Tackling Recruitment Marketing

Recruitment marketing is an exciting new tool in the realm of talent acquisition. A recent report from Aptitude Research Partners revealed that up to “70% of companies are planning to invest in Recruitment Marketing technology over the next 12 months.”

With recruitment marketing evolving on a yearly basis, Xref sat down with three experts in the field – John Fleischaer, Natalie Pedrosa and Kathleen Teixeira – to discuss their experience, insights and practical tips.

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What is recruitment marketing?

Recruitment marketing is the practice of using marketing strategies to attract, engage and even retain talented individuals to your business. It is the earliest stage of talent acquisition and is supported by a set of skills, practices and technologies that have become vital for employers to compete for the best talent.

“To me, recruitment marketing is about understanding your talent target audience,” said Teixeria, Senior Consultant, Workforce Transformation at Delloite.

“It is all the tactics we adopt and everything we do to engage and delight those people before they convert into applicants. And for me, it has to be considered at the very early stage of the recruitment process.”

“Recruitment marketing is marketing your culture, your jobs, where your opportunities are, the people that work there,” added Pedrosa, Talent Acquisition & Culture Manager at Kruger Products. “It's the people side of marketing, focused on potential candidates or future employees.”

“To me, it's really about getting the message out,” said Fleischauer, Chief Talent Officer at Pivot + Edge. “Promoting what is it like to work in your organisation before you've even met anyone or talked to them. A window into what you're all about, what the environment is like, what the purpose is. The core message here really is engagement. It's about not just putting an advert up but engaging and determining if you’re the right fit for a candidate.”

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How is recruitment marketing different from everyday recruitment?

Traditional recruitment deals with sorting, screening, and interviewing applicants for a particular role. Modern recruitment marketing focuses on the step before; attracting the best applicants to express their interest or apply to work at an organisation.

Recruitment marketing follows the same principles as consumer brand marketing by generating ‘leads’ or qualified candidates at the top of the funnel. Candidates progress further down the funnel with high-touch nurturing using candidate relationship management (CRM) software. Once a candidate applies for a position, an applicant tracking system (ATS) captures and stores their information.

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Does recruitment marketing fit within the overall marketing strategy?

All three experts believe that marketing and the human resources department should be working closely to optimise the performance of recruitment marketing.

“Marketers, in general, don't have an HR mindset and HR People typically don't have marketing know-how, so it's important to act as a bridge between the two,” Fleischauer said. “In order to truly be highly efficient and successful, the marketing and recruiting relationship has to be a tight partnership.”

“We try and include marketing in everything that we do,” added Teixeira. “We’re going through our employee value proposition right now and we work with them to review all of the themes and all of the concepts that we've put together. It’s an education process, getting them up to speed with the value of this work and how similar it is to the stuff that they do every day.”

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Which companies are effective recruitment marketers?

The overarching goal of recruitment marketing is to drive talented candidates to the positions that your business has available.

There is no leading industry for effective recruitment marketers. What works for some businesses, won’t be as effective for others. It’s all about knowing your market and the people that you want to attract.

“I use the example of L'Oréal talent quite a bit,” Teixeira said. “The one thing that stands out with L'Oréal talent is that they're very clear on their call to action in every single thing that they put out. Any ad that you're seeing or anything they post on social media, there's an action attached to it and it directs everybody back to the same website wherever they are globally. It is a very standardised and seamless experience across the board. There are obviously nuances locally, depending on office locations, but I think they do a very good job, they’re very consistent and they really understand who they're targeting.”

“For me the one that’s doing a great job is the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC),” said Fleischauer. “If you look at the financial must-haves that we all have in Canada, you have five options basically for which bank to work with. RBC is leading with stuff that people actually care about. It’s not just about a policy on diversity inclusion, and the job, it’s more about what they believe in and what their culture looks like every day. Even with the limited number of competitors, just by showcasing what their core values are, will have been really, really powerful.”

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How do you measure recruitment marketing efforts?

Like any marketing campaign, measuring key metrics during and upon completion of a recruitment marketing campaign is crucial to determining its success.

“We use LinkedIn and look at data kind of like a funnel,” Pedrosa said. “We see how many eyeballs we have on a campaign, then we'll look at clicks and then at how many candidates we got out of it.

“So that piece kind of measures the number of candidates that we have coming to a campaign and then there's the recruitment funnel. Of those people who applied, how many went to interview? How many went to offer? And how many were hired? So, we’re measuring the quality of the candidates that we're getting.”

But measurement doesn’t always have to be campaign specific.

“I think another metric is the amount of time and money you put into your career pages,” added Teixeira. “You can easily measure the amount of time that people are spending on your website.”

Not every recruitment marketing campaign will be the same, so it’s important that you are measuring against goals that are clearly defined at the beginning of the campaign.

Also, it’s a learning process, and you’re going to acquire learnings through trial and error.

“Something else we’re learning is the types of campaigns that work,” Teixeira said. “On Facebook, there are a number of different campaigns that you can do. What we learned really quickly was one of them wasn't converting as many applications. We were posting the job ad and we were asking people to go back to our careers site to apply and people were dropping off. We realised that what works best is a lead generation campaign, where you can ask people three or four qualifying questions and no resume is required. You can then use that list of leads to call everyone that showed interest in the role.”

Conclusion

Recruitment marketing is certainly a growing aspect of the recruitment portfolio. Once you have your recruitment marketing in place, don't forget the next crucial step of verifying your candidates to determine if they're the right fit for the role.

Contact Xref today to see how we can enhance your verification process.