As a modern recruiter, you need to be both a marketer and salesperson.
This article details what recruitment marketing is and how you can use recruitment marketing to increase your hiring quality.
What is Recruitment Marketing?
Recruitment marketing is the art of building an engaging online presence through job advertisements, career page, company blogs, and social media channels.
The applications received through these recruitment marketing efforts are like the leads generated for a product or service in traditional marketing terms.
Let us discuss what a lead is and the different types of leads in general.
As per this article on Hubspot, “a lead is any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service in some way, shape or form.”
In the case of recruitment marketing, it is the candidate applying for a position.
In general marketing terms, there are various types of leads based on the level of maturity in their engagement with the product or service.
For recruitment marketing purposes, we will consider two types of leads.
Low-Quality Leads
Many candidates are applying but are not a good match for your company culture or job requirement.
High-Quality Leads
A smaller number of candidates are applying who match your company culture and job requirement.
The goal of recruitment marketing is to generate high-quality leads or applications.
Recognizing it in Practice
Are you doing the following things?
Writing Detailed Job Advertisements
A job advertisement has to be very clear, sharing relevant information about the company, the group for which you are hiring, education, benefits, skills, and job duties.
The more detailed the job description, the better the quality of applications. Here is a detailed article on how to write killer job descriptions.
Maintaining Career Page
A career page is the most critical page where the candidates seek more information about a company.
An excellent converting career page will have only the active jobs listed. It will clearly show the benefits offered by the company.
You can also have some employee success stories, talking about why they like working for the company.
LinkedIn Company Page
Another place where candidates look for information is the LinkedIn company page. Having a branded LinkedIn company page with the latest company updates from the various employees can provide an excellent impression on the candidate.
Glassdoor
These days, most purchasing decisions are made by reading product or service reviews on sites like Amazon, Capterra, Yelp, etc. Similarly, Glassdoor is the place applicants visit to read about the company reviews.
This is not something you can control, but you can certainly ask happy employees to write a positive review for your company.
Facebook Company Page
Some candidates also check your Facebook company page. Maintain your Facebook company page with news and updates. On Facebook, you can have more employee stories and pictures.
As you see, these are some ways you can increase the quality of applicants.
Use Cases
Rejecting a lot of Candidates
If you are rejecting a majority of the applicants, you are not doing an excellent job with your recruitment marketing.
The reason for getting applicants who do not match the qualifications, most likely is there is not enough details in the job description.
Bad Candidate Experience
If you have received negative feedback from unhappy applicants, either due to the incomplete information, lengthy application, or lack of communication. You have to up your recruitment marketing efforts.
Time to Hire
If you are taking longer to hire, your recruitment marketing efforts are not up to the mark.
It is also dependent on the tools you are using. A lot of times the recruitment process takes longer if you are doing with manual methods like email and spreadsheets.
Quality of Hire
If your quality of hire is not excellent, your recruitment marketing efforts need to be updated. Here is an excellent article which details how to improve the quality of hire.
Again the quality of hire can get better with the use of tools for sorting and filtering the applicants.
Spending a lot of Time Explaining the Company and Position
If you have to spend a lot of time doing this, your recruitment marketing efforts need to be updated.
If the website career page clearly explains the culture, benefits, and relevant information along with a detailed job description. You can reduce the amount of time you spend on these activities.
Poor Employee Retention
If your employees are not staying long enough, your recruitment marketing efforts need to be improved.
By hiring great, long-term employees for your company, you will drastically reduce hiring costs.
As per this article, the average cost of hiring an employee is $4129.
Here is an excellent article which details the benefits of retaining employees.
Benefits of Recruitment Marketing
Here are the key benefits of recruitment marketing, among various others:
Employer Branding
If you do recruitment marketing correctly, it will also enhance the employer brand in the prospective applicant’s eyes.
Here is an article which details the employer branding guidelines for an HR professional.
Higher Quality Applicants
With the right recruitment marketing efforts, your quality of applicants will be better. That will lead to lesser rejections, and higher quality hires.
Future Pipeline
You can build an excellent pipeline of future candidates with a good brand and appropriate recruitment marketing.
Candidates will apply for a company even without having to spend a lot of money on advertising.
Reducing Hiring Costs
The hiring cost goes down drastically with appropriate recruitment marketing since you can hire great employees in a shorter period.
Candidate Experience
Excellent recruitment marketing will lead to a better candidate experience. Candidate experience is the most important metric, which will increase brand awareness and lead to a better hiring pipeline.
Recruitment Marketing Tools for Productivity
Here are some tools that can help your recruitment marketing efforts:
Social Media Marketing Tools
You can use Social media marketing tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, etc, which allow you to post your updates to multiple social media channels from one place.
You can also manage individual accounts differently from one place.
Chatbots/Beacons
Having chatbots or beacons on your website and career page can lead to better engagement with the applicants, leading to better hires.
You can use tools like HelpScout, Facebook Messenger, and various other tools for this.
Job Portal Management System
Use a job portal management system like Recruiteze to manage your active jobs on your career page.
You can also create customizable screener questions to shortlist better candidates.
Mobile-Friendly Application
Use a mobile-friendly application so that applicants can easily view and apply from their mobile devices. You can use modern recruitment software like Recruiteze for this.
Recruitment CRM
A modern recruitment CRM like Recruiteze allows you to post and publish your job advertisement to numerous job boards and social media channels with one click.
You can build your candidate database and provide a great candidate experience by keeping the applicants in the loop at each step of the application process.
Recruitment Marketing Strategies
Yes, you should certainly use tools to amplify your message. But you can also try some of the other proven recruitment strategies like below:
Employee Referral Program
Employee referral programs are a great way to get high-quality candidates. The retention rate of employees hired through a referral program is much higher compared to organic hires.
This is because the prospective candidate will have learned about the company and team from your employee.
Sponsoring Meetups
Depending on your industry, there will be a lot of local professional meetups.
You can reach out to the owners of these groups and support the events by sponsoring food, samples or by handing out branded T-shirts, hats, etc.
Attending Job Fairs
Having a booth in job fairs is a great way to talk to many candidates.
You get a chance to positively spread the word about your company and speak to candidates in a more informal setting, where you can learn a lot more about how the candidates perceive your company.
Newsletters
If you use a Recruitment CRM for your recruitment marketing, you will build an extensive candidate database after a while.
You can stay in touch with many candidates by sending out newsletters that talk about your company accomplishments, updates, and anything else that will show how you are impacting society.
Hosting Virtual Career Fairs
You can also host virtual career fairs using appropriate tools. This is a great way to meet candidates in an informal setting.
You can have your hiring managers, happy employees, and critical decision-makers answering the candidates directly. It will offer a very positive view of your company.
SEO
Keeping your career pages SEO optimized can help potential candidates to find you more easily. On the other hand, having unique and high-quality content can get candidates running to you.
Final Thoughts
I hope you enjoyed the article which details the benefits of recruitment marketing, and how you can use various tools and strategies to improve your recruitment efforts.
One of the essential tools for recruitment marketing is modern recruitment CRM software.
With modern recruitment CRM like Recruiteze, you can post and publish your job advertisements to several job sites to increase your job’s visibility.
Additionally, you can manage your career portal and offer a mobile-friendly application process.
By using a customized workflow, you can build a candidate database that allows for quicker sift through a large number of applicants.
We hope to see you inside!
Thank you for reading!