Recruitment marketing is reshaping how businesses recruit in this digital and AI era. Without a doubt, talent acquisition has always included elements of marketing and sales. However, we are seeing a rapid shift in the role of marketing in recruitment, with marketing now playing a more prominent role in the process.
The talent acquisition industry is being shaped by this fusion of marketing and recruiting. For example, recruiters are increasingly leveraging marketing tactics to strengthen their employer brand and increase candidate engagement in order to remain competitive and secure the best talent.
Websites are adaptable marketing tools that may be used at any time to help you engage with your audience and build your brand. Landing pages are an excellent way to collect email addresses, sell an item, or provide visitors with a quick summary of your company, new products, or services. If you create a landing page, you can even alter the URL with your own domain name to give it a more personalised, branded feel.
Finding, attracting, and engaging with the most qualified candidates in a proactive manner in order to generate a constant flow of candidates has become critical for any company’s current and future hiring needs.
The process of determining how effective your recruitment strategies are is essential to demonstrating the value of your work. Even more so, understanding your recruitment strategies’ efficiencies and inefficiencies will help you improve key performance indicators.
Cost-per-hire (CPH) is an important metric to measure your team’s efficiency in hiring candidates, and it should be checked on regularly.
The cost per hire ratio compares the cost of recruitment to the number of posts filled in a certain time period. The costs cover all aspects of filling a position, including both internal and external costs.
You can accurately assess your services and justify your pricing by analysing cost per hiring numbers.
What is Recruitment Marketing?
Recruitment marketing helps recruiters establish and maintain a strong talent pipeline by creating a strong Employer Value Proposition.
All of a company’s strategies and methods for finding, attracting, engaging, and nurturing talent to fill an open position are referred to as recruitment marketing. The recruitment marketing efforts, essentially how and where the job opportunity is publicised, are usually determined by the type of position and nature of the work. For example, posting an open position for a Sales Manager on a specialist job board for IT professionals would be ineffective. In this situation, it would make sense to target sales-related channels mainly.
Recruiters may use automation, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence to post job vacancies in the best channels, target the appropriate people, and use the correct language with recruitment marketing. Recruitment marketing helps recruiters establish and maintain a strong talent pipeline by creating a strong Employer Value Proposition.
A strategic statement that specifies how a firm wants to be seen by its employees is known as an employer value proposition. It is a crucial stage in creating an employer brand strategy for talent acquisition since it symbolises the company’s beliefs and aspirations.
What is Candidate Experience?
Candidates’ perceptions and interactions with the hiring process are referred to as candidate experience. The job application, the screening process used to filter prospects, and the interview process are all critical aspects of the candidate experience.
There was never a shortage of talent in India but finding the right candidates is difficult under the current scenario.
While some businesses may anticipate increased bargaining power due to a larger pool of active job seekers, the true opportunity lies in leveraging applicant experience as a competitive advantage throughout the downturn.
The Benefits of a Great Candidate Experience
While fostering a positive company culture, and streamlining the application process are some of the obvious benefits of improving the candidate experience, it also delivers the goods in terms of bottom-line growth.
Recruitment automation allows businesses to compete more aggressively for the top talent by enabling them to find the best applicants faster and from a larger, more diversified pool of prospects.
Furthermore, recruiting technology removes time-consuming processes like interview scheduling, lowering the cost-per-hire by a large margin.
Plus, employee experience begins from the hiring stage itself when a prospect ‘discovers’ a brand for the first time and employee retention increases dramatically, saving thousands of dollars in employee replacement costs per individual.
How to Improve Candidate Experience?
The following are some of the best practices for improving the candidate experience:
1. Make a strong impression of your brand.
When it comes to brand building, doing what everyone else is doing isn’t enough. Job searchers have many options. Therefore, your brand must stand out to attract the top candidates. Content-rich career portals can attract both active and passive candidates. Personalise your outreach with email marketing, social media campaigns, and recruitment videos to make a lasting first impression. This can help you create an immersive experience for candidates at the top of the recruitment marketing funnel.
2. Create interesting career web pages.
Is your career page a good representation of your company? Is it true to your company’s image? In keeping up with the latest trends, consider integrating customisable widgets like simplified navigation tools that allow you to promote and show job openings with no effort. Candidates can apply from anywhere by using mobile-friendly websites.
3. Be transparent about your recruiting process
Setting expectations about the hiring process is critical to providing a positive candidate experience. According to popular research, 83 per cent of candidates believe that setting expectations about the recruiting process would greatly improve their overall experience.
Knowing what they’re getting into can help candidates overcome self-doubt, nervousness, and confusion. They will feel less stressed and more appreciated by your organisation.
4. Keep in touch.
We’ve all experienced the anxiety of not knowing whether or not we’ve been selected, which doesn’t help the applicant experience. It’s unlikely that they would ever recommend you to others after such an experience. You have earned a detractor rather than a brand ambassador.
Maintain applicant engagement — and keep them informed — throughout the hiring process. With a recruitment marketing CRM, you can send prospects automatic status updates and notify them of upcoming hiring events, career fairs, and other opportunities. And “active” profiles will enable you to stay informed about a candidate’s employment hunt while being compliant.
5. Show them what a typical day is like on the job.
Corporate videos are not just for investors and business presentations. Candidates may receive an authentic feel of the company. In terms of career choices, millennials are more idealistic and cause-driven. Millennials can get a feel of what the future holds for them with your firm by showcasing outstanding video content that gives them an insider’s view of the company culture, values, mission, and overall work-life.
Video has pushed over heavyweight opponents like email, blogging, and infographics as the most used type of marketing material, according to HubSpot’s 2020 State of Marketing study.
Unsurprisingly, millennial and Gen Z customers are driving video content’s present popularity. These age groups are more internet-connected than older generations, and they prefer to be entertained or learn new things via watching online videos.
Recruitment Marketing Is a Long Game
When someone has a poor experience, you can’t always rectify previous mistakes or fix the harm. You can team up your marketing efforts with your social media presence to empathise with those individuals and then make improvements and adjustments to your processes to avoid repeating the same mistakes with future prospects.
You already know you’re in it for the long haul because RM can take time to deliver incredible results. However, those outcomes do not arise overnight as if by magic. Candidates sourced through RM or referrals are more likely to be satisfied with their work and stay longer. Some of the benefits of referrals include better culture fit and lower hiring costs. In this situation, existing employees serve as brand ambassadors. In fact, employees are 3X more trusted than employers.
Knowing this can help you iterate your marketing approach to better target the talent you want to attract and keep. It will also have an impact on the candidate experience as they become applicants. Across the different candidate touchpoints, that ultimately shape people’s impressions of your organisation from the very beginning of their journey with you, a consistent and evolutionary strategy is critical.
And that’s the actual bottom line: the candidate experience impacts your RM efforts by shaping future decisions. When someone has a poor experience, you can’t always rectify previous mistakes or fix the harm. You can team up your marketing efforts with your social media presence to empathise with those individuals and then make improvements and adjustments to your processes to avoid repeating the same mistakes with future prospects.
