Recruiting and marketing are becoming increasingly intertwined. With candidates becoming more difficult to recruit, overcoming the talent shortage means rethinking the way we approach recruitment marketing. Recruitment marketing is emerging as a core competency that must be mastered and effects every aspect of the talent acquisition lifecycle.
To create a successful recruitment marketing strategy, you must understand the fundamentals of recruitment marketing.
- Employer Branding
It is time to invest in a career site that delivers an exceptional candidate experience. Gone are the days of stock photos of candidates smiling and the generic blurb about how people are your greatest asset. Employer branding is about being transparent and identifying why your company is a unique and attractive place to work. Develop your key message and communicate it consistently across all of your recruitment marketing initiatives.
- Proactive Sourcing And Pipelining
Another fundamental requirement of a great recruitment marketing strategy is proactive sourcing and the pipelining of candidates for future needs. Proactive sourcing requires that you understand key roles your organization recruits for regularly and that a pipeline of top tier candidates to fill these roles as they become open began well before the position became vacant. This requires that you continuously communicate with candidates to keep them actively engaged within your brand. This also means that the way you use your applicant tracking system must change. Instead of capturing just inbound prospective candidates, your applicant tracking system must be capable of functioning as a Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
- Applicant Nurturing
Turning applicants into hires, means they must be nurtured through the candidate experience. Unfortunately, you cant just build it and they will come. We must spend time building meaningful talent communities that add value rather than simply extracting value. This means sharing information about the industry, job search best practices, how to interview, specific professions, and your company that potential future employees will find interesting. This will not only nurture existing applicants in your talent pipeline, but create new engaged applicants that are interested in your company and brand.
Recruitment marketing is all about driving engaged, qualified applicants to your organization. Understanding these basic fundamentals of recruitment marketing are essential to building a successful recruitment marketing strategy. We can measure our success based on the number of qualified candidates we have feeding our talent pipelines.
Looking for more strategic ways to increase the performance of your recruiting organization? Check out our recent blog
12 Actionable Strategies That Transform Recruiting & Technical Talent Acquisition.