By Ajay Kaul, managing partner of AgreeYa Solutions
If you’re an HR or recruiting professional, I’m sure you’ll agree that it can be very challenging to fill open positions with quality candidates in a candidate-driven job market.
With so many other companies competing for the same limited number of candidates, it seems like an impossible task to get top talent’s attention. However, with a well-rounded recruitment marketing strategy, it’s easy to build your talent pool and keep it filled with a steady stream of great candidates.
Recruitment marketing has gone from an emerging trend in talent acquisition to a necessary strategy to attract top candidates and stay competitive. This article will outline some key strategies to help organizations build a robust recruitment marketing program.
Outline your recruitment marketing goals
As a first step, define what you want to accomplish with your recruitment marketing plan. Though your overall goal is to attract high-quality candidates, defining precise, specific, and measurable goals will help you get there.
Some examples of common goals include improving:
- Candidate engagement on your career page, social media, and other job portals
- The number of applicants from social media
- Employee referral rates
- Offer-acceptance rates
- Employer brand awareness
- Applicant diversity
- The number of recruitment event attendees
Know your ideal job candidate persona
A candidate persona is the semi-fictional illustration of your ideal job candidate. Think beyond basic job-related details such as current job, education, experience, and skills.
Some of the characteristics you may want to include when building your candidate personas are:
- Likes/dislikes
- Habits
- Hobbies
- Goals
- Motivations/frustrations
- Brands they may associate with
- Personality traits
Build and spread the word about your brand
Building a strong employer brand has a positive impact on recruitment — 75% of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before applying for a position. This implies that candidates are just as concerned with a potential employer’s reputation as the employer is concerned with a potential candidate’s experience and work history.
For effective employer branding, it’s important to consider how candidates will perceive your brand. How are you communicating the organization’s mission, vision, and values, as well as the practices and accomplishments of your current employees?
Share the stories of your employees shining and excelling within your company and the community it serves. These stories give prospective candidates insight into their career roadmap, should they choose to join your organization.
Review and update your social media pages
Regularly review and update your organization’s social media accounts and ensure that they align with your organizational culture. Be sure to share your employee success stories, initiatives for internal commitments to employees, and fun work-related activities on social media channels and your brand website.
Keep your career page updated
Your career page acts as a window into your organization. From the moment a candidate lands on your page, they develop a mental image of your organization, employees, and culture.
Creating a well-designed and easy-to-navigate career page greatly impacts the prospective candidate experience. Nearly 65% of candidates cited career pages as a top resource for searching for new opportunities.
But because of long forms or a cumbersome application process, many qualified candidates abandon job applications halfway or, worse, apply for the same role with a competitor. Conversion rates increase by as much as 365% when the application takes less than five minutes to complete.
Screener questions can help filter out unqualified or unsuitable job candidates so that recruiters can dedicate talent acquisition resources to engaging the most qualified applicants.
Create quality content
You can also leverage content marketing to attract and engage quality talent.
Working alongside your organization’s marketing team, aim to create compelling content in formats such as blogs, articles, eBooks, podcasts, and videos. The content should tell a story that adds value for prospective candidates and helps you hire better candidates.
Focus on SEO strategy
A high ranking on search engines and job boards can help you attract a steady stream of candidates. Properly optimized job postings offer additional job data that Google finds valuable, and this data determines how Google indexes and ranks your page. The more complete a job posting is, the more likely it is to turn up in the top results of a candidate’s search.
Finally, it’s a good idea to measure the success of your recruitment marketing efforts by gathering metrics on what strategies worked and what didn’t. You can also test different campaigns and identify job ads and calls to action that deliver the best results. You can then use these insights to continually adjust and improve your recruitment marketing plan.
Talent shortage remains a challenge in the industry, forcing recruiters to find new ways to attract candidates. By executing a strong recruitment marketing strategy, organizations can stay ahead of the talent curve.
Ajay Kaul is a visionary leader and a trendsetter. As managing partner of AgreeYa Solutions, he has been instrumental in leading the company through solid growth and international expansion for the past 20 years. Kaul has three decades of experience in building powerful and innovative solutions for businesses across various industries and verticals. His expertise and knowledge span across enterprise sales management, marketing and strategy, global delivery, mergers, and acquisitions.
