One of the many popular buzzwords in the talent acquisition space is recruitment marketing. Here at Sense we talk a lot about the candidate experience, but before you can provide a great experience, you have to recruit those candidates.
So how do you attract the right candidates?
One way is through recruitment marketing. But what is recruitment marketing? Let’s dive in.
Recruitment marketing is the combination of strategies and tactics used to attract, engage, and nurture potential job candidates.
The process of recruitment marketing involves leveraging principles of marketing to build an employer brand, optimize the recruiting funnel, and improve acquisition of candidates through multiple marketing channels.
Recruitment marketing includes:
Your staffing firm is unique, so you’ll want to pick and choose which of these tactics works for you, but employing these techniques will place your staffing firm on the leading edge with top companies that contractors want to work for.
Attract and engage the best talent through these recruitment marketing strategies.
Before a candidate can apply to work with your staffing firm, you have to attract their attention and motivate them to submit an application. One way you can do that is to have the qualities they desire. One of the top three motivator for choosing a company is schedule flexibility. The desire for schedule flexibility among workers has increased by 29 percent from 2015 to 2016 and shows no signs of slowing down.
We like to break the pre-application phase down into four stages.
If these steps haven’t fully clarified recruitment marketing for you, this definitely will.
Depending on which phase a potential candidate is in, they might discover or run into your brand in a number of places. Those places include: Facebook, job aggregators and career sites, employee review sites (like Glassdoor), customer review sites (like Yelp), and job searches.
No matter where a potential candidate might discover or interact with your brand, you want them to have a great experience. This means that you need to make sure your brand is appropriately represented on all of those sites, and that people have a positive impression of your company’s brand.
Proper brand representation also means making sure your job posts are SEO-friendly, have modern interfaces, and function on all devices, including mobile.
You also want to make sure your advertising targets the right candidates. Job posts should be clear and honest so that you can attract the right candidates from the beginning. Each post should be personalized to the target candidate you’re looking for.
Lastly, you want to make sure your application process is as easy as possible. Make sure that those who are looking for the post can find it by making it SEO-friendly and then easy to use.
Once a candidate submits their application, then the focus has to shift from external to internal. Now the focus is all on your organization. What are you doing to create a great candidate experience from the moment the candidate hits the apply button?
Once the candidate applies, then it’s up to your organization to make sure they fit.
The post-application candidate experience should include:
What specifics do we need to think about in recruitment marketing?
Your recruitment marketing experience post-application should include some of these specific elements. This isn’t an exhaustive list so there might be others that you discover are necessary or you might find that some of these don’t work for your brand.
Recruitment marketing helps the right candidates find your company and helps your company recruit the talent that you’re looking for. Whether you implement some of these techniques or all of them, it should help you to more accurately recruit talent and be a better competitor for the best talent out there.
If you’re interested in improving your recruitment marketing, sign up for a demo of Sense today. Sense creates software that makes it easier to communicate with candidates, contractors, and measure their experience.
