Most recruiters, about 46% of them, assert that they see their job more as marketing.
Rather than plainly recruiting the employees just to meet the necessary requirements of the company, recruiters aim to acquire the best talents who will help ensure the success of the organization.
This is why it is better to look at recruiting as a marketing endeavor as well that involves finding potential candidates that could contribute remarkable efforts.
What is recruitment marketing?
Recruitment marketing is the type of marketing that communicates the brand of the company to potential employees and the best facets of the organization in order to attract more qualified candidates in the talent market.
Through recruitment marketing, companies are able to land candidates who make the best fit to the company’s culture. This type of marketing also highlights the company’s best assets in such a way that appeals to the target people.
Note that recruiting and recruiting marketing have differences. The recruitment process itself is just focused on the specific needs of the company, while recruitment marketing promotes the company as an employer to facilitate hiring.
Another difference is that the recruitment process itself does the onboarding process at the post phase, while recruitment marketing nurtures the potential new hires throughout the process so it would be impossible for these prospects to say no to the companies offering the jobs.
Goals of Recruitment Marketing
Beyond marketing, recruitment marketing is also involved in obtaining candidate leads and nurturing relationships through which gives higher quality for the company and gives hires a positive hiring experience.
By having a good recruitment marketing strategy, you can have a competitive advantage, attract more candidates and encourage them to apply in your open job positions.
As recruitment marketing paves the way for you to acquire the best talents to your organization, here are some of the its specific goals:
- Obtain qualified job applicants
- Increase engagement among candidates
- Get more applicants from social media and career sites
- Increase offer-acceptance rate
- Increase employer brand awareness
- Increase more participants at the career site
- Organize successful recruitment and networking events
You can craft your own recruitment marketing goals. Just be specific and aim for feasibility in order to produce effective results for the company.
Importance of Recruitment Marketing
About 75% of professionals are passive type of job seekers which is why companies must be aggressive at times.. Different things are done to promote the employer brand while making use of the recruitment process to attract, engage, and nurture relationships with qualified talent.
Recruitment marketing helps build a pipeline of candidates that are fit for the company and are highly available for the current and future positions; hence, resulting in a convenient and fast recruitment process.
Statistics show that recruitment marketing itself produces an economical opportunity that it even saves 35% of the overall budget intended for recruitment. This lets companies save money and allocate the remaining budget to other needs or save it for the next recruitment activities.
In terms of the quality of hires, recruitment marketing lets recruiters make a comprehensive plan of nurturing the candidates and moving them through the application funnel which will give satisfactory results to the company.
Again the competitive advantage that effective marketing efforts deliver can be extremely valuable to a company in a lot more ways.
Steps for a Successful Recruitment Marketing Plan
Companies having essential recruitment marketing tools contribute three times the quality hires above competitive benchmarks. Having a successful recruitment marketing plan entails a long process of taking note of the candidates’ details in making sure that they are qualified.
Having a recruitment marketing plan is challenging, especially that you need to consider other factors. You can check ahead of time and effectively prepare for worst-case scenarios that might happen during the conduct of the recruitment marketing activities.
The following are what a typical recruitment marketing plan overview must talk about:
- Preparing your ideal candidates
- attracting talents
- converting applicant
- selecting and screening candidates
- conducting an interview
- onboarding
Here are several steps that you need to follow.
Establish Your Company’s Recruitment Marketing Goals
When crafting your recruitment marketing goals, make sure that it is specific,measurable and achievable.
Without the company’s recruitment marketing goals, there will be no clear direction for the recruiters on how to promote the brand and embody. Increasing referral rates, getting more applicants from social media, boosting employer brand awareness, and other goals can be taken into note.
Part of the goals you set are the identification of performance indicators and relevant metrics.
Measure the success of your activities if it has achieved the goals of your recruitment marketing activities through metrics.
Make use of different metrics measuring how you work on your social media, landing company career page, application forms, candidate experience, and recruiting email to identify several points on what to retain and remove from your future recruitment marketing activities.
Define The Candidate Persona
The next thing you should do is to define your candidate persona by creating a representation of your ideal job candidate.
This is an imaginary type of persona only, but this lets you pinpoint the necessary characteristics that are professionally and personally fit for the company. Taking note of the desired education attainment, experience, and skills, while determining other demographic and geographic information of the candidate persona should be done.
This way, you can determine to what extent they are going to attain the company’s goals and how these factors are going to add value to the employer brand.
Improve Your Employee Value Proposition
Recruitment marketing is not just about endorsing to the candidates how much you are going to offer to them. The same with defining the candidate persona, making your employee value proposition will also let you anticipate how you are going to nurture the candidates once they become your employees.
You also need to communicate with your target people what other perks come with working for you and with you.
Including opportunities for career advancement, working on interesting and new projects, great company culture, attractive work environment, fairness, and other components should be considered to ensure alignment with the goals of the company.
Create a Company Career Site
As research asserts that having a company career site becomes a sustainable option for conducting recruitment marketing, having a career site will let the potential candidates give an access to information that they need to know to decide whether they want to work for the company or not.
What the company does and the highlights in the company culture and work environment should be emphasized in the company career site to let the candidates examine your company and offerings.
This also entails the use of content that will educate the potential hires while promoting your company to them.
Determine The Brand Ambassadors
According to LinkedIn, candidates do not only look at the company itself but they also check the employees who are working for a certain company. They trust the employees’ testimonies three times more than what the employer has to say.
Your employees can be your most effective brand ambassadors. Through word-of-mouth promotion, your brand ambassadors can help enable the recruitment marketing staff to have a wider reach in the talent marketplace.
Encouraging the employees to write an article to the career site, taking everyday snippets of their life in the company, sharing their wonderful insights to the company, and giving frequent reviews should be done in order to give the candidates an information on what the employees are currently doing.
Build and Manage Your Effective Talent Pool
A talent pool creates a database of prospective candidates for your company.
Every time the company has an open job position, the recruitment marketing team can always tap into the talent pool to get potential candidates.
Building an effective talent pool from referrals, social media, career sites, and events are ways of having one. Partner up with other HR professionals or educational institutions in building to make it even bigger.
However, it does not stop there because the next thing that you should do is dividing the pool into different groups where you can effectively nurture them with personalized marketing campaigns.
After such, you need to make ways to frequently communicate with them and then build a community where all members of the talent pool can collaborate for future endeavors.