Welcome to the last post in my series designed to help your staffing firm LEVEL UP your marketing!
Earlier installments in this series:
12 Strategies To Level Up Your Marketing: Part 1 – Differentiating Your Company
12 Strategies To Level Up Your Marketing: Part 2 – Capturing Clients’ Interests
12 Strategies To Level Up Your Marketing: Part 3 – Selling More Staffing
12 Strategies To Level Up Your Marketing: Part 4 – Maximizing Sales Results
12 Strategies To Level Up Your Marketing: Part 5 – Driving More Sales Leads
12 Strategies To Level Up Your Marketing: Part 6 – Building Trust With Your Prospects
Today’s topic of discussion is mastering the 5 pillars of recruitment marketing!
LEVEL UP RECRUITING
In a down market, you need to recruit more!
Yes, you read that right.
When job orders are scarce, you need to dig deeper to find that “perfect fit” candidate, and you need to respond faster to get the placement. That means you need a stronger talent pool than the competition.
But with the cost of job advertising skyrocketing (as it does every year!), what can you do to strengthen your talent pool without crushing your budget?
Master the 5 Pillars of Recruitment Marketing
To build your talent pool and maximize placements, you need better job ads, stronger (and better managed) referral programs, a system to mine your ATS for reactivation, and proactive outreach to clients and your associates to extend assignments and maximize redeployment rates.
To accomplish these things, you need to master the five pillars of recruitment marketing:
1. Employment Branding
Why should someone work for you?
Employment branding is about understanding your unique value and all the reasons why you are a better option for temporary associates (and internal staff) than other staffing agencies…and direct employers.
To LEVEL UP your employment brand:
- Look at pay rates…are you consistently at or above market?
- Review all the benefits you offer…how could you improve them?
- Map your hiring process…how could you make it easier?
- Look at your onboarding…how could you it better?
- Evaluate your candidate’s experience…where are the gaps?
Employment branding starts with providing a great employment experience. Once you’ve nailed that, you then need to ensure your conveying the right message in all your recruiting—on your website, in your job ads, through social media, in email marketing, via automation, and reinforced by the words and actions of your recruiters.
But wait, there’s more.
You also need to take charge of your online reputation. In the world of Glassdoor and Indeed reviews, your employment brand is largely defined by what others say about you.
Do you have a proactive system to generate testimonials and positive online reviews?
If not, go back and review the section on Leveling Up Your Reputation!
2. Career Site
When most staffing companies think about recruiting, they start with job ads. But if you want more people applying to your jobs, first optimize the last mile…your career site.
Bad career site? That will cost you up to 95% of job applications!
To LEVEL UP your career site:
- Allow candidates to immediately search jobs and/or apply online when they visit your website.
- Improve job posts…sell the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) first, then the job requirements.
- Keep your jobs on your company domain. They’re great SEO content!
- Keep your application form as short as possible.
- Give people multiple ways to apply (via resume, online form, Indeed Apply, chat).
- Offer options for people not quite ready to apply, such as:
- Have a question? Talk with a recruiter!
- See if your resume is a match for the job
- Save this job for later
- Sign up for job alerts
- Use exit pop-ups to get a response when people don’t apply.
- Incorporate retargeting PPC ads to keep your company and jobs top-of-mind.
A great career site makes jobs easy to find, makes it easy to apply, and gets candidates to come back after their first visit.
Did you know that a returning candidate is 2x as likely to apply to a job as a first-time visitor?
3. Social Recruiting
Every staffing professional knows that the best candidates aren’t looking for work.
So where can you find this passive talent?
On social media, of course.
The average Facebook user checks their account eight times a day. Same with TikTok.
Forty percent of LinkedIn users check their accounts daily. As do 52% of Twitter users.
To LEVEL UP social recruiting:
- Determine where to invest your time…go where your ideal candidates are.
- Create two recruiting strategies…one for passive talent and one for active.
- Plan your content calendar…what to share and when to share it.
- Be active throughout the day…and on nights and weekends.
- Use a mix of media (images, videos, plain text).
- Take advantage of engagement tools the platform offers (polls, live video).
- Consider your conversion path (remember that section on CRO!)
- Get your recruiters involved in sharing the content (NetSocial can automate this!)
- Incorporate paid ads to expand your recruiting reach.
With social recruiting, your biggest battle is capturing the attention of your audience. Just like with your sales process, AIDA matters in social media:
To capture attention, be bold, be relevant, be interesting.
To get people interested, focus on their problems…why might they want a new job?
To create desire, sell your employment brand.
To get people to take action, make it easy to take that next step.
4. Job Advertising
When it comes to marketing in most staffing companies, job advertising is the #1 expense. Which is exactly why you need to get the maximum ROI for every dollar you invest!
To LEVEL UP your job ads:
- Test job titles. The same ad with different titles will get different responses.
- Train recruiters to write better posts. These are ads, not job descriptions!
- Get your jobs in front of more people. Think beyond job boards.
- Test different job boards to see where you get the best candidates at the least cost.
- Don’t lock into annual job board contracts. You need freedom to adjust your spend.
- Ensure your jobs are automatically optimized for Google for Jobs.
- Automate distribution to multiple job aggregators.
And if you spend more than $1,500 a month on job ads, invest in data-driven job management solutions that leverage a combination of job posting automation technology and human experience to help you get the greatest ROI on your job spend.
And yes, this is a pitch for our job advertising management services!
We’re reducing the average cost per apply by 33% within six months!
If you want to see if we can help you, contact us today for a FREE job ad review.
5. Recruitment Automation
In staffing today, delivering a great candidate experience requires more time and effort than any recruiter can possibly manage.
That’s why tools like Sense and Bullhorn Automation exist.
These automation platforms allow you to improve communication, ensure consistent service delivery, obtain timely feedback, increase referrals and redeployment, and save your recruiters tons of time!
To LEVEL UP your recruitment automation:
- Process map the workflows in your hiring, onboarding, and ongoing service delivery…walk your candidates’ experience
- Stay top of mind while you source, qualify, and present
- Identify:
- Communication gaps
- Process gaps
- Places to gather feedback
- Opportunities to nurture relationships
- Create a roadmap of automation to develop
- Systematically build out your automation…and test to see how they perform
One final word about automation: don’t be a robot!
There are a lot of staffing companies using the same tools with the same playbooks. To make your automations stand out, create a distinctive voice—a style of communication for your texts and emails that matches your employment brand and conveys your personality.
Want more ideas to improve your recruitment marketing?
Download our SMART RECRUITING Checklist
Final thoughts…
We hope you have enjoyed these ideas to improve your marketing and strengthen your ability to sell staffing and recruiting services in the coming months and years.
As we wrote in the beginning, this series of posts was created based on lessons from past recessions to help you succeed regardless of what happens in the economy.
In the Great Recession, one-third of staffing companies went out of business. But the companies that got smarter about how they sold, and got more aggressive about their marketing, not only survived but thrived.
Those companies that increased their visibility, strengthened their messaging, and got creative about how to engage and nurture employers recovered six months sooner than the rest of the staffing industry and grew at more than double the industry’s rate of growth.
If you would like the full ebook you can download it here.
To learn more about any of our services or brainstorm ideas specifically to help your firm, contact us at 1.888.696.2900 or [email protected].
