Recruiters Become Marketers

Attracting top talent in today’s market is more difficult than ever before. Attract and find the candidate is not easy way, however with the right approach and the tools, you will find out that recruiting is best working together with marketing techniques.

But don’t worry like recruiting, marketing ain’t rocket science. You just need to understand the rules and you can learn everything else.

With Facebook, Twitter and other social media that you and candidates are using every day you will find out that social media recruiting requires a different mindset. It’s not only about sharing link on Facebook or spamming on Twitter, you need to take different approach and think differently.

Why recruiting is more like marketing?

Recruiting was always about selling, if you are working as an agency recruiter, you are selling your client, the role and the opportunity. If you are company recruiter, you are selling your company, the career future. But the agency recruiters are not disclosing any company names or information about products, so their’s job to attract candidate is much harder.

But the world is changing and just selling is not going to help you. People are just browsing over the job boards; they are overloaded by the invites from LinkedIn. The technology that we create is changing the way we work, network and communicate. And you know this, because you’re experiencing it too. People (candidates) are overloaded by information. So you will need to attract the candidates with your position and your company.

It’s time for marketing approach.


Recruitment is going through evolution. If you are working in this field more than 10 years you can see the difference between the tools that we used before and that we are using now.

But the greatest challenge has been and still is to attraction of individuals into the selection process.

In marketing, one of basic rules of marketing is that you must reach the right audience. If you are able to target specific audiences as a marketer, you can tailor message to be as relevant as possible, you can easily sell product. But as a recruiters you need to do one more step further.


Brand Marketing


Employer branding - if you are doing this wrong then you are going to have problem to attract the right people. Bad news travels fast, but trusts me; bad feedback on company travels much faster.

A company’s recruitment brand is the image of the organization in the minds of current employees. Your brand is walking out the door every evening, talking with their friends, posting information (or complaining) on Facebook, Twitter etc. Recruiters are the first people presenting the company and trust me, the candidates are not checking only your company URL, but they check the LinkedIn profile of your recruiter team and also google this person and check the FB (public profile), Twitter etc. So check your public presence and if you are company owner, director etc. check your recruitment team and maybe you will be surprised.

Stop doing the same thing as everybody else, remove the generic smiling stock photos, template website and ad the real information and real people from your company. It will help you to create the brand that will able to help you to lure candidates meeting expectations and which they are culture fit for your team. It could also help you with better quality of hires and lower your retention.

As a recruiter ask your team members, why they are working for your company, what is keeping there and you can find some interesting selling point. Your team members can help by spreading your brand message in their LinkedIn profiles’ summary, Facebook etc.

Brand your company’s culture!

Job Advertsiment 

When you are creating new ad posting, start to think like a marketer. You are selling “product” and you need to be different between the job postings. Today (9/2/2014) there are 113 postings on jobs.cz with Java Developer title. So you need to be different

What I also tried in past was create the Job add only with the title “Your next dream job could be here” and create the ad only full of “Work with Us” data. This job posting generate a lot of new profiles and our company website has four time more visitors during that month than before. So I help company branding and I got pretty impressive pool of potential candidates.

These ads will target passive candidates as they visit your employees’ profiles. These will feature their picture alongside your company logo and, if there are any live at that time, a relevant job opening.

Best advertisement I have ever saw on job boards was the Ad from company Durex, they create the Ad with Title “Looking for testers” that Ad goes viral and they attracted lots of visitors for their website. Try to be creative and try to new things, do not copy!


Market research 

• Always start with checking your competition, you will find out what they are doing correctly or what they are doing wrong. 
• Use your daily calls to ask questions, every day you are speaking with candidates and they can tell you interesting information about your company and competition 
• Add the recruiters from your direct competitors so you can check how they are selling the roles and company. 
• Always ask the candidates for a feedback after interview, you will be surprised what interesting information you can learn from this. 
• Ask candidates how they find the job opening. You can check what strategy is working for you.

SEO

The best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of Google.

SEO has become a crucial part of recruitment marketing strategy. If people are looking for Java Developer, they will go to google and type “Java Developer Prague”. Are you on the first page? No? So you are on the page 2 or 3. Well you are probably the only one who knows that you are on the page 2. Page one results enjoy a whopping 95% of all search traffic.


Referrals

One of the easiest ways to do that is through word of mouth, use the referrals also as a promotion of your company and culture.


Direct and email marketing

Recruiters in these days must now recruit constantly. So don’t forget to create the pool of candidate in your ATS. Even if they’re not the right fit for the job, you can still have that candidate’s information for when you are hiring for that next position or use them for spreading the word about your company and new jobs.

Monthly or quarterly mailing list to your candidates could do wonders.


Recruitment marketing

Recruitment marketing new field. However there are some amazing recruiters in Prague, and they see the potential in social media and they are socially aware and prepared to learn new skills that better meet client requirements and attract more candidates. That’s one of the part of theirs success!