Does Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy Need Some Love?

Companies have had to make many changes in the past year, from remote working to introducing new diversity and inclusion plans. Is your talent acquisition team staying ahead of the curve or falling behind the times? If your recruitment marketing strategy could use some love, here’s some tips to help you upgrade your approach and trends to keep an eye on this year.

Remote Jobs Ads: New Rules

Since the pandemic started, we've had clients ask about how they should advertise their remote jobs. We've shared best practices for advertising remote jobs in a previous blog, but there are main questions I still frequently get: How do I prepare for the new year? If the job is remote and you want the person to live in a certain area, but it's just work from home right now, how do I advertise that? 

Indeed actually did a good job with this because they recognized that there's more than one kind of remote job. They make companies share if their job is remote right now just because of the pandemic, or if it’s remote with some work from home benefits, or if the company doesn’t care where the candidate lives. Companies had to signify either in the job description or edit the XML file -- XML is the markup language that helps structure information and uses it to transport over the internet -- and make a field that is for remote.

This made it easy for clients to tell us what kind of remote position they had in mind, which is great because in the past this was sometimes frustrating to our customers.

Focus On Diversity

I think the companies that started focusing on diversity initiatives in 2020 have to keep it up, even if their budgets get cut. A lot of companies hired diversity recruiters and diversity managers, or anything of that iteration, and think, “All right, we put a diversity officer in place, we're good, right?” But I think it's important for them to not just ‘check the box’ with diversity initiatives. 

It’s important to roll up your sleeves and get to the roots in your organization, and it's not always a recruiting problem. For example, we have a client who had plenty of diverse candidates apply for jobs and many of those candidates got submitted to the company, but they didn't make it past that step. The company found that their diversity issues were in the selection process, and a company can't just hire a diversity person and be done with Diversity and Inclusion. It has to be something your company focuses on and works towards, and you have to do this to manage your brand.

Your company's efforts in Diversity and Inclusion, whether it's in the media you create or figuring out what's happening internally, should hopefully be something that’s going to be carried over and even expanded in 2021.

“You have to get your house in order first!”

I think the candidate experience is a top priority for companies to pay attention to. Before companies even put a job on their ATS or career site, they need to look at that description and ensure they are writing the job description for a job seeker -- write for candidates, not for a computer. Don’t put your branch number in the job title or HR descriptions as the actual job post. The job title and description need to be like an advertisement to attract candidates. 

Something else that I think companies should do is have mystery shoppers, or go through their own application and see how long it takes. You pay all this money to a job site, and you might be unaware of how bad the drop off is -- people who do make it to the site but don't make it to the end of the application. Most of the time, this can be because of a really poor application. This is super important for attraction even before saying, “Where should we promote that we're hiring?” You have to get your house in order first! 

Content And Career Sites

Something I recommend is that career sites shouldn't be all text. If you’re spending money on a career site, you should be putting content out there. Also, if a company is adding videos, it isn’t wise to use the same video on every site, unless it's a short “who we are” video.

I recommend that companies should personalize their job description page based on what kind of job it is. For example, if there’s a nurse job, have a nurse talk about what it's like to work at the company. Also, employee generated content is always beneficial for job seekers to view, and they typically would rather see real people and hear what they have to say about the company and their jobs.

New Focus On Video 

I think video content isn’t popular currently because of resources and fear. It’s easier now to create employee generated content with virtual interview platforms, and these platforms don’t require many resources to create the content. Before, you would have to schedule everyone one by one to do an interview in an office space, and now employees can create videos on their own time wherever they are. So maybe there might be a fear of the unknown when trying to create content for the first time.

And then, of course, there’s still a budget issue. We pitch virtual interview platforms for companies to use, and they get very excited about it, but it’s hard to get anybody across the finish line and have the platform added to next year’s budget. The pattern I’m seeing so far is that everyone's budgets are smaller for 2021. They are bigger than 2020, but smaller than 2019 -- and this might be because of uncertainty. Most companies have not recouped to the recruitment levels pre pandemic. But I think these platforms are important because they are an easy way to put your best foot forward and make a great first impression. If you’re looking for something to help create content, and you have the room in your budget to do so, virtual interview platforms are definitely worth the investment.

If you want to learn more about leveraging videos for recruitment marketing, you can check out our in-depth guide, or you can download our webinar "How to Use Video in Recruitment: Maintaining a Human Touch in a Virtual Recruiting World" to get tips from our expert panelists.

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During the pandemic, many companies have used the time to re-evaluate and reconstruct their recruitment marketing strategies. It’s beneficial to take time to see what is working and what should be adjusted, but sometimes companies don’t know where they should start. I hope these tips will help you navigate and adjust your recruitment marketing strategy for future success!

Do you need help “getting your house in order?” Recruitics is here to help create the best recruitment marketing strategy!

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