When reading through resumes and conducting interviews, it's easy to feel as though recruitment is all about hiring the right applicant. However, the recruitment process begins much earlier than that first handshake: Before you can choose a valuable employee, you need to make sure you've built the best pool of candidates.
This is where recruitment marketing comes into play.
What is recruitment marketing?
Recruitment marketing is much like all of the other marketing your organization does. You will be advertising your job opening as the "product" and thinking of potential applicants as customers.
Also, like its traditional counterpart, recruitment marketing takes research and careful implementation. It isn't as simple as posting on a job board or updating your website's career page — but it can be much more effective.
Why should you implement recruitment marketing strategies?
When you begin your candidate search with recruitment marketing, you don't limit yourself to choosing between whoever happened to see your job opening. Instead, you reach a more diverse audience — but also a more specific one. For example, recruitment marketing strategies can help you target and advertise to job seekers with the background, experience and skills you're looking for.
How to get started
Here are a few ways to use recruitment marketing to your advantage.
1) Market internally
According to the Society for Human Resource Management, you may be missing out on a significant pool of candidates if you fail to make job openings visible to current employees. Internal mobility can come with a long list of benefits, from cost-savings to reduced turnover rates. Additionally, applicants already familiar with your company can bring skills an outside hire would have to be trained on.
2) Target the appropriate audience
Although recruitment marketing allows you to target a broader audience, it's also necessary to make sure your message reaches the right candidates. For example, if you were only interested in applicants with experience in your field, you wouldn't want to advertise to job seekers from other backgrounds. This ensures you aren't wasting time on candidates who aren't suited to your open positions.
3) Use digital channels effectively
Digital channels are easy to use, but they will only benefit your recruitment marketing strategy if you use them appropriately and effectively. Different audiences spend their time on different forms of social media, so it's crucial to understand the user base of each digital channel before using it for marketing purposes. That being said, a LinkedIn study found that 52% of candidates visit an employer's website and social media when performing background research — so don't skip this step.
4) Clarify your message
Recruitment marketing gives you the opportunity to widely distribute your message. If that message is unclear, difficult to follow up on or otherwise confusing, applicants may not be interested. Make sure your recruitment marketing strategy is unified around a central message — for example, the kind of person you're looking for or the company culture you hope to create.
Even with all the latest recruitment marketing trends at your disposal, hiring poses plenty of challenges. To overcome those challenges and end up with a candidate who fits your needs, let YES Partners help. Click here to see just a few of the roles we've successfully placed.
Finding people is easy, but finding the RIGHT people is not. YES Partners helps companies FIND the right people for all company functions, across many industries.
