Talent acquisition has come a long way in the era of recruitment marketing, and it can often feel as if the space is moving at a rapid pace.
Just take a quick look at the key trends Undercover Recruiter highlighted for 2017 and you’ll see that three of the top five include innovations such as mobile sourcing, artificial intelligence and social recruiting. Three more pieces of the marketing puzzle HR and talent acquisition professionals must now learn to incorporate into their efforts.
When an industry develops as quickly as ours has, it’s important that we revisit the basics from time to time to ensure our efforts--and more importantly, our strategies--are grounded in the most up-to-date best practices.
In this post, we’ll discuss 5 key aspects of every successful recruitment marketing strategy, revisit some blogs from our archives around similar topics and help you understand what you need to be successful in talent acquisition today.
But first, let’s start with a refresher on the basics.
What is a recruitment marketing strategy?
As we discuss in our blog, “What Is Recruitment Marketing?,” recruitment marketing is simply an advanced form of talent acquisition where marketing best practices have been co-opted to help HR and talent acquisition professionals more efficiently attract, engage and hire top talent in their spaces.
One of the most important aspects of marketing that recruitment has taken for there own is digital advertising. Job descriptions today are advertised through banner ads, in search engine results (especially job search engines), on job boards, in social media feeds, and the list goes on and on. But all of that media must be managed and it must be supported through budgets.
And that’s where the strategy comes into play.
Your recruitment marketing strategy documents your recruitment goals, but it also takes into account which sources your advertising on, what kinds of media you’re buying, what the budget is for each source, media type, or group of jobs, and under what circumstances you might change budgets by reallocating funds.
Your recruitment marketing strategy helps you set goals based on benchmarks, set roadmaps to reach those goals and, with the help of analytics, helps you identify where funds should be move around to get the greatest ROI.
5 Key Aspects of Successful Recruitment Marketing Strategies
While each recruitment marketing strategy will, and should, be customized, through our work we’ve been able to identify five things that are consistent across nearly every successful strategy:
- Deep, Source- and Job-level Analytics: As alluded to above, it’s nearly impossible to run a successful strategy without recruitment marketing analytics. This is because successful strategies have the ability to make adjustments, and analytics help identify when and where those adjustments are needed.
- Clear, Metrics-Based Goals: Success in recruitment marketing is based on goals, but you won’t be able to understand whether or not you're meeting your goals--or even on pace to hit them--unless they’re intrinsically tied to metrics.
- Understanding of Job Performance Classifications: While you can learn more about Job Performance Classifications here, the gist is pretty simple to wrap your head around. When recruiting, especially at scale, there are some jobs that will perform better than others--making some harder, and others easier, to fill. By implementing uniform classifications to categorize your jobs according to performance, you can easily identify areas where funds need to be reallocated, and where you can get that extra budget from.
- Top-Notch Job Content: Yes, money and budgets can help you rank high in search results, but conversions are an entirely different story. In order for a candidate to convert into an applicant, you’ll need good content from the job title that sparks engagement, to the job description that seals the deal.
- A Diversified Media Mix: The best recruitment marketers don’t just take advantage of one job board or one media type. Rather, they advertise their open jobs across a number of sources (such as job boards, job aggregators and other employment sites) and through a number of different mediums (such as radio ads, local TV spots and on social media). As we mentioned in our blog, “Why The Right Media Mix is Critical to Recruitment Marketing Success,” a diversified strategy can help you expand your reach, lower your CPA and help you run a more cost-efficient strategy.
Where To Get Started: Basic Recruitment Marketing Strategies for Employers, Staffing Agencies and Job Boards
Now that you understand what the foundation of your strategy should include, you’re probably wondering where to get started. To get a better idea of how your strategy should be built, take some time to revisit these blogs from our archives:
- For Employers: In our blog, “3 Data-Driven Optimizations You Can Make to be More Efficient in Talent Acquisition,” we explain how companies can better scale their recruitment marketing strategies without breaking the budget. It’s a good example of some pillars that should be considered when working on executing up a new strategy.
- For Staffing Agencies: For those in the staffing industry, strategies tend to be a bit different--as your main focus is on making placements and driving gross margin. So, if that’s your goal, you’ll need to be as efficient as possible when it comes to paid media. You can learn more about how your staffing agency can accomplish this in our post on driving gross margin by making three key PPC optimizations.
- For Job Boards: When it comes to our friends in the job board space, recruitment marketing is all about creating a better product that helps you drive traffic and retain clients. Therefore, your strategy needs to aim to accomplish these goals. In our blog on how job boards can retain clients, you’ll learn three key aspects of a strategy that will allow you to do just that.
How to Learn More About Recruitment Marketing Strategies
Recruitment marketing strategies are living, breathing plans that need to be adjusted throughout the course of your recruitment efforts. Therefore, you can’t expect to get them right the first time--especially without the help of in-depth recruitment marketing analytics.
If you’d like to learn more about building a recruitment marketing strategy, or need help improving the one you’re currently executing against, our team of experts can help.
Simply contact the Recruitics Agency today, and one of our recruitment marketing experts will be in touch with you to discuss your current needs.
