The increasing importance of recruitment marketing is no joke

It’s getting harder and harder to compete for candidates’ attention online. Companies aren’t just competing with other job ads; they’re up against a wave of other digital distractions such as social networks, games, eCommerce websites, streaming platforms, and more. The nature of online behaviour is changing. If you provide a weak candidate experience on your site, people are far less patient than they used to be. They’re much more likely to jump to social media (or a competitor’s career site) than to click ‘apply’ on yours if you provide an underwhelming experience.

Recruitment marketing has never been more important. Talent acquisition professionals across the world are faced with new talent attraction and talent retention challenges. This is particularly true for tech talent that can now work from anywhere in the world.?

The increasing importance of recruitment marketing the “Great Resignation” is no joke.

A global survey of 30,000 workers by Microsoft found that 41% were considering quitting or changing professions this year. Another study in the UK and Ireland showed 38% planned to quit.

Building a robust candidate pool of talent is no longer a “nice to have.” In today’s job market, talent acquisition leaders have to do more than reach out to candidates or rely on job postings to attract talent.

Typically recruitment marketing drives value in two major ways. The first is through driving awareness. This can be through traditional job advertisements that are more broadly distributed through paid placement on websites like Indeed. This can also be done through advertising strategies that are both paid and organic but more natural to the world of marketing, such as social media advertising, SEO-focused content, and even webinars. More awareness leads to more candidates and further growth of a given company's talent pipeline.

Even if a candidate makes it this far and applies but ultimately opts out of doing an interview, don’t stop there. Add them to your candidate pool. It may not have been the right time or circumstance for them to pursue your company, but they may be interested in the future.

Our latest research shows 49% of candidates use Google search as their primary source for finding jobs, so you’d better be on your SEO game. Plus, Google, for some time now, has officially entered the rec-tech fray, so SEO’s only becoming more important.

Job ads work for many high-volume, high-velocity roles but suffer from a couple of significant flaws. They rely on a moment of serendipity: your ideal candidate needs to come across your job at the exact moment that they’re looking.

Of course, recruitment marketing is only effective if you use the right tactics and execute them in the right way.

Marriott is an excellent example of companies doing recruitment marketing the right way. Their careers page has 1.2 million likes, and they publish content twice a day - sometimes more. They share content that potential employees can relate to and feel inspired by, such as individual workers' achievements, days in an employee's life and general day-to-day updates from across the Marriott network.

A trade secret of content marketers is repurposing valuable content—ensuring that your efforts aren’t being focused just on creating new things from scratch but also leveraging existing content, so it does double duty. The benefit of repurposing your recruitment marketing content is that you can make everything you create go further, which is especially helpful if you’re short on resources, budgets, or capacity.

Some examples of marketing practices now being utilised by HR teams include lead generation, SEO, guerrilla marketing, social advertising, personalised candidate journey and content creation. Understanding where you are currently, road mapping where you want to be, and tracking the results is critical to marketing success. The vast majority of your recruitment marketing strategies should be guided by data and have identifiable success metrics.

However, before you even start thinking about developing a recruitment marketing plan, you need to define your employer's brand. Employer branding is crucial for managing and influencing your reputation as an employer of choice and should encompass every aspect of your recruitment marketing plan.

Then, once a potential applicant lands on your ad, you get one chance to pique their interest. If your ad doesn’t differentiate your brand and sell your opportunity, that’s a missed opportunity.

Providing memorable candidate experiences is one of the most important aspects of every recruitment marketing strategy. Ensuring seamless and fast application processes, timely post-interview feedback, clear reasons for rejections, and continuous candidate relationship management greatly impact shaping a positive candidate experience.

It is important to understand that no single stakeholder should do recruitment marketing. Moreover, HR, marketing, internal communications, CEOs, leaders, and employees all play a very important role in making recruitment marketing work.

At the least, review and monitor your company’s profile on review sites like Glassdoor. If any negative-leaning reviews appear, you can dilute their negative power by responding to them honestly and humbly. Regularly and actively ask current employees for reviews.

Candidates, like shoppers, are more information savvy than ever. They use social media, review sites like Glassdoor, conduct online searches, and closely review your career site to get the information they need to make an informed decision.

No matter your business, you’re in the business of people. People are key to the growth and success of any company, and building a team of diverse yet complementary personalities, passions and skill sets is one of the most challenging aspects of any business.

You can download our free Salary and Benchmarking Survey here if you haven't already.

At Beagle Talent, we’ve got decades of experience: in Digital, Marketing, Data and Technology. It means that whatever business or people problem your leadership team is facing, we can handpick a team of experts to help. It gives us the confidence to challenge when we need to – never settling for the quick fix if there’s a better way or bigger problem to solve.

We are leading the way in executive search and understand that the right leader can dramatically alter the trajectory of your organisation. With the stakes so high, we know it’s not enough to identify someone with the right experience. The right candidate must also have the ability to fit the culture—and the influence to rally the business around their vision.

We passionately believe that every company has different needs. Therefore, we treat each recruitment project individually, aiming to tailor-building your ideal candidate and add value to your business. We are open, objective, honest and direct in our business dealings. We hold ourselves accountable to our clients while maintaining the highest ethical standards.?

It is worth mentioning that this is what we do, and many of our clients retain our services because of the confidence we place in them. So, book some time with us to talk through your hiring needs and how we can help find the right talent today.

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