Recruitment Marketing
Recruitment Marketing
Creative Job Titles That Resonate With Job Seekers
When it comes to creating job titles, many companies struggle with finding the right words. They want their jobs to reflect their company culture, but they also want to be sure that the titles are searchable and appealing to potential employees. In this blog post, we will discuss some tips for creating job titles that accurately reflect your company’s culture while also being creative and interesting and straightforward. Job search site Indeed suggest taking a simpler approach when it comes to job titles. They consider a great job title are ones that a job seeker would search for. It should be a “industry-standard term”. They offer this example; For example, “Customer Service Representative” is a common job title for someone who answers customer questions. While you might be tempted to use a more eye-catching job title like “Phone Answering Superstar,” job seekers just aren’t searching for that term on Indeed. They’d prefer employers stick to job titles that job seekers “will find”. And this strategy has a purpose. When you stick to standard job titles, you’ll be more likely to reach more quality candidates. Creating Your Job Titles Start by considering the type of role you are hiring for and how it fits into your company’s mission. Think about the skills that you need and what kind of people could best fill the position. This will help you determine what kind of job title would be most appropriate. Next, consider how creative you want to get with your jobs titles. While many companies opt for traditional titles such as ‘Account Manager’ or ‘Project Manager’, some organizations may want something more expressive and creative like ‘Social Media Maven’ or ‘Data Driven Strategist’. The goal is to make sure your jobs stand out from others on the market, so think carefully about what unique terms might work for each position. Also consider how the jobs you are creating fit into your company’s values. What kind of language do you use to describe successful employees? This can help guide what kinds of job titles would be most appropriate and meaningful for each role. Give Your Job Titles Context I also like to give job titles more context by adding a descriptive word or two at the end of the job title. For example I recently saw an HR role on the job board EvilHRJobs that caught me eye. HR Generalist + Talent Wrangler (PT Remote) The first part holds the standard industry term but the rest of it gives more context about the role. It tells the job seeker that it will require some recruiting but its only a part time gig. That combination helps the seeker filter themselves out or in. Finally, keep in mind that these job titles should accurately reflect the responsibilities associated with each position. You don’t want a title that is too vague or doesn’t accurately reflect the work that will be done by the person who takes on this role. The job title should also be searchable and easy to find when potential employees are looking for jobs at your company. Creating job titles that capture the essence of your company while still being informative and creative is no easy task. By taking these steps, you can ensure that your jobs stand out among the crowd and attract the right kind of people for each role. Writing Your Job Description A job description should start with a clear and concise job title that accurately describes the role. This will help potential candidates understand what type of position they are applying for and whether it aligns with their skills and experience. It’s also important to use keywords in your job title that are relevant to the industry or position, as this can help you reach out to more qualified applicants. Next, provide a detailed overview of the jobs duties and responsibilities. Be sure to include all tasks related to the role so that candidates have an accurate idea of what they will be expected to do on a daily basis. Additionally, describe any special skills or knowledge that may be required for success in the position, such as programs or software used by your company. In addition to job duties, list the qualifications and experience required for the role. This should include both educational requirements as well as any relevant work history or skills that are necessary for success in the position. If you’re looking for somebody with a certain level of expertise, be sure to state this clearly so that candidates know what they need to have in order to be considered. Finally, provide an overview of your company and its culture. Candidates want to know what it’s like to work at your organization and how their job fits into the bigger picture. Talk about your values and mission statement, as well as any perks or benefits that come with working at your business.
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Recruitment Marketing
What's an Employer Value Proposition? - Emissary.ai
Within today’s job market, getting creative with hiring solutions is more important than ever. An employee value proposition, EVP, is one tool employers can use to stand out from competition in attracting top talent to their organization. Gone are the days where simple promises of growth or the highest salary wins over the in-demand candidate. Rather, employers must present a comprehensive package that stands out amongst companies lined up ready to hire. According to Gartner, a technological research and consulting firm, an Employee Value Proposition is “the set of attributes that the labor market and current employees perceive as the value they gain through employment with the organization.” A well-developed EVP displays to a potential candidate not only the financial rewards being offered, but also the professional development opportunities, unique company benefits, or values and vision of the organization. An EVP may come in many forms such as a statement included in job ads, a video shared from company social media platforms, or one-pager shared with new employees. Regardless of the form it is delivered in, a successful EVP is one that company recruiters know well and is easily communicated to candidates. Every EVP should include certain elements that create a comprehensive view into the unique worth a company offers its employees. The EVP may be wrapped up in a share-worthy tagline, but almost always expands on several key components. Compensation The explanation of compensation in an EVP could include the company compensation strategy, system for raises and promotions, current employee compensation satisfaction, employee review procedures, and market comparisons. Benefits Benefits shared in an EVP should detail the basic medical, dental, and vision that is expected as standard and whether any percentage of premiums are covered by the employer. In addition to these basics, the company should share about their time off policies, retirement benefits, employee assistance programs, holidays offered, family leave, and any other perks included in total compensation. Forward thinking employees are always going to be considering the whole package, and one additional incentive may be the difference in being the employer of choice. Professional Development How is the company investing in its future by making employee growth a priority? Employees want to be re-assured that loyalty is not a one-way street when it comes to employment. Sharing how the organization invests in its employee’s growth can be a strategic differentiator in the market. Consider sharing whether the organization provides education reimbursement, professional networking opportunities, career planning, or training for advancement opportunities. Candidates want to know how their future work will be evaluated and how feedback will be provided. Work-Life Work life in an EVP clues candidates into what day-to-day values are prioritized in the company. Nike expresses their values in a EVP slogan, “win as a team.” Nike wants candidates to know they are a company who values working together to the make the world better through their products and services. Google claims to “build, design, code, create—for everyone.” They want to cultivate a diverse network of employees to join the ‘Googler’ team. Maybe the organization allows flexible work hours, advocates for clear work-life boundaries, or encourages healthy lifestyles; these are all important to share in an EVP. Finding creative ways to share the values the organization is focused on can help a company stand out and draw in candidates who feel aligned similarly. Culture An EVP could include a focus on company culture. Perhaps share that a vision of collaboration or company communication is a current emphasis. Answering what leadership style is prevalent could be a huge factor in candidate perspective. What efforts is the company making to create change via social or environmental responsibility? Employee value propositions can be a unique tool to foster buzz amidst both active and passive candidates. Companies can incorporate crafting an EVP during the annual goal setting process. By identifying not only company goals, but also ideal candidate traits, the organizational leadership can perform a gap analysis to pinpoint focal points. After creating the EVP from current goals, employers can initiate a roll out by defining where and how the EVP will be advertised to gain the best results. EVP’s should be evaluated on a yearly basis to ensure alignment with the everchanging and up-to-date company vision. Stephanie Mauney is a freelance writer and content curator specializing in Human Resources
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Recruitment Marketing
Job Aggregators - The Big List - Emissary.ai
Back in 2004 Indeed and SimplyHired launched our industry’s first job aggregators. Since that time, numerous players have emerged to take advantage of this trend. The end result is that jobs are now everywhere. Heck even Google got into the market back in 2017 with the Google for Jobs service. And Indeed eventually bought SimplyHired to remove them as a competitive threat. In between, there are seemingly dozens of so called job aggregators that want to help employers find talent. We’ll cover some of the biggest in this blog but let’s take a look at the difference between job boards and aggregators. Job Aggregators vs Job Boards Traditional job boards are marketplaces that simply allow employers to post jobs related to a certain niche: MarketingJobs.com, SupplyChainCareers.com etc. A job aggregator has always been a search engine first by indexing all the jobs from their client base and sometimes other job boards. Many aggregators now allow employers to post individual jobs in an appeal to small business owners. Job boards also now can scrape your jobs and are often backfilled with listings from players like Ziprecruiter. So the two channels have certainly merged features and functionality over the years. So should you use job aggregators. The answer is usually yes but here’s some reasons why; Comprehensive Search: Job aggregators server ever part of the job market not just a niche like a typical job board. They are a huge database of jobs. More Efficient: Job seekers love aggregators since it makes their search more efficient vs having to go to multiple sites. More Jobs: Because aggregators list so many jobs candidates can discover jobs they normally may have missed. It levels the playing field for small businesses. See Who’s Hiring: Aggregators are also a great research tool for staffing firms to see’s who’s hiring. Indeed even has a trend section to see which job keywords are trending. Top Job Aggregators Here is a list of the largest and most popular job aggregators: Indeed is the largest job aggregators in the world (by a large margin). Ziprecruiter is a ubiquitous player in the space that does a ton of advertising in order to generate traffic. Juju.com has comprehensive search results for millions of jobs found on thousands employer career portals, recruiter websites, job boards, and other employment sites all over the Internet. CareerJet.com is also similar to Indeed, but is available in more countries and in more languages than SimplyHIred. LinkedIn Jobs is more than a career social media site, it also aggregates job postings. GetWork (formerly Linkup) is an aggregator that pulls jobs exclusively from company websites. Talent.com is a global job aggregator with sites in 60+ countries around the world. Upward.net will post your jobs to 100+ other job sites. Jooble is an international job search website used daily by millions of people in 71 countries. Adzuna is another global player in the aggregator world. Also big in the UK. Maximizing Your Job Aggregators There are certain things you can do to maximize your use of these sites. Keep your job titles simple and use the right keywords. List your keywords multiple times throughout the description. Ensure your ATS has the proper XML feed so aggregators can scrape your data properly. Get listed on Google for Jobs (its free)
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Recruitment Marketing
What is Recruitment Marketing? - Emissary.ai
Recruitment marketing has become such an accepted part of talent acquisition that Google lists more than a million references to “every recruiter is a marketer” or some version of it. There isn’t a recruiting or HR conference today that doesn’t have a session or two on the topic, some feature marketing as the conference theme. What makes marketing so central to successful recruiting is the need for employers to stand out in the crowded marketplace in order to attract and engage with the talent they need and convert them into applicants they want and hire. In the past, when jobs appeared in the newspaper and workers had little access to detailed knowledge of an employer and its culture, recruiting was transactional, with the recruiter holding most of the cards. With the rise of social media and employer review sites like Glassdoor, candidates are more sophisticated and what they learn about an organization influences their decision about applying. That alone is reason enough for a company to invest in recruitment marketing. A second and perhaps even more significant reason is to reach those not yet looking for a job. With more open jobs than applicants and competition fierce for the best people, promoting a positive brand and building awareness of an employer’s values and opportunities develops interest in the organization and hopefully encourages passive candidates to become candidates. Defining Recruitment Marketing Recruitment marketing involves working across multiple-channels trying to get talent to click on your opportunities. It involves leveraging social media, showcasing the company and jobs on the career page, monitoring employer review sites and responding as necessary, ensuring good SEO in job descriptions while planning the job posting placement to most effectively target the desired candidates. As if that isn’t enough, recruitment marketing strategies extend to building and communicating with the talent in candidate pipelines and ensuring that the application process itself is as simple and easy as possible. As the list illustrates, the range of recruitment marketing activities is broad. For that reason larger organizations have dedicated marketers on their talent acquisition team and also work with recruitment marketing and advertising agencies. However, many smaller companies also work with outside agencies. Even more have their recruiting team handle the marketing. Whatever the process, all recruitment marketing has the same goal: to attract and interest talent in your company, building and nurturing the relationship to convert these potential candidates into employees. Though the strategies will differ, all have the same basic blueprint: to tell the company’s story by highlighting the work it does and the people who do it. The company career site becomes the window into the organization. Job opportunities are listed, but the primary focus is to show potential applicants what it’s like to work there. Recruitment marketers most effectively do that with video tours and employees describing their experience and what excites them about their work. On social media, recruiters will interact with potential candidates engaging with them in Q&A sessions or something as simple as a poll. It’s just as important to talk about the company’s mission and its role in society, as well as describing the company culture honestly and transparently. More than a few companies forthrightly admit to what many would consider a negative, for example that long hours and frequent weekend work is part of the job. While that may seem a negative, it warns off candidates uninterested in that type of culture. While “every recruiter is a marketer” may be more of a hope than a reality, it is true that every recruiter has a role in recruitment marketing. It may be as simple as improving the application process or keeping up with the Facebook page or posting company pictures to Instagram. The more touchpoints, a marketers call them, a company has, the more opportunities there are to promote the brand and communicate with candidates. In that sense, every recruiter can participate in recruitment marketing. At the end of the day, recruiting IS marketing. Contribution by John Zappe
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Recruitment Marketing
Employer Branding for Changing Times - Emissary.ai
2020 memes. I’m sure you’ve seen them all across social media, making light of the horror show that this year has been for most people, from pandemic to murder hornets to race, class, and political warfare. Toss in things like layoffs, furloughs and professional struggles, and traditional employment branding can seem tone deaf or out of place. Priorities have shifted for customers, employees, and job seekers. Who cares about ping pong tables and free donuts when if everyone works from home? Who cares about how many awards your company has won when your employees are turning over and customers or not renewing? Who cares that you offer competitive pay if workers are more concerned about stability? People are not moved by dry technical copy or compliant corporate-speak. Nor are they influenced by superlatives like “exciting,” “cutting-edge,” and “dynamic.” It takes more to stand out to a society with so much being thrown at them. This is really difficult to do in the digital age of political correctness, and so there is the understandable tendency to want to play it safe. But safe and proper are not what drive people towards a common goal. The branding that gets results today takes a stand on a specific set of values and is shamelessly, vulnerably authentic. Here are a few ways you can shift your branding strategy from what used to work to what works now: Old way – promoting how great a place it is to work and how happy people are. New way – talk about your challenges. Dostoevsky said (and I’m liberally paraphrasing here), that if you gave people everything they wanted and everything was perfect all the time, the first thing they’d do is smash something, just to have something unexpected or interesting happen. We are adapted as humans to require some security, but we are most alert and alive when we have one foot out in the unknown and are working to attain something. Talk about where you’re headed as a company and what problems need solving. Old way – culture and work environment are unknown or misperceived until after people are hired or decide not to pursue employment. Potential employees have no idea what it’s like to work for your company unless they know an insider. They are otherwise relying on maybe a statement or video on your career page, asking the Recruiter or Hiring manager, or checking out Glassdoor reviews (and then crossing their fingers). New way – Have your employees promote your culture and work environment on social media, company website and hiring ads. Give top candidates an insider to connect and interact with, and the ability to have an informational interview that is not tied to judgment of their qualifications for the position. If you’re afraid to do it, maybe your culture isn’t worth promoting. Old way – creating a website and social media pages, using them passively and leaving hiring ads to the Recruitment team to post. New way – doubling down on efforts to get brand recognition. Get your name out there with strategic SEO, partnerships and collaborations with other companies, and increasing your number of brand ambassadors to include as many employees as possible doing all of the things above. Employer branding is an evolving message that needs to be calibrated for shifting times. Hopefully these tips give you an idea of where to start. QUICK TIP 5 ways for enhancing your employer brand through texting. Send potential candidates news about your Great Place to Work Award. Push out ‘day in the life’ content about what its like to work there. Alert them of the latest job opening via opt-in subscription. Break down your top perks and benefits for working there and share those. End your messages with your EVP (employer value proposition) to reinforce branding.
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Recruitment Marketing
Not Hiring? Build Your Talent Community Instead - Emissary.ai
Since many companies have had to freeze hiring or layoff people due to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, a lot of them are still posting jobs in hopes of “pipelining” candidates. One industry insider told me recently as many as 50% of employers are actively still posting with no intention to hire. But this strategy has one big flaw. It exacerbates the resume black hole for candidates who are looking to find work now. Instead of this tactic, I recommend employers look at building and curating their own talent communities if you truly want to fill your pipeline for future hiring needs. A talent community also provides a slew of long term cost saving benefits especially when it comes to job advertising. The bigger your talent community is, the less you have to spend on external marketing in the future. Your organization already has the foundation of a talent community. It’s the database that sits right inside your ATS but most companies fail to use it properly. A talent community is merely a group of people who have shown interest in working for your company at one point or another. It could be as broad as everyone who’s applied and been rejected or as narrow as your “silver medalists” – those that you interviewed but didn’t hire. These networks usually manifest themselves in an online format which allow you to maintain a relationship with the candidate over time using channels such as email, social media, and video to communicate industry news, job alerts and other updates about your hiring plans. By staying in touch with prospective candidates, a talent community allows you to maintain that relationship the next time a job opening occurs as well as building your employer brand for when they are ready to make a move. If I were building a talent community from scratch, the first order of business would be to hire or assign someone to be the community manager. This person would be responsible for building a digital relationship between you and your candidates through the above mentioned content tactics. Talent Communities Are Not Lists The Talent Community should not be thought of as just a list of people that you communicate with, it should also be a place where they can talk to each other. A number of cloud based software platforms like MightyNetworks or Hivebrite already exist which allow anyone to build a dedicated, private online network. It just takes effort and consistency to make it work. Candidates (especially the good ones) need a good reason to join your talent community. They don’t want to be marketed to with just job alerts. They want to learn and grow in their field and it’s your job to help them do that. One great example of a talent community that works is by a European company called Specsavers. They are an optometry retailer with locations in about 10 different countries. Their talent community is called Green Club, and it’s not branded as Specsavers at all. It’s a login website, with a message board, video content, professional development courses, events and more. It’s become a powerful tool to augment their optometry hires year in and year out. You can setup your community as a pre-screen tool as well by asking some qualifying questions during the signup process to give you better data about the candidates who are joining. Once they’ve signed up you can create and curate content that interests them. In a past role in recruiting I once set up a twitter account to retweet news from the industry my company participated in (ecommerce). I found RSS feeds for all the major news sites that covered the space and rebroadcast their headlines to the twitter account which was branded as a free resource for the industry “powered by” my employer. It became a solid channel to build our brand and share job leads. If you don’t want to go that far you can do something like what the LinkedIn Talent blog does each week. They put together a list of the 10 Must Read Articles for Recruiters each week. This type of content curation is easy to do for any industry. 3 Ways to Use Texting in Your Talent Community Send potential candidates a monthly update on upcoming hiring plans. Offer text based job alerts according to their preferences. Send them a monthly reminder with one of the perks about working for your company. In addition to industry news, you should be sharing content such as company news, interview tips, hiring manager spotlights, career paths, new hires, hiring process FAQs, perks and benefits and related events. Within your talent community, whether its just an email list or a full blown online platform, don’t bombard your members with content. Sending them an email every few weeks with relevant news and if possible segment those emails based on their job type interest. Over time, as your community grows it becomes another channel that you own which will certainly reduce your reliance on outside hiring sources that you are paying for.
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Recruitment Marketing
How to Scale Recruitment Marketing - Emissary.ai
I’ve heard from a number of employers this year who are looking to scale their recruitment marketing efforts in order to attract more applicants using less resources. Many companies have small teams and recruitment marketing duties often get shifted to HR professionals who weren’t trained on the various ways to market your jobs. If you are an HR department of one you probably understand this more than anyone. As attracting talent gets more technically challenging, a number of tools and techniques have emerged to reach many candidates with the click of a button. To maximize your scaleability you’ll need a few important assets; a job XML feed that contains all of your job listings, a modern ATS and a solid social media tool. Note: If you don’t know what an XML jobs feed is, just ask your ATS. Most applicant tracking platforms provide a job feed as part of the service. Here are my top five solutions to ramping up your recruitment marketing campaigns through technology platforms. Programmatic Job Advertising: Still spending time posting jobs manually? There’s no need to with programmatic job vendors like PandoLogic, Recruitics, Joveo and others. These platforms take all the jobs from your ATS and automatically distribute them to many job boards at once. All you do is set a budget and the technology does the rest by sending money to the jobs that need the clicks. For example if a job hasn’t gotten enough applicants after a certain timeframe the algorithm will automatically start to spend more to reach more candidates. Programmatic advertising is perhaps the cheapest and most effective form of job seeker traffic you can buy today. Automated RSS Campaigns: This is one of the best kept secrets in marketing. I frequently use MailChimp to send automated email newsletters. If you have an RSS feed of jobs or blog posts you can automate that content by creating an RSS Campaign inside their platform. You simply enter the URL of the feed, choose a day and time to send it, add your logo or choose a template and press the launch button. Then once new content gets put into that feed the email goes out according to the schedule you set up. I think this functionality exists in tools like Hubspot as well. Texting: No surprise here, but adding a text recruiting platform to your HR tech stack will supercharge your efforts and save you valuable time by reaching more candidates. 90% of texts are read within 3 minutes vs. 80% of emails that are never read at all. Those are convincing numbers to make the switch now. ATS Triggers: Just about every company needs to review and revamp their automatic message triggers in their applicant tracking software workflow. This feature (which any good ATS has) sends a message via email or text to the candidate alerting them of their new status. Those messages should inform the candidate to what’s happening to their application and where they stand in the process. If you aren’t leveraging those alerts to their maximum use you are not optimizing the candidate experience. Social Media Tools: Social media management tools like Buffer, Dlvr.it and Zapier allow you to send and track job and other career content to your followers. They feature RSS publishing campaigns like I mentioned above and more importantly you can schedule and recycle important content. Zapier even has several ATS integrations with platforms like Workable, BambooHR, Greenhouse, BreezyHR and many others. Employers can set up automations called “Zaps,” to build candidate nurturing funnels that provides custom content to candidates based on their actions. For example when a candidate is added to a specific Breezy HR stag, Zapier will share the details as a Slack message. Leveraging these tactics will, for many of you, become a set it and forget it solution, thus leaving you more time to connect with those most important to you…the candidate. Do you have other suggestions on scaling recruitment marketing? I’d love to hear them so drop me a note on our contact page.
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Recruitment Marketing
Talent Network Content Tips for Employers - Emissary.ai
Recently a startling statistic* came to light about employers’ content marketing efforts. Just 5% of Fortune 500 employers with a talent network send actual content (e.g., something other than job openings). That’s not the right way to lure potential applicants. People who sign up to talent networks want more information about your company, your industry and your culture. It’s a chance for employers to nurture relationships, build up their employment brand and be seen as an employer of choice. A jobs only strategy is not going to accomplish those goals. The problem stems from the fact that most talent acquisition departments are not trained content marketers. But, if you regularly collect contact info from those who haven’t applied yet, you need to use a variety of content tactics to encourage them to engage and apply. The good news is that companies are have lots of content to tap into, you just need to know where to look and set up a calendar to help guide your efforts. We’re not saying you need to create 1,000 word blog posts…simple, bite sized nuggets will do the trick. First let’s look at some general guidelines to follow. Your content should be conversational in nature. Keep it informal and authentic. Brevity is your friend. Keep it short, so it is easy to consume. Be visual. Images and video clips are attention getters. Have a call to action to learn more or apply. With those rules in mind, here’s a list of content ideas that should be part of your regular publishing across your email campaigns and social media channels. Promotions and New Hires Show off employees who are being promoted so you can highlight people who are progressing throughout their career and finding advancement with your organization. Candidates want to know that their next employer will offer opportunities to learn and grow professionally. Similarly, it’s also a great idea to welcome your new hires as part of an onboarding strategy. Take a picture of them and welcome them to the team via your social media (after getting their permission of course). It demonstrates that you represent a dynamic organization and provides you a stead drip of content to fuel interest from other prospects. Important Industry News Keep your candidates informed on important news and events happening in your industry. Become a resource for their career and keep them up to date on how your company’s activities fit within those trends. Tips on Applying Let candidates in on how to apply and what to expect after they do. The more you can prep them for how your hiring process works, the more thoughtful and professional your organization will look. If your application process looks accessible and well organized, top talent will apply. If it looks like a dehumanized black hole, they won’t. Also, offer them tips on how to impress as they interview with you. Insurance giant GEICO does a good job at this. Employee Spotlights Ask your star employees to answer some questions about their experiences with your organization and use that as content. Integrate their answers into short stories on your career site and let your candidates read about the people they will be working with. Reasons to Work There From perks to benefits to culture, every company has something about them that is unique. Use that as talking points for why you should work there. Do a quick survey of your employees and ask them what their favorite aspect of working at your company is. Their responses can then be used as content pieces to attract new talent. Finally, don’t be afraid to show off your employees in action through video and pictures. Today’s candidates, especially the next generation, love visual content. So, be sure to show off your office environment to help them get a peek inside. *Source: Smashfly
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Recruiting
Tips for Adopting a Recruitment Marketing Mindset - Emissary.ai
Recruiting leaders need to think more like marketers. Similar to marketing a product or service, today’s recruiting teams must focus on specific ad campaigns to reach the most qualified candidate audience by using a multi-channel job marketing approach. After all, every other employer is fighting for the same talent so how will your company stand out? Your focus should be on attracting, engaging, and developing candidates who haven’t yet applied to a job, using your unique employer value proposition to turn them into applicants. This type of conversion is inherently not a skillset most recruiting teams have, therefore you need to bring in more marketing experts to fill out your staff. We’d recommend hiring a Recruitment Marketing Manager and perhaps even a copywriter to help craft your messaging. Their first order of business should be defining your target personas. Personas are a blueprint designed to help you understand your ideal candidates. These identities, once you have them down on paper, will help you develop relevant and useful recruitment marketing content designed for that target audience. You’ll probably require several personas – one for entry-level candidates, another for management, and still more for specific jobs like customer service, engineer or developer. Think of them as a reverse job description. All of the personas you develop should include elements of top talent, but it will be helpful if you have those which focus on your hiring managers’ experience and skills wish list for their team members. Include information about who these candidates are in real life. Include passive candidates in these personas and show where they go for development, community, and social networking. Ask your team what types of TV shows and entertainment do they consume? What types of schools or trade licenses would they have? Where do they tend to hang out in real life and online? The answers to those questions will help you better target those individuals. Planning Your Recruitment Marketing Campaign Once you’ve found your top candidate, you should focus on these areas when building your recruitment marketing campaigns: Job Descriptions. Start to think of your JD’s as landing pages. That is how a marketer sees them. Are they optimized for converting clicks into applies? Do they make it easy for the seeker to apply quickly? The best way to optimize is by allowing them to apply right on the page, or at the very least start the apply process by entering a name and email. You might even add in text reminders that will send them a link to the job so they can apply later. If you are going to pay for traffic to these pages it is imperative you optimize them for conversions. Use Tech to Target. Targeted outreach via social media as well as programmatic job ad offerings will help you optimize your ad spend. After finding where your top choices spend their time, you can target them through Social media. For instance we’ve heard Twitter is good for advertising to sales people. While Facebook is better for blue collar and entry level workers. One way to make your ad campaign successful is to highlight the training and development programs your company offers to employees. Remind them what makes working for you different/special. A/B test your campaigns. Marketers always test to determine which messages and pages are working best. Measure to determine which ads work best, as well as the best email messages and subject lines for candidate outreach and social messages. Then, rinse and repeat for each campaign. Let data be your guide. Leverage the press. PR outreach through press releases, interviews, awards, and other milestones is a great way to improve your recruitment marketing efforts. If you aren’t ready to hire in-house PR staff or a marketer dedicated to working on outreach, assign an HR team member the job of maintaining and building media contact lists and communicating with them regularly.Your company PR should reach out to job seekers, recruiters, career experts, and HR influencers. Share the work your company has been doing with others who are interested in hearing about new career sites and successful strategies to attract talent. There are lots of great career and recruiting podcasts out there, those shows can be great for spreading your hiring message! Use your career site to provide helpful information about life at your firm. Your career site is a key part of branding and attracting candidates to your job postings. It’s a place to shape your message. So it should be more than just a page with job listings. It should be designed to move candidates into your recruitment funnel. Add content such as employee stores, FAQs and include LOTS of images and video. The career site should be mainly a visual experience. Graphics/imagery. Having a graphic designer on staff or on loan from your marketing department will be extremely useful. Use video testimonials, custom images, and real world pics of your employees in action. Use header images and profile photos on social media and make accounts available to employees and recruiters for increased branding. Wrap It Up If you haven’t spent much time or resources on defining your employer brand, you’ better get started. Your employer brand messaging (which includes job postings) shouldn’t cover what your company is most proud of; rather, it should be targeted towards the candidate in terms of ‘what’s in it for them’ if they come to work for you. Additionally, there should be frequent measurements of your employer brand strength, including its impact on job applications, and your efforts adapted for continuous improvement. Implementing a recruiting marketing approach for recruitment will bring about changes in your employer branding, prospect attrition, and scale of candidate outreach. A successful recruitment marketing approach will result in a reduction in your low impact recruiting tasks, allowing your company to focus on recruiting top quality hires and innovators that may not respond to standard hiring methods. Focusing on data-driven decision making tools, such as KPIs and A/B testing, that provides you with the ability to make decisions based on hard data regarding employer branding, recruitment advertising and job posting placement.
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Emissary is a candidate engagement platform built to empower recruiters with efficient, modern communication tools that work in harmony with other recruiting solutions.
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