How often have you as a recruiter gone through the repetitive motions of your hiring process? Roll out a JD and job posting, put it up on multiple job boards/forums/internal comms/, waited for a response, had candidates who meet maybe one or two aspects of the JD, and then be disappointed after a month-long search with no right candidates. Like Albert Einstein said if you want different results, take different actions. And, recruitment marketing holds the key to pulling the best-fit, talented candidates right into your hiring funnel.
No more pain of wrong hires, where your organisation not only coughs up the expense of replacing them, it may also risk losing some of the best performers when they get too frustrated working with these wrongly hired co-workers.
Mind you, the causes of employee turnover are 80% Bad Hires and 20% Others.
Let’s explore the fails in the traditional hiring process.
The struggle to fill job openings with skilled employees is real. But most organizations still rely on a handful of tried and tested recruitment techniques. High-quality candidates don’t go looking for generic job boards or career sites. They would never respond to old-fashioned ads that fail to inspire them to improve upon their already valuable skills.
Moreover, the multiple one-on-one interviews that are a part and parcel of the hiring process exhausts candidates to reject the interview process altogether. and stifles collaboration among team members. Or perhaps even worse, the candidate has only one interview round and the recruitment process hinges only on just one person’s judgment call.
Recruitment marketing is put into action just to prevent the ennui that traditional hiring processes face like the below:
- Template-based hiring questions that don’t explore the role-based abilities of the candidates,
- Regular interviews where the candidates are set to impress rather than seek how they can contribute to an organisation’s business goals
A candidate that has applied just to get hired compared to a candidate who is well-aware of the employer brand and sees himself aligned to the company’s culture.
More than half of HR managers spend over three hours a day performing administrative duties, leaving them hard-pressed for time and pressuring them into hiring someone they may later regret. The recruitment process takes an average of 36 days but it can sure feel like months of misery when bogged down with mounds of resumes and tedious tasks like manually keeping up with applicant spreadsheets — which is painstaking, to say the least.
Despite this excessive investment of time and resources, the end result is a bad hire more often than not, the average cost of which is 2-3 times the person’s salary. India ranks at number 4 in the world when it comes to making bad hiring decisions and according to a recent study by Glassdoor 95% of companies admit to making at least one bad hire every year. These numbers are mind-boggling!
Recruitment marketing ensures a steady stream of highly qualified talent sourced from a candidate pool that is in keeping with your organisational needs and the company’s culture.
THE NEED FOR RECRUITMENT MARKETING
Recruitment marketing offers more effective strategies to minimize the efforts involved in the hiring process and ensure sustained results that drive inbound recruitment in an ongoing manner. For most HRs and talent acquisition experts the most challenging part of recruitment is identifying the best talent from a pool of candidates. Recruitment marketing aims at engaging your employer brand with the best candidates without you having to go through the painstaking process of reaching out to them and screening through multitudes of unsuitable applicants.
In the current recruiting scenario, the demand for talent is much higher than supply, leaving companies struggling to fill vacancies with the right candidates. To meet these talent voids, organisations need to stand out from their competitors, so they attract the right candidates. Sometimes the best candidates are not really looking for an opportunity, even though there may be plenty available. About 70% of the workforce is made up of passive talent who are not actively searching for a job change.
Furthermore, candidates thoroughly research a company before making up their minds to apply for any position these days. They want to know all about the company culture, read employee reviews, before applying. Thus, it is critical for recruiters to start thinking and acting like marketers if they want to onboard the best talent. They need to be more proactive in attracting talented candidates and need to market the role throughout the hiring process so that the candidate doesn’t lose interest and opt for another offer.
A good recruitment marketing strategy ensures your organization positions itself as the number one choice for the candidates you are targeting. So, what are the steps to build a good recruitment marketing strategy:
1. Strong Company Branding
Focusing on building a strong brand around your business and work culture is essential for any recruitment marketing strategy to work, as it Focusing differentiates your organization from your competitors. Start thinking of your candidates as consumers, and begin by understanding that these “consumers” have a wide variety of “products” (job roles) to choose from and you need to make your company seem the most attractive to them.
According to a poll conducted by CR Magazine in collaboration with Cielo Talent, 50% of workers wouldn’t work for a company with a negative reputation even if the salary and perks were significantly better.
The best way to create strong employer branding is to be as transparent about your company culture, vision, objectives, and benefits as possible. Create content and social media posts around work events, birthdays in the office, festive celebrations like Diwali or Christmas parties, etc. – basically anything that displays the humane aspects of your business.
You should also spend more time creating the right content for your blogs and social media. It is a major turn-off for candidates when they Google your company name and all that comes up is an empty Facebook page or a poorly maintained website. Keep in mind that your website is your digital stand-in and people always return to a brand that’s well-recognized. So, the way your company is projected and marketed to the public is very important.
Some good examples of establishing a unique brand vision upfront are Swiggy and Zomato’s social media posts. From their creatives to their content, everything makes you want to work with them or be a part of their creative team. Even Durex India nails their marketing with controversial yet brilliant content that resonates with their brand identity.
Remember, that your work culture may not resonate with everybody, but being transparent about your company culture and values filters out ill-suited candidates who would otherwise be unhappy working with you and drop the offer at the last stage.
Allowing candidates to build an emotional connection with your employer brand makes it much easier for them to accept a job offer as they can already imagine what their day-to-day life will be like working for your company.
2. Segmentation of Candidates
Segmentation is necessary to drive personalised marketing in recruitment. A campaign crafted to the specific needs of a specific segment of candidates will perform far better than a broad, universal message. The “one-size-fits-all” campaigns are how traditional models worked, and the modern recruitment process instead uses candidate segmentation to divide candidates based on, demographics, online content consumption patterns, current employment status, skills, career goals, salary expectations, and more so that a “product” (job vacancy in this case) can be placed in front of only the most relevant eyes.
Customizing what looks attractive to candidates working in the Customer Service function as opposed to what draws in those working in the Sales function is very crucial. For instance, will the 58-year-old accountant be interested in the free pink gin offered every Friday night at the office? Perhaps. We are not in a position to make generalised assumptions about people, which is why in-depth research of your target candidates is very important in order to avoid sending them unrelated or misaligned content to ensure they stay engaged.
In a job market that is stubbornly driven by candidates, segmentation and personalisation can help recruiters to:
- Enable candidate communication that is exceedingly personalised to achieve better engagement and connect with them on a deeper level. More and more candidates are choosing to work with recruiters who they feel understand them and have their best interests at heart.
- Capitalize on opportunities by identifying valuable segments that are underrepresented in your applicant tracking system (ATS) and actively appealing to that type of talent.
- Learn more about their candidates than ever before through the pursuit of better segmentation to find the perfect fit for a role and further enhance the employer brand.
- Hear only from the most relevant candidates instead of having your HR team sift through hundreds of resumes to find the best candidates. Recruitment marketing automation identifies the best-fit, ready-to-convert candidates using data-driven segmentation and personalisation.
Fortunately, talent segmentation is no longer intimidating, as, recruiters can bring automation into their current recruitment marketing strategies to streamline each step of the hiring process. This reduces the paperwork, empowers them with increased control and tracking abilities that prevent the top candidates from slipping through the cracks of a broken recruitment system.
Though any good applicant tracking system (ATS) will be capable of basic segmentation, turning this raw data into actionable intelligence requires the expertise of a recruitment marketing agency to provide applicants with an engaging, professional hiring experience that keeps them on board from day one.
3. Personalised Content Marketing
Every time you communicate with your candidates, personalised content marketing ensures you create an opportunity to win over in-demand talent (passive job seekers) by incorporating everything from employer branding to targeted content based on the specific segmentation of the candidate profiles explained in the point above. step. This includes everything from web pages, job descriptions, social media, advertisements, thought leadership, welcome packs to onboarding content.
The goal behind this is to lead prospects through the first three stages of a candidate journey- 1. Awareness 2. Consideration and 3. Interest which can convert potential candidates into inbound applicants.
How To Recruit Like A Marketer
As a part of inbound recruitment, good content can continually entice talented individuals to your organisation. For active candidates, job boards and maintaining a strong social media presence are some of the many ways to effectively catch their attention, establish your credibility as a brand and bring prospects back to your website. But, for passive candidates who mostly ignore job boards, you need to rely on a different type of funnel to bring prospects to your doorstep. Original content is one of the best ways to increase conversions.
Now, let us consider the difference between original and curated content-
When you curate content for your social media, website, and other platforms (i.e., knowledge gathered from outside sources), you borrow your credibility and ownership of your content from others, but when you post original content, you’re establishing your expertise and command over the industry in the eyes of the reader. For example- extensive blogs, eBooks, case studies, and white papers draw those highly sought-after prospects to your website and make them interested due to your expert opinions and the quality of services you provide. This content can be further optimised to provide pathways that expand upon the passive talent’s curiosity and direct them to pages with higher conversion rates.
With that said, do not forget to focus on bite-sized content. Crisp and snackable messaging creates a broader mass appeal, whereas static content like PDFs, though very important to build brand recognition among industry experts, are not engaging or insightful enough for a quick read to set you apart from the hordes of other recruiters competing for talent.
Remember, the key here is differentiation. You must elevate your content beyond what everyone else is doing. So, do not be afraid to subvert the existing content marketing norms with interactive personalised messages in the form of imagery, video, assessment forms, polls, etc. to distinguish your company and be the dream choice for any candidate.
4. Social Media Recruitment
When done right, social media in recruitment marketing proves to be an effective tool. With the average internet user having more than five social media accounts, the key is to cut through the noise and participate in the right conversations. This can also include a softer approach to promote your unique workplace culture through an active social media presence.
More importantly, recruitment marketers must use social media to build their company brand and publish relevant content that highly resonates with their target audience. This is particularly effective in forging valuable connections with the younger, emerging talent through informed and personalised approaches. Being active on visual platforms like YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram provide an even more engaging way of delivering branded content to your target candidates.
Even though it may feel like a drop in the ocean, social media increases your visibility and outreach to a wider pool of talent, without which all the strategising and content marketing may not yield great results. However, you need to think differently, because simply sharing job ads across various social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. just doesn’t cut it anymore.
5. Leveraging Data and Analytics
Data analytics is crucial to get the precise picture of your company’s recruitment marketing efforts and candidate attraction initiatives, while successfully predicting trends for your recruiting landscape. All of the aforementioned strategies need to be mapped with the analytics data to monitor your efforts. Be it Google Analytics, Social Media Analytics, or some other software, measuring how your content is being received and by who is very important to fill job roles with the right talent.
The granularity achieved from a data-driven approach influences your decision-making on which are the important talent profiles to groom and cultivate based on accurate and updated information that can avoid recruiters from committing hiring blunders. It also helps to evaluate the current hiring process and prepare for any upcoming trends or changes with the ability to create detailed reports through an interactive dashboard that displays how far most candidates make it in the recruitment process, how long the process usually takes and the ratio of successful to unsuccessful applications, among other things.
Opting for recruitment marketing services rooted in data and analytics eliminates the gaps and ensures a more systemized and predictive hiring that identifies your talent needs and hiring patterns to yield the best results for your company and clients.
Misses can be mitigated with data analytics and your recruitment efforts can be improved by leveraging analytics to help optimise your strategy over time. That, in turn, will build a strong employer brand and a recruitment marketing strategy that candidates won’t be able to resist.
Are you looking to partner with a recruitment marketing agency in India that strategizes everything for you – from your content to social media marketing to running automated drips? Consider us for a fully managed services solution with vast industry experience to create highly intelligent insight-driven strategies and content that attracts the best talent much before your competition can!