It can take between 12 and 20 touch points to influence a career decision. Recruitment marketing is a strategy for attracting and engaging the best talent through the same tactics marketers use to sell the value of their products: tailored content, personalized nurture campaigns, and long-term multi-channel engagement-through through boarding and beyond.
A strong recruitment marketing strategy reduces time-to-hire, builds more diverse and more qualified pipelines, elevates candidate experience, and boosts employee engagement and retention. Here are the first steps, along with a list of what to focus on, when it comes to building your recruitment marketing strategy:
Define Your Recruitment Marketing Goals
Make your goals measurable: “a 10% increase in career site visitors by June”; “35% of Q2 hires through referrals”; “20% more engagement with our social content within 4 months”; “double the size of our talent community this month”; If your goals aren’t measurable, they’re not actionable.
Define your employee value proposition
Your employee value proposition is the unique set of benefits employees receive in return for their commitment to your org. It covers everything from personal development, to company culture, to diversity, to social responsibility, to vacation time, and more.
What can your org offer employees that your competitors can’t? Your EVP will be the centerpiece around which your recruitment marketing strategy, and its content, is built; Sit down with your employees and ask what they love about working for you. Craft your EVP out of those responses.
Clarify your candidate personas
A persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal candidate: current role, experience, skill sets, career goals, core values, motivations, frustrations.
You’ll craft your content based on this understanding. Segment your personas: engineering managers and SDRs may have different expectations about work; diversity hires may be compelled by different elements of your culture in your messaging.
Personas help you get in your target talent’s heads;
Create recruitment marketing content
Newsletters, blog posts, videos, webinars, infographics, employee testimonials, podcasts, thought leadership pieces, and events can cover everything your EVP entails.
Your marketing team has an archive of materials to draw from; employees can contribute through blog posts about projects they’re working on, or social posts about the career growth they’ve experienced with your org.
Create content for each stage of the candidate journey (awareness, consideration, interest, decision).
Build (and nurture) a talent community
A talent community is a network of people who’ve expressed interest in working for your org, though current circumstances prevent them from entering the hiring process.
With Gem’s help, prospective candidates fill out a customized form directly on your careers page; use the information you collect to nurture and engage with them through targeted campaigns over time. Gem’s branded email campaigns allow you to personalize high-touch communications at scale, and get sophisticated analytics to understand what’s working and what isn’t.
Optimize your careers site
All your digital efforts (social media, SEO, job posting platforms, etc.) will ultimately point back to your site.
An “optimized” careers site is one in which visitors can quickly and intuitively find all the information they need about working at your org.
It explains who you are, what you do, and why employees love working for you. It’s mobile-friendly, next steps are obvious, the application process is seamless, and it’s GDPR compliant. Put yourself in talent’s shoes and navigate your own site. Analytics will help you understand visitor behaviour.
Implement an employee referral program
Referrers deeply understand company culture and recognize what it takes to thrive at your org; they’ll be among the best Vetter’s of talent for your open roles. Our customers use Gem’s forms for referral submissions;
Host exceptional recruitment events
Consider meatus; AMA (ask-me-anything) sessions with your CEO; VIP dinners; and more.
With Gem’s events module, RSVPs and attendees are automatically added to a Gem project for easy nurture down the road; our full-funnel analytics show you which events lead to which hires.
Have recruitment-specific social accounts
Any strong recruitment marketing strategy recognizes that vast majority of your prospective candidates are on social. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, YouTube, and wherever else your target talent hangs out – establish a presence there to add depth and authenticity to your brand and its culture.
Decide on a strategy for each platform you’re on;
Offer a best-in-class candidate experience (CX)
We don’t have to tell you how CX impacts your ability to market yourself as an employer of choice. It takes your entire hiring funnel into account, from first contact through to offer-accept.
It entails frequent and transparent communication, equitable processes, minimal time-in-stage, and a sense – from the candidates’ perspective – that their time was respected and well-spent. With Gem, you can analyse conversion rates to identify the weakest points of your pipeline and understand how to fix them.
Slice by hiring manager, recruiter, job, gender, race/ethnicity, and more to spot biases and effect process change for a more equitable candidate experience. Where is talent dropping out of process?
Measure and iterate on your recruitment marketing strategy
There’s an endless set of metrics you could follow down the rabbit hole;
More passive talent to your careers site?
More diversity in your talent community?
Better response rates to your email outreach?
Whatever your goals, the data are there – every step of the funnel, and every candidate touch point, is tractable and measurable. Be empowered to conduct informed experiments where the data suggests your process could be better. It’s the only way you’ll improve.
Source– GeM.Com
