When your company is recruiting job candidates, visibility is the most important thing to keep in mind. Can job hunters find your jobs? You must ensure you're getting noticed in the right place, at the right time. Digital recruitment marketing is the tool that helps you achieve this!
We know this better than anyone else. At Hueman, our business is centered on virtual, digital recruitment marketing. Our recruiters are trained in cloud-based technologies, best-in-class marketing tools, and the art of phone and video recruiting and sourcing.
So how do you build an effective recruitment marketing strategy of your own? Don't worry—we've broken this down into 10 key steps for you.
10 Steps to Building an Effective Recruitment Marketing Strategy
1. Build Your Recruitment Marketing Team.
First thing's first: building an effective recruitment marketing strategy takes a village! Well, kind of. You must build a recruitment marketing team.
Who should be on this team?
Some organizations have in-house marketing teams. If you have access to them, awesome! They can guide you through this process. If you don't have access to a marketing team, that's okay! Try to engage with a coworker who may have social media marketing experience, may be a strong writer, or may have advertising experience.
Just ensure you divide and conquer! If you are leading (or part of) a department that hires regularly, delegate an expert for each marketing wheelhouse. Identify experts in social media marketing, job description writing, SEO optimization, and LinkedIn sourcing. Each person can own a piece of the process, and you don't have to know it all.
2. Define Your Employer Value Proposition (EVP).
Do you know what an "employer value proposition" (EVP) is? Does your company have one? An EVP explains why someone should work for your organization while setting the guidelines for your company's culture and values.
In Hueman's experience, businesses with a clearly defined brand and EVP are more successful in both recruiting and retaining good candidates/employees.
3. Understand Your Candidate's Online Experience—Then Improve It.
60.7% of job applications were completed on mobile devices compared to 39.3% on desktop.
Would you want to spend hours online filling out an application that is repetitive and asks for too much information? Well, neither does a future candidate. Put yourself in your candidate's shoes when creating your online job application process.
If you don't want to fill it out, then chances are no one does. In fact, 60 percent of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out online job applications because of length or complexity.
Some questions to consider to improve your recruitment marketing tactics:
- Is your jobs/career section easy to find on your company's website?
- Is your job application mobile-optimized? (Can someone easily apply for a job on their smartphone?)
- Is the job search function easy to use?
- Does your job search function have filters?
Answer those questions, and then improve your job candidate's online experience with your company's job application.
4. Establish Quantifiable Goals.
What gets measured; gets done. Don't forget about setting goals for your recruitment marketing program!
Promoting a job effectively takes time and money. Your goal may be as simple as "Garner 10 applications for my job opening." Or, you may think at a larger scale and set a goal such as "Increase the total number of candidates via mobile by 15 percent within the next six months."
Either way, you must set formal, objective goals recruiters and recruitment marketing team members can understand and strive for.
5. Set a Budget.
As much as we like to believe that if done right, marketing should be free, that perception is just not right.
People are the greatest investment for your business. So, finding the best employees for your company will cost money.
If you can understand your average cost-per-apply for a job and how many applicants you need to nab a hire, you can determine your precise budget per channel and modify it over time. (You'll need historical data to drive baselines and decisions, so it will require testing at the forefront.)
Check out an example of how we approach job-level budgeting:
6. Increase Job Visibility and Identify Advertising Opportunities.
A key piece of marketing is visibility. You want your job openings to be seen! And there are best practices for drawing such attention.
Let's start with the first thing in your job description: the job title. What is the job title you're hiring for? Is this job title commonly used, or is it a fancy, internal name?
How do you ensure your job title is searchable and sensible? Perform an online search for some potential job titles and see what comes up. You can use Google Keyword Planner or Google Trends to discover if the terms you want to use are being searched or which ones may be a better fit.
When looking for advertising opportunities, you need to ask yourself, where does my target candidate spend their time physically and online? The answer to that question will lead to the following question: Where can I place my job ads to receive the most applicants for my position?
For example, say your job candidate is highly proficient and active on LinkedIn. Consider investing in LinkedIn advertising! When building an ad, use their demographics, interests, and work experience for your targeting parameters.
If you're unsure who your target candidate is and where they spend their time, create a persona for them. A persona is the blueprint for who you need to attract (or market to) and unveils where you can find them.
Check out our blog, "How Candidate Personas Can Strengthen Your Recruitment Strategy," for more information about persona building.
7. Formulate Your Marketing Mix.
Job sites are just the beginning of your marketing tactics. There are other activities that you can add to your marketing mix, such as:
- Texting
- Social media
Marketing is all about experimentation. Test out various days of the week, times of day, and types of outreach to see which mix performs best. Once you find a mix of activities that work for your specific audience(s), use them to drive future posts, emails, and messaging.
8. Schedule Key Marketing Activities.
Once you have established a recruitment marketing strategy, it's important to schedule marketing activities to attract job applicants.
Outline your key marketing tactics to reach your goals, such as:
- Setting up an Indeed account.
- Sponsoring jobs on Indeed.
- Redoing job descriptions to make sure they properly utilize SEO best practices.
- Switching to an ATS with job distribution capabilities.
- Establishing a social media posting strategy.
9. Measure, Analyze, Repeat.
It's imperative to monitor, measure, and analyze your marketing activities and investments. You should continue to evolve and improve your strategy over time—no matter how long you've been doing it.
There are basic (and free) tools that are readily available (that live within and outside your marketing platforms, such as Indeed) that can help you monitor performance, such as Facebook Ads Manager.
10. Communicate the Strategy to Recruiters.
Before you press "go" on your recruitment marketing strategy, marketing tactics, and activities must trickle down to your recruiters.
Communicate what you are doing and why you are doing it. If they can understand the "why" behind your recruitment marketing strategy, they'll be more likely to buy in and do their part.
We've just skimmed the surface of building an effective recruitment marketing strategy. To learn more about each of these 10 steps, download our World-Class Recruitment Guide.
