Does your recruitment campaign strategy need some work? The answer is “yes.” Surprised? There is no “maybe” here, and there is no exception. You see, even the best recruitment campaign strategy needs work.
Whether you are just starting, working off an undefined recruiting strategy, or have a current strategy you think is great, read on to up your ante.
Did you know a good strategy involves using our free applicant tracking system for small business recruiting and hiring? Recruiteze makes finding and acquiring talent easy. Click here to use it for free.
What is a Recruitment Campaign
A recruitment campaign is a strategy that employers use in order to attract and encourage the right people to join their companies.
This type of campaign works just like any other marketing campaign. Its purpose is to differentiate your business from the competitors and attract your target audience, which is a perfect employee for your company.
To do so, you must have a unique and creative recruitment campaign that speaks to your target audience. Without further ado, let’s dive into the basics of a successful recruitment campaign strategy!
The Basics of A Successful Recruitment Campaign Strategy
A recruitment campaign strategy consists of more than sending out mass emails and scanning resumes. You need to set goals for yourself and create habits that help you work smarter rather than harder so you can find and attract the most qualified candidates.
Here is a quick overview of what makes the excellent recruitment campaign:
- Clearly defined goals
- Good research of the company
- Well defined target audience, i.e., optimized candidate profiling
- Networking
- Getting the most out of marketing
- Having a good message
- Evaluation
- Using social media
- Aim for the greatness
Define goals
Goals help us accomplish tasks quicker and more efficiently.
With them, we create actionable, intelligent plans that keep us both productive and motivated. It can take you a long time to make progress without goals because you haven’t strategically planned a way to succeed, and you overlook potential areas for improvement as readily as you could. But when you have set goals, you can have your recruitment strategy working like a finely tuned machine, succeeding and adapting as needed.
If you are just starting out with recruitment goals, try:
- Matching candidates to positions they’ll stay in for a certain length of time
- Increasing the number of candidates who are satisfied with their new position
- Setting a time to try out and master a new onboarding tactic
When doing so, make sure that your goals are SMART. Here is an example of a SMART goal:
“Attract 10 qualified candidates for the content specialist position by the end of the second quarter of 2021.”
- Specific: 10 qualified candidates
- Measurable: Yes
- Achievable: Yes
- Reasonable: Yes, based on the market size, you can attract that many qualified candidates
- TIme-based: Yes, end of the second quarter of 2021.
Once you have defined a SMART goal, it is time to get down to research and creating tactics for making it happen.
Compile relevant information on the company
Your number one priority as a recruiter is to have a comprehensive understanding of your client or the company you work for.
Many recruiters fall for the mistaken impression that you only need to know a limited number of factors to make a hire, such as a salary and job requirements. While these are essential pieces of the recruiting puzzle, they are only a tiny segment of all you need to know.
Think of your work history. How happy and productive have you been at your jobs? What percentage of that happiness came from the salary and what from your job requirements and overall work environment.
Suppose the hours are impossible, the culture utterly incompatible with your work methods, or the company’s long-term objectives nothing like your aspirations. In that case, you aren’t going to thrive in that environment. And what’s the point in hiring someone and putting the client through the cost of a new hire if they won’t stay and be productive for the company?
There isn’t one.
It’s a waste of everyone’s time. The recruiter becomes Sisyphus rolling that rock up the hill, mindlessly throwing hires at jobs without making any real progress for anyone.
Make sure to determine points such as:
- The client’s short and long term objectives
- The company’s culture
- Which employees are already thriving in that environment and why
Optimize candidate profiling
It is all too common for recruiters to mindlessly scour job candidates’ resumes and social media profiles and churn out cookie-cutter emails that wind up in spam folders.
This tactic seems to save you time because it requires less thought, but it is sucking up your valuable time in reality. Imagine trying to shoot hoops with your eyes closed. You’re going to waste a lot of time and energy throwing wild shots into the wind. You might have gotten that shot the first time with your eyes open.
With recruiting, you’ll have your eyes open when you have a well-defined candidate target profile (link to post titled, How Recruiters Can Hone Their Candidate Target Profile).
Create a targeted candidate profile by:
- Taking the information you gather on the client
- Considering what goals the client wants to fill with the position
- Using information you have on which employees are most successful at that client/in that position
- Getting to know the candidates
- Personality
- Approach to goals and challenges
- Preferred management style
- Aspirations
Using our free applicant tracking system for small business recruiting and hiring can also help. Recruiteze is number one in online recruiting software. Keep reading to learn more.
Collect candidate relationships
Build up relationships with potential candidates on an ongoing basis. You may not be able to hire that person for this particular job, but they may be perfect for another client or two down the road.
Clients like recruiters who have a network of viable candidates to choose from. While no one wants to knock being very adept at searching for candidates(it is a rare skill in itself), you can make yourself indispensable if you have this thriving network at your disposal.
Improve candidate relationships by:
- Staying on the lookout for all exciting candidates
- Maintaining periodic contact with promising candidates
- Telling candidates why they weren’t accepted for the current position so they can improve
Apply advertising techniques
Recruiting is very similar to advertising a product or service. You have to know who your target audience is and how to appeal to that audience. Use all the avenues open to you as a means to attract potential job candidates to you.
If you do this correctly, you’ll save a ton of time scouring the internet for candidates because they will come to you! You’ll also be able to use your advertising to weed out the poorer matches.
How to use advertising techniques in recruiting:
- Discover where your target audience is already talking and how they like to communicate
- Go where they are and appeal to their “language.”
- Tailor job advertisements to this market
There are numerous marketing channels you can use in order to get to your target audience. These will vary based on the industry and the type of the job.
Having a good message
Regardless of the industry you are working for; your message must be clear to the target audience. They need to have a clear understanding of what your offer is and why they should choose you and not the competitors.
In order to nail the messaging and convey your value proposition, make sure you answer and consider the following questions:
- Why should they work with you?
- What differentiates your company from other competing companies?
- What do you offer that others don’t?
- Are there some unique benefits that you give to your employees, like healthcare insurance, covered maternity/paternity leave, flexible work hours, work from home? If yes, mention it.
- Did the company win any awards? What is the reputation, CSR? If they have, then make sure to mention that as well.
This is very important to keep in mind if you want your recruitment campaign strategy to work.
Evaluate
No plan is so good that it doesn’t need adapting or growth. There is always something that has been missed and times change so old methods no longer work as well. Designate time to evaluate your recruitment campaign strategy so you can quickly discover room for improvement.
When to evaluate your recruitment campaign strategy:
- After the first few hires with your new strategy
- If you notice a negative pattern
- Every year
- When the job market changes
Keep your evaluations organized by using Recruiteze, the top applicant tracking system for small business recruiting and hiring. Click here to start recruiting online for free.
Using Social Media In Your Recruitment Campaign Strategy
Social media is so important to today’s recruiting techniques that the topic warrants its own separate section.
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are excellent places to find, understand, connect with, and appeal to amazing job candidates. Put your advertisements where eager and passive job candidates will run into them.
You don’t want to force the job on them with boring emails or miss the mark by sending untargeted communications to them. It is much more powerful to learn what they’re looking for and connect to them the way they already think, and social media is the perfect place for that.
LinkedIn focuses on careers, so everyone using it is talking about and thinking about career-related topics. It is the perfect place to get to know and reach out to a job candidate. Join groups to learn about an industry from the candidates’ perspective and see what they need and want.
Facebook provides an excellent opportunity to get to know a candidate in ways that may involve their fit for company culture. Do they have a vision, attitude, or sense of humor that meshes well with the current goals and employee mindsets?
People who discuss work on their Facebook profiles are not surprised if you contact them through Facebook either. If you choose to do so, make sure you don’t waste the opportunity with a cookie-cutter message. Target your communication to their personality and goals as shown online.
Many people use Twitter to discuss topics involving their industry. Follow the hashtags already popular in that industry to see what people think, share, and feel about their careers and target messages to them accordingly.
Employ Content Marketing & SEO Strategies
Content marketing & SEO can get you a far way with recruitment if done right.
They both take longer to work than the other mentioned strategies, so you should start with them asap.
Our recommendation is that you hire a content agency if you don’t have enough time to work on it continuously. That way your efforts will yield the most results.
Aim For Greatness
Don’t be afraid to be innovative with your recruitment campaign strategy. If you are looking for top talent, the kind of people who will come into a business and be thinkers, doers, and innovators, you need to speak to them this way. Read some examples below to get your creativity flowing.
For a recruitment campaign, IKEA chose to target loyal customers as potential employees because they wanted people who were in love with the brand. They sent job advertisements in the packages with purchased furniture and presented it as if it were instructions for “building” a job.
Google once used a mathematical equation on a billboard to excite potential job candidates and weed out those who were not qualified. The billboard’s equation led to a website that led to more equations and eventually Google Labs. Through this job advertisement, Google spoke to their most compatible candidates by forcing them to use the problem-solving skills they need to use on the job.
So, try out new things. Use marketing techniques to guide you in perfecting the most efficient and rewarding recruitment campaign strategy. Please everyone, recruiter, client, and candidate alike. Most of all, try our free applicant tracking system for small business recruiting and hiring. You’ll be amazed at how easier your job will be.
Conclusion
Every job is easier, faster, and more successful when completed using a strategy. Of course, even the best strategies need updating from time to time to ensure they remain the best. So, set goals, tweak those goals, and expect more from yourself. You may think you’ll be working harder, but you’ll be working smarter.
Free Applicant Tracking System For Small Business Hiring Needs
Recruiteze is an applicant tracking system for small business needs. Candidates can apply to be added to your database immediately. End-users can access candidate resumes online at any time and make changes quickly, for free.
This powerful online recruiting system makes your life easier by saving you time and money. Call us today to learn more.