4 Marketing Strategies To Apply Online To Recruitment In 2016
Thursday, March 10, 2016
4 Marketing Strategies To Apply Online To Recruitment In 2016
If your database of candidates are in the market for exciting new opportunities, your branding campaigns need to work harder to attract the right attention of a proactive, more astute talent pool. In this day and age, job hunters are increasingly basing their decision to change roles after analysing online research, blog interactions and company reviews. Have a read below and think about whether you are doing any of the following. If not, it's relatively straightforward to start making these changes:
1. Employee centred content
Your most influential advocates for the benefits of working in your company should be your existing employees, preferably the ones who have been at the company for over a year or two. Ever since it became popular, consumer brands have been gathering personal testimonies from current employees and introducing user generated content into their marketing drives.
Dell has been doing this very successfully over the last few years. In 2010, they got serious about using social media for recruiting and employer branding. This resulted in more social hires (those generated through social media channels). Their number of social hires has continued to double every year since they first started incentivising social media.
In particular, Dell have focused on promoting the voice of current employees using a wide range of social media channels, including Glassdoor reviews, unscripted video content and bonus schemes. Also, 90% of its employees are active on LinkedIn, which further helps to get their brand recognised, especially if some of those users are sharing and liking related content.
2. Effective employer branding
Why do companies only talk about the benefits of working for them in recruitment campaigns and not all of the time? If you publish content on such topics on a regular basis, it would demonstrate to passive candidates the upsides of registering interest for upcoming positions. Some of these candidates may even send speculative applications or be willing to have initial conversations about a role.
On the other end of the spectrum, some social media start-ups like Buffer have concentrated over 90% of their recruitment efforts using inbound marketing campaigns. With a loyal team of 70 employees and 25 new job roles advertised, they receive a staggering 2,000 application a month. Buffer cleverly steer job seekers to their careers page with interesting content and inside knowledge about the benefits of working at their company.
The methods Buffer use are quite unique: they openly publicise salaries, equities and revenues to an open dashboard. Not every company would be comfortable using this approach, but Buffer's commitment to leadership articles, employer branding content and living the brand values are strategies that any organisation, small or big, can start using immediately.
3. Carefully analysing data and more data
You should always be looking at data and key metric targets before launching any marketing campaign. If you fail to evaluate this crucial data, you'll have no idea of what's working or what to change in the aftermath. It's the equivalent of a plane taking off without navigation systems.
First of all, you should sit down and define your targets and then track, monitor and evaluate the metrics which mean most to you. Agree beforehand how much time and money you want to expend into this particular campaign. Therefore, set up analytics before launching anything and write the first batch of content with some advice from the marketing team. As we all know, marketing has always been a numbers game, but in comparison to more traditional recruitment campaigns, this is a game candidates will be more than happy to play if there's something in it for them.
4. Nurturing through email capture
The majority of candidates will be reluctant to send their CV upon the first request, but if you offer them engaging content, they'll be more likely to forward their personal email address or even take the time out to talk to you. If you publish content that is useful to their sector and the roles they are currently seeking, they would lose out by getting in touch. If you exchange content in return for contact details, it is yet another way of promoting employer branding without having to be too salesy in your recruitment efforts. After a matter of time, candidates will slowly start to see you as an industry expert and you'll generate more interest from passive candidates.
One of the advantaged of using social media is that it won't eat too much into your budget. Interacting with candidates is free, but you will need to set aside a small budget to capture their attention in the first place using targeted ads and sales messages. If candidates type your company name into Google and they see many positive reviews along with specialised industry content, they're more likely to trust you as an industry leader. You should always be seeking to engage with candidates across multiple social media platforms, but without being obtrusive.
Hari Singh, Recruitment Consultant
