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Long before a candidate becomes aware of your company as a potential employer, they glean information about your brand from the news, social media, job boards, google searches, friends and family, or other touch points. Even satisfied employees are eager to find new opportunities and that’s why company reputation is more important than ever. A strong recruitment marketing strategy will activate your employer brand at all candidate touch points, using an array of tactics to engage talent at the right place and the right time.
Partnering with the Conference Board for a live webcast last week, our Avature experts shared key recruitment marketing strategies that leading companies are implementing, and having great results with. This article reviews some of the key elements you need to consider for building your own strategy.
Who is in charge of recruitment marketing?
It’s a common misconception that recruitment branding activities should be carried out by just one internal team. The truth is, it’s a collaborative effort that should be executed by a company’s recruiting, employer branding and talent acquisition leaders, with close collaboration with a company’s marketing teams.
Stepping up the social media game
For most leading companies, social media plays an integral part in the recruitment marketing strategy, as it’s where they engage followers and drive interested candidates to register for your talent pool, a key goal of recruitment marketing.
The first step in this process is to set up specific social media company pages to begin building a following online. Once those are created, share compelling content to social media channels. Companies like Dell, have had great results with creating country-specific company pages on social media, posting authentic content, industry updates, news and pictures of your employees to showcase your culture. Live streaming a Q&A session for a specific intern program or project can also engage your followers on Facebook, and give you some insight into who is interested in your company. See some other great examples of how Dell tailors social media content to candidates.
Build networks
Consider creating specific talent pool sign up pages that will link people to specific pipelines in your CRM, thus boosting your long-term talent pipeline engagement strategy. By asking for only the necessary information, such as name, email and an easy-to upload resume option — you will encourage high conversion and leverage your database to fill roles faster, and at a lower cost.
Candidates are increasingly using mobile devices to search for jobs, so mobile-optimized career pages are no longer a “nice to have” – it’s expected. The chance that your company pages will be viewed through a smart-phone is much higher than in the past, especially if candidates are brought to your pages via Facebook or Linkedin. Embrace this trend and make sure you consider how candidates can easily upload their resumes to your talent community from a mobile device, by using Dropbox, Google Drive or Linkedin Apply.
Showing off your brand: content, design and personalization
When used effectively, employer branding tactics, can really provide a differentiation factor that sets the company apart in the minds of candidates. Consider your identity as an organization, the value proposition, and what you offer to candidates.
By considering content and design, you can create branded microsites with specific, targeted content for each audience, such as engineers or new graduates. Microsites are often used to present a snapshot of information relevant to your audience. With the right technology, companies can edit and update the content in-house and optimize keywords for Google, making the site more relevant to the audience and also easier to find through search engines.
Content personalization really makes a big impact on candidate experience. Doing it successfully means, segmenting your candidates, offering tailored pages for the type of opportunity they may be looking for, and offering valuable and relevant information such as global workplace rankings, and job opportunities based on location. By collaborating with the marketing department, HR leaders can learn and share strategies for improving the employer brand.
SMS campaigns for quick response
According to TextRecruit, SMS has an almost 100 percent open rate, with 90 percent of texts read within 3 minutes. It’s a great channel to reach candidates, but remember a few tips. Craft a relatable message, and do your research to show each candidate group that you understand their interests.
Including links to your job postings gives candidates an easy way to click through and find out more about your company and its opportunities.
Email marketing that feels friendly
While SMS is a great new channel for reaching candidates, email marketing remains a strong option for recruiters. The same considerations for customization and friendly tone apply here since candidates are demanding more personalized emails from employers.
When reaching out to your audience via email, you want to keep the tone friendly and go from a “general” content to “specific/personalized” as you learn more about the candidates, you’ll share relevant links, videos, and articles that will engage candidates. Consider asking an engaging question to the candidate in the email, to get more knowledge of them.
Measure success with one source of truth
It’s important to have a centralized database that safeguards all verified and accurate candidate information. Align your goals and your metrics to ensure you are measuring your recruitment marketing efforts accurately and that you then can present what is important to your management.
Dashboards within Avature CRM, offer tailored reports that allow you to have a comprehensive overview of your data and performance. Views, clicks, open rates, spam filter rates, and conversions of candidates to hires are great metrics to start with, they allow you to identify what you can optimize and continue to perfect.
To find out more about Avature metrics for recruitment marketing, check out the resources below.
