent Acquisition Follows Consumer Trends
The latest marketing trends in talent acquisition follow the most recent trends in the consumer world. Ryan Christoi, the managing partner at KRT Marketing, gave a great talk on this topic. (And I would argue marketing trends in staffing follow after the traditional HR world, but that’s a different topic).
Let’s look at examples:
That can be great for the talent acquisition and staffing industries. Why? Because we can see what works and what doesn’t work in the consumer world before jumping on board with the latest shiny tactic. It will help limit wasting resources and allow staffing agencies to be more efficient with their marketing strategies and tactics to reach business goals.
Make Someone Feel Like They HAVE to Belong
Employer branding is playing the long game, similar to recruitment marketing. Your brand isn’t going to sell but it will relate to people.
Tony Lepore, the director of employment branding at Shaker Recruitment Marketing, gave a great talk about how recruitment marketing isn’t your company’s brand. It’s one of the expressions of the brand and you need to nurture that relationship over time.
How can you do that? I would argue through video.
Create videos that show a “day in the life” of different jobs you place for. Take them on to job sites. Show how people are working.
Then, show how your top employees have been impacted by your staffing agency. Create videos. Use a video marketing service that can brand them easily so all you have to do is upload a short video and everything else is taken care of.
Create 30-60 second videos that highlight employees where you made a difference in their lives. Highlight employees who have moved onto a career because of the start your staffing agency gave them.
We trust employees THREE TIMES as much as we trust employers. Leverage your top talent and showcase the best stories.
Technology Is Great, but Only When Used the Right Way
My last takeaway talks about technology and is a quote from a really impassioned speech from Thom Kenney, the CEO at SmashFly.
One of the quotes I took away was “the technology is never the solution. It’s the implementation of the technology that’s the solution.”
It’s perfect. Why?
The newest technology is awesome. It’s fun to have the latest model on the car lot but if you don’t know how to drive it, what good is it?
That’s where having the right recruitment marketing strategies is imperative to reaching your business goals. We can use programmatic technology, but if it’s not eliminating pain points or driving applications at the cost you want, what’s the point?
We can use an automated interview scheduler, but what’s the point if you don’t drive job candidates and don’t use the automated reminder tools to reduce no shows.
This six-pack of takeaways summarizes a really awesome conference run by TA Tech in Chicago in the middle of April. Think about how some (or all!) of these takeaways can impact your recruitment in a positive way.
We need to make it easy for job seekers to consume content, become familiar with your brand and then to apply for jobs.
Oh yeah, don’t forget it doesn’t stop there. Make sure your interviewing and onboarding process is just as strong. Or you’re going to be hiring for that person again real soon.
