If you work in the field of recruitment, I don’t need to tell you that recruitment marketing is today’s Big Thing. In case you’ve missed it, this blog by our friends from Beamery will help you understand why this topic is so hot at the moment.
Simply put, having a solid recruitment marketing strategy in place can help you with the following:
- Increase the number of high-quality applicants you receive;
- Lower your cost per hire;
- Reduce your time to hire;
- Support and boost the effectiveness of the rest of your recruitment efforts (e.g. sourcing, referral, recruitment agencies).
The biggest challenge for those of you out there who are relying mainly on a different approach (e.g. agencies) in their recruitment, is to know how to get started with job marketing or recruitment marketing from scratch. Right?
Here we lay out for you 4 simple steps to get you started on recruitment marketing, without the need to put a stop to the rest of your strategies.
Step 1. Apply Funnel Thinking
First and foremost, you need to start applying the so-called funnel thinking to your daily recruitment practice. Marketers are data specialists that steer their actions led to a great extent by the principles of funnel thinking. You can compare this so-called funnel with the one that a consumer goes through when making a purchase, namely the buyer journey. The candidate journey of an applicant resembles the buyer journey of a consumer in that it describes all the steps a consumer (or an applicant) takes before they purchase a product (or apply on your job). Funnel thinking will help you in gaining insights into what makes your recruitment strategy successful.
By splitting up your recruitment process in stages and measuring how many candidates go through each stage, you’ll be able to manage your recruitment efforts much more effectively. The AIDA-model can help you in defining your recruitment funnel. Learn more about this in this free white paper ‘learn how to recruit like a marketer’.
At the end of the day, what you’d like to know is how many potential candidates need to visit your career page and what percentage of them need to view your vacancy page and apply so that you know that you have received enough applications to meet your hiring objectives.
Step 2. Embrace Data
The next step is to start applying data analytics to your recruitment decision-making process. Naturally, we all look at stats like the number of candidates during the first and second round of interviews, but what many recruiters don’t realise is that one needs to start gathering data about their candidates long before they have applied.
It’s easier said than done, so we recommend you to take one step at a time. You can, for instance, start looking for data on how many candidates have visited your career site, your job description and ultimately how many of those have actually applied. This data gives you insights into what’s referred to as Conversion Ratio (How many of the page visitors actually apply). Once you combine this information with the candidate-hire ratio (the number of candidates you need before you get a hire), you’ll know how much traffic you’d need to generate on your career site, so that you secure your next hire. The next logical step is to start gathering data on where your traffic comes from, e.g. which is your best source.
Step 3. Give it a Try
By all means, be brave to experiment, but make sure that you start with a clear goal in mind. This way you can make sure that focusing on data will remain on top of your agenda. Also, run a thorough research on the best channels you can use for targeting the right talent. Not sure how? There are tools to help you do that, but you can also use your historical data to see what had and what had not worked in the past for you. So, go ahead and give it a try with your first job campaign, measure the outcomes and determine which channels add most value (measuring number of applicants, etc.). It is important to remember that in this way your data set is getting richer by the day and that you can leverage on this information in the future.
Step 4. Dive Deeper. Repeat. Predict
Now that you’re familiar with the concepts of funnel thinking, conversion ratio and are focusing on data, you can take one step further in analysing all the data you gather. For instance, try paying close attention to the quality of sources throughout your funnel to determine which source delivers the most candidates as well as the most hires. Often it takes more advanced expertise and technology to do that, so don’t expect quick results there. Have patience and pay attention to what works best for you, so that you can leverage your experience in your future recruitment campaigns.
Now you are all set to get started with job marketing. Applying these simple techniques will allow you to gain valuable insights into your desired candidates, target them more successfully, leverage on past recruitment campaign experience and predict the success of your next campaign.
