How to Get Started With Recruitment Marketing

By Oscar Waterworth

It was not so long ago when talented people went out to find suitable employment by proving to employers just how great their potential is. Nowadays, employers have to compete in order to attract the attention of talented people and give compelling offers that will interest the best candidates enough to work for an organization.

Recruitment marketing is a way to promote a company's culture and story in order to let talent know that working there has many perks and benefits. It involves creative and innovative ideas for winning over talent and qualified employees. Here are a few tips on how to get started with recruitment marketing.

Tell Your Story

Talented recruits need to know why they should they join your organization and what kind of benefits will they have if they work for your company. They need a compelling reason to share their talent with your company and kick off their career with you. That is why it is important to tell your company's story the best way possible and convince potential employees that they have a bright future waiting for them in your organization.

Your company needs to formulate a strong message that will capture the attention of those who are actively searching for employment and those who are still passive and indecisive. It is a good idea to closely work with your HR department on creating a campaign and choosing effective strategies that will provide the best results when it comes to recruitment marketing. Together with your HR, you can create a recruitment persona that will reflect on what kind of people and skills your organization needs in order to target specific audience.

Involve Other Members of Your Team

 In order to create an awesome recruitment marketing strategy you should enlist the aid of your existing members of the team. For instance, HR is already helping you to create a message and a recruitment persona, now ask the marketing team to come up strategies that will help you deliver the message to recruits and interest them as much as they would interest customers into buying something.

Do not hesitate to involve your team into helping you out. After all, they are good at what they do and they can also shift their skills to create recruitment marketing strategy that is just effective as a product marketing strategy.

Leverage Content Marketing for Recruitment

Content marketing has always been an effective way to attract customers and capture the interest of viewers. Content is also a good way to reach out to recruits and spark their interest as well. Promoting content for recruits is pretty much the same as promoting to customers, with few adjustments of course.

You can use your company's website to promote recruitment content or manage a different website or a blog with a specific purpose of attracting recruits. It is important to remember that your blog has to have good performance, otherwise viewers will leave. You can host your recruitment blog separately or use shared hosting with other blogs, which is more economical. Regardless, a website or a blog will be the hub for your recruitment content and it must serve a purpose of promoting your company's story and culture that will hold the interest of recruits.

When it comes to recruitment content, you should make sure it contains in-depth information about your organization such as working benefits, career opportunities, career advancement etc. You should also involve your employee's personal experiences and reviews to help you boost the impact on viewers. Transparency and creativity will speak for your company's legitimacy and potential employees will have a detailed view into your company's culture - which in turn, will make them feel closer to your organization and hopefully help them decide to join you.

Recruitment marketing is very similar to product marketing. The only difference is that you are not trying to convince people to buy something, but rather join your company. Recruitment marketing involves leveraging content, social media marketing and other strategies, with a slightly different approach.

Oscar Waterworth is a writer and a senior editor at Bizzmarkblog. He frequently blogs about the latest developments in the tech, marketing, and business industries. To stay updated with Oscar’s latest posts, you can follow him on Twitter.

Using Recruitment Marketing to Attract the Best Candidates

By Oscar Waterworth

It is no longer sufficient or acceptable for recruiters to simply put up a job advertisement and hope for the best. Regardless of how great (you think) your organization is or how many people are trying to get in, you are unlikely to attract the best possible candidate and even less likely to attract the best possible field of candidates from which to choose without having engaged in recruitment marketing.

For a variety of reasons, the balance of power in recruitment has shifted from employers to potential employees. Candidates - particularly young and educated ones with no dependants - are no longer desperate for stable work and are willing to wait a long time before committing to a full-time, permanent job.

On the flipside, they are not willing to spend a long time in that job if it doesn't suit them – this has made recruitment a very particular and complicated science that is not just about finding the most impressive candidate, but the right candidate and convincing them that their organization is worth committing to.

It also means that the candidate search is not limited to the unemployed – it means attracting the best talent regardless of whether they are employed, unemployed, underemployed, interstate, overseas or even retired! It means targeting the "passive" job market and catching the biggest fish out of the biggest possible pond.

How do You Attract Candidates Who are not Even Looking for Work?

As mentioned above, in order to give yourself the best chance of attracting the best possible candidate you need to cast the web as wide as possible. This means more than just advertising a “position vacant” on as many mediums as possible, and in fact it means more than just advertising a position at all. This means a constant and consistent marketing campaign of your company or organization as an employer, rather than just a goods/services provider.

As such, the search for the ideal candidate doesn't begin once a position becomes vacant – it should have already been occurring in the form of brand development as an employer. It should have been occurring on various mediums, whether exclusively online or on traditional media as well (depending on your organization's budget).

If you are a software development firm, you want all software developers to know that you exist and you want them to know how great conditions in your office are – you want a video of your office to pop up on their Facebook feed, complete with classy footage of your existing staff happily brainstorming on beanbags, sipping on fresh lattes from your state of the art coffee machine!

Your organization may not match this description, but you can certainly find competitive advantages of your workplace (whether this is the location, the conditions or any other factors) and find a way to highlight these to prospective employees.

Developing a Reputation as an Employer of Choice

Most HR departments, although great at their core business, are not equipped to conduct the kind of full-scale recruitment marketing campaigns that are required to stay competitive in the talent market. If this is the case in your organization, it is highly recommended that you engage the services of brand developers.

Brand developers are able to build up the kind of reputation your organization needs to catch the biggest fish through a comprehensive process including content marketing and analytics. Recruitment marketing has become a science in itself, which a company neglects at its own peril.

You may know that you are a great employer, your existing employees may know that their conditions are great and this may be outlined in great detail in your job advert – but nobody knows this except the active unemployed job seeker. And even then, only IF they are using the same channels in their job search that you've advertised on. To avoid the risk of missing out on the best possible candidates (as we speak!), make sure you have a recruitment marketing campaign in place sooner rather than later.

Oscar Waterworth is a writer and a senior editor at Bizzmarkblog. He frequently blogs about the latest developments in the tech, marketing, and business industries. To stay updated with Oscar’s latest posts, you can follow him on Twitter.

Stop Making Candidates Jump Through Hoops

By Stephanie Hammerwold

Applying for a job can start to feel like a full-time job itself. Searching online is time consuming, and once a job seeker finds something they are interested in, there is often a long application process. While it is important to get enough information from a candidate to ensure that a good hiring decision can be made, often companies ask for unnecessary information, which results in tedious application processes that can scare good candidates away.

Long & Detailed Application Process

Several years ago, a friend and former coworker of mine was looking to relocate out of state and was applying for jobs prior to her move. After spending a couple hours on the application, she heard back from a company that sounded like a good fit, but they sent her several links to a long online personality profile as well as some skills tests. Once my friend was confronted with the several hours it would take to complete all the tests, she decided to give up on that company and to look for jobs elsewhere. As a result, the company lost out on someone who would have been a great employee.

A common best practice in HR is to have a job seeker fill out an application even if submitting a resume. The job seeker then signs the application stating that all the information is true. The application serves two purposes: it is a signed statement from the applicant about the veracity of their work history and it also gives the recruiter and hiring manager all relevant information in an easy-to-read format. The problem with this approach is that we often ask far more than we need to know in the initial application.

Prior to embarking on my HR consulting career, I did quite a bit of hiring in both grocery and warehouse/manufacturing industries, both of which constantly had job openings. As such, I developed expert screening skills to sort through a large volume of applications. What I started to realize over time was that the application asked for far more information than I needed to do my initial screening. If this sounds like you, do a review of your job application.

In an initial screening, I am most interested in work history and if the person’s experience shows that they have the skills required to do the job, which means that the first thing I scan is the job history section. Many applications include a variety of screening questions that require paragraph-long responses. I often breezed right past those and did not bother to read them unless the applicant’s work history piqued my interest. Instead of asking for detailed information from all applicants, consider a shorter pre-application that gives you just the information you need to determine if someone would be worth pursing. If they are, send them a more detailed application where you can ask screening questions and for more information about their experience.

When it comes to pre-employment tests, evaluate whether the information from the test really helps in determining if someone would be a good hire. As in my earlier example, hours of tests coupled with a long application could scare good candidates away.

Endless Interviews

I remember interviewing at one company where I went back four separate times for interviews, only to not get the job in the end. The process involved a mix of a group interview, panel interviews and one-on-one interviews. It was tedious and required me to have a flexible schedule to fit in all those return trips to the company. On top of that, I found myself answering the same questions over and over again.

Making the decision to hire someone is hard, so often companies go to great lengths to have plenty of people meet the candidate. In reality, a lengthy interview process could result in losing candidates who end up taking a job elsewhere while they wait for yet another interview with your company.

To edit your interview process, start by looking at the list of people involved in interviews. I was once hiring for for an entry-level produce staff position in a grocery store. Interviews included the hiring manager, produce director, store manager, director of operations and me representing HR. When I looked at the candidate who was visibly shaking due to nerves as he stared at the five people across the table from him, it was clear to me that we had too many people in the interview room. For higher level positions, it is important to include more people in the process, but entry-level positions rarely warrant that kind of interviewing. When it comes to such hiring decisions, trust your managers to make good choices for their team. In the case of the produce position, it would have been sufficient to simply have the hiring manager and HR involved.

When you are hiring for a position that requires a number of interviewers, set up panel interviews whenever possible. This reduces the chance that the candidate will keep answering the same set of questions over and over again. It also cuts down on the amount of time a candidate must spend in the interview process.

While we are on the topic of interviews, take the time to review the questions you ask. While it may give you insight into a candidate’s critical thinking skills to ask why manhole covers are round, such questions can become unnecessary when asked of a retail worker. Do your questions give you the information you need to see if the candidate is a good fit for the particular job? If not, cross the questions off your list. Avoid questions that are not relevant to the job.

Failing to Follow Up

So, imagine that you have put someone through a long and tedious interview process and at the end of it, they hear nothing from you for weeks. Aside from the risk of losing a good candidate to another company, this also shows a lack of respect for the time the candidate has already put into the hiring process.

Let a candidate know during the interviews how long you expect the whole process to take. Even if remaining interviews, reference checks and such are delaying the process, take the time to write an email or make a phone call to keep the candidate updated. If a candidate really wants to work for you, they will be more inclined to wait and push away other offers if they know there is still a possibility they will be hired at your company.