As recruiting leaders, we want our recruitment marketing to perform so well that we can demonstrate ROI year after year (and don’t have to press our company leadership for a budget). One of the mistakes we make is trying to force our career site, job postings, content marketing, and social feeds to be everything to everyone, yet we accomplish very little when we do this. Truly great recruitment marketing means that we attract the right candidates, not all candidates. Our focus should be targeting specific skills and experience that we want from top candidates. Sometimes the simplest changes to a recruiting strategy are exactly the right move to make, yet they’re also the easiest to overlook.
What Is Missing In Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy?
So what is your recruitment marketing strategy missing? In this post, I’ll outline five things that are essential for recruitment marketing and how they can help maximize the efforts you already have in place.
1) Career site retargeting
You have an amazing career site, with video and employee testimonials, well-written job descriptions and an easy apply process. So where are your candidates? Having a great site isn’t enough to get the job seeker traffic you need to build your talent pipeline. This is where retargeting comes in.
Retargeting is a form of online advertising that allows you to reach out only to people who have already raised a hand expressing interest. In its simplest form, retargeting allows brands to serve online display ads only to people who have already visited their website. Traditionally associated with e-commerce (brands can retarget consumers who have abandoned a shopping cart, for example) retargeting is an effective way to drive people back to your career site, keep your company in mind, and encourage them to begin or complete a job application.
With retargeting, you can easily segment a job posting campaign to serve unique ads only to job seekers with specific qualities. You can place a retargeting pixel (the single line of code needed to track site visitors) on your careers page and serve recruiting-focused ads to that pages’ visitors. This yields even higher results than a generalized branding campaign, plus helps you direct your advertising budget into the channels that are high performers.
2) Live virtual events
Consider that the candidates you really want to reach already have jobs. In this tight talent market, most candidates are currently employed and not all of them are actively looking. You can focus on recruiting passive candidates, or the top talent currently employed by your competitors, with holding live events online. Not only will you stand out from your competitors, you’re offering potential future employees the opportunity to get to know your company in real-time – and without having to be physically present.
If you have robust social channels, you can promote “virtual open houses” or “meet the hiring manager” events. If you’re still in the early stages of growing your social presence, a small advertising budget for an event via social media can bring new followers and interested candidates. For a Facebook live event, you could show them what a few minutes on the job are like, introduce some co-workers, or do a question and answer session about a job opening.
Live virtual events and career fairs are innovative, and the team at Brazen have an exceptional platform making it easy to connect qualified candidates with your recruiters.
3) Responsive channels like social, email, website chat bots, and messaging
In order to really drive the candidate experience and a reputation that you respond to messages from candidates in less than 24 hours. Dynamic content personalization based on conversation with a chat bot. AI is more and more common, and people know they’re not talking to a real person, but it allows you to find out what your candidates are asking about the job or your company. You can gather information about a candidate’s level of experience that might not be in their resume or LinkedIn profile, which allows you to deliver more qualified candidates to your hiring managers. This responsive technology can be on your website, your social platforms, and even in email automation.
You can use texting technology to confirm job interviews, inform candidates about next steps, to pre-screen candidates with programmed text questions, and to direct potential hires to your company career site via a mobile apply process. No more wasted time leaving voicemail messages, playing phone tag, or sitting in your office sending and responding to emails. Texting with multiple people at once is more efficient and allows recruiters to juggle 20-30 conversations on a text dashboard at the same time.
4) Candidate automation
This is one way to push candidates through your recruitment marketing funnel with personalization and engagement that builds relationships with your ideal talent pool. Automation technology allows us to develop scripted responses and nurturing messages that drive results in an industry where relationships are everything and recruiters are focused on candidate to hire and conversion goals.
One of the focus areas when it comes to automation and building candidate relationships is marketing to passive candidates. In this talent market, the right candidate is out there, but they may not be ready for an interview. To help warm them up, you can lean on CRM (candidate relationship management) technologies to automate emails and other communication touch points to help candidates learn about a company and why they would want to work there. This is crucial for building and nurturing your candidate funnel.
5) Video
Job postings with videos are viewed 12% more than postings without video. On average, employers receive a 34% greater candidate application rate when they add video to their job postings. They are a powerful way to relate and resonate with your candidate in a way the written word does not. Consider the following stats:
- 45% of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos a week. (HubSpot, 2016)
- 55% of people consume video content thoroughly. (HubSpot, 2016)
- 75% of millennials watch video on social media daily. (Animoto, 2017)
There is so much competition on social channels, it’s difficult to get traditional posts out there without putting a lot of budget behind them. However, if you look at Facebook as an example, video ranks higher in its algorithms than a text or photo post. And making it easier to share them from your social feed and career site can organically boost the reach and engagement.
Videos add value, and they don’t have to be viral. According to Cisco (Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Trends, 2017–2022), 82% of all internet traffic will be video by 2021. Don’t make it harder than it has to be. A hiring manager can do a quick and simple video for your job posting or your recruiting team can film an office tour with a smartphone. It’s inexpensive and it’s personal, which is great for your employer brand. If you have a video on your job posting, engagement increases exponentially.
Related: How Video Can Transform Your Recruitment Marketing
Finally, these creative recruitment marketing strategies won’t stress your budget, and they can help you and your team reach the best candidates by relying on time-tested digital marketing techniques.