A New Approach to Recruitment
There is no question that Recruitment Marketing has gained popularity and in today’s market has become an essential strategy for so many organizations. While this is extremely exciting, there is still a lot more work to be done to get Recruitment Marketing to the level it needs to be. I have a dream – that Recruitment Marketing will one day be to Talent Acquisition what Marketing is to Sales.
What’s the Difference? What’s Missing?
In Recruitment Marketing, we talk a lot about Employer Brand and talent attraction. Rally Recruitment Marketing defines Recruitment Marketing as “the practice of using marketing strategies to promote the value of working for an employer to attract, engage, recruit and retain talent.” Today, recruitment marketers are using tools like social media, landing pages, and email drip campaigns to attract what they feel are ideal candidates.
In traditional marketing, the first step in the process is identifying your ideal customer profile. Without this ICP, your strategy leads to wasted efforts on what YOU think your customers look like and what they want versus what they really want. Your ICP is your road map to painting a beautiful story for your customers to fall in love with so that when they need XYZ, they think of you first.
Many organizations skip the step of understanding what their ICP (Ideal Candidate Profile) looks like in Recruitment Marketing. They refer to the traditional job description and say this is what we need. Skills and competencies become the core of our search. We post ads, search Indeed or LinkedIn, send emails, Inmails, or make as many phone calls as possible, which is all outbound and costs far more in time and money than inbound.
Creating the Perfect Inbound Recruitment Strategy
So how do you create the perfect inbound strategy? As we said, the first thing you need to do is identify your Ideal Candidate Profile. Having a thorough understanding of your ideal candidate, what pains they are experiencing in their current roles, and what channels they use the most allows you to target them in ways you never have before.
In Recruitment Marketing Automation, this information is crucial as it helps you to identify your prospective candidates, create segmentation and content that you can deliver to the right person at the right time.
In creating Recruitment Marketing content, it is essential to keep several factors in mind. First is your ICP, your goal for each piece of content, and the path your candidates take to becoming an employee.
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Understanding the Candidate Journey
But wait, isn’t the goal of all content to convert passive candidates into active applicants? No, not even close. Consider your process when making a large purchase like a car or going on a vacation. Is the first thing you want when you start looking to have a salesperson trying hard to ‘close you’? Not likely, you are most likely looking for information that will answer questions you have.
For your recruitment marketing automation strategy to be effective, you need to understand where your candidates are in the journey. At CandidateHub, we have identified four stages that candidates go through in the application journey: Awareness > Interest > Consideration > Action.
These four stages are the candidate funnel, and knowing where each candidate is in that funnel makes nurturing candidates much more manageable. This is the heart and soul of Recruitment Marketing Automation. Having the right system in place to analyze a candidate’s behaviour and engagement with your content and predict where they are in the funnel allows you to push the right content out to the right candidates at the right time.
Nurturing candidates using automation ensures that the content your potential candidate is seeing is relevant to them based on the stage they are in of their particular journey. For example, candidates in the awareness stage are most interested in education around skills and career development. In contrast, candidates who are in the interest stage want to know what life is like at your organization.
With a robust recruitment marketing automation platform in place, you can allow the platform to do all the heavy lifting to nurture your candidates and enable recruiters to focus on doing what they do best, engaging with and building relationships with those who are ready for action.
Recruitment marketing automation is the future for a reason. It enables recruitment marketing teams to personalize the candidate journey, improve the candidate experience, attract higher quality talent and convert talent much faster.
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