Is your Recruitment Marketing leading the pack or trailing behind?
In the hyper-competitive talent marketplace, your recruitment marketing has to do more than get candidates to your job listings. As employers, we must engage with job seekers and employees throughout the candidate journey to build awareness for our employer brand, persuade the right talent to apply, create a frictionless candidate experience, and build a culture that values and supports our people, customers and communities. With so many priorities, where should you focus your recruitment marketing efforts for maximum impact?
We culled the most recent employer branding and recruitment marketing research to bring you the latest intel on the most relevant areas on which to focus. Dialing up your efforts in these high-impact zones will help elevate your employer brand, set your organization apart and activate interest among candidates.
According to The 2019 Recruitment Marketing Benchmark Report, recruitment marketing leaders differentiate their practices across six core categories:
Employer Branding: Leading organizations are much more likely to share employee stories (both video and narrative) and to invest in separate career profile or hashtag on social media platforms.
Initiative Hiring: Top employers offer content on opportunities for diverse candidates, veterans and students as well as conduct recruitment events.
Content: As opposed to their peers, recruitment marketing leaders are more likely to post content beyond job openings on social, provide details on their application and hiring process and publish a blog.
Nurture: Leading employers are nearly eight times more likely to host a talent network for interested candidates with job alerts and monthly communications.
SEO: Top employers are more likely to optimize their career site for Google Jobs and to SEO-optimize their job landing pages.
Personalization: While adoption is building in this category, leading employers are more likely to incorporate a chatbot into their career site, send personalized job opportunities to candidates, distribute content based on the candidate’s job family and skills, and enable candidates to customize their talent network communication preferences.
The 2019 Fortune 500 Employer Brand Report assesses Fortune 500 employers across four categories:
Awareness and Attraction: Interestingly, recruitment marketing is the most overlooked element among those studied in this report. 73% of the Fortune 500 scored 10 or fewer points (out of 20) for this category, which includes talent community, blog, career-specific social media pages, employee testimonials and recruitment programs for veterans, university and diversity and inclusion.
Recruitment: Top employers advertise on designated job boards as well as on key social media sites. In addition, top-scoring employers have robust career websites that provide insight into the company’s culture and values alongside info on career paths, benefits and learning and development opportunities. And, leading employers incorporate AI chatbots and virtual reality games into their career site experiences.
Candidate Experience: More than ever, employers are treating candidates like customers, seeking to enhance their experience across all stages of the application, interviewing and hiring process. Key to this experience is transparency, and top employers embrace this with live Glassdoor integrations on their career sites, candidate feedback surveys and active employee referral programs.
Employee Experience: Leading employers recognize the power of external accolades to sway candidates – especially awards that are based on employee surveys, such as “Great Places to Work.” In addition, employers know that candidates seek out companies that have strong corporate social responsibility programs, and many candidates will pass on a company whose corporate values do not align with theirs. Top companies showcase their corporate values, community outreach, environmental stewardship and sustainable practices on their career sites and via social media.
How to differentiate your employer brand
- Enable tech work to for you – Incorporate technology that will add significantly to candidates’ and recruiters’ experience including optimizing job pages for Google Jobs and incorporating a live Glass door integration to your career site.
- Share the culture through storytelling – Employee testimonials, ‘day in the life’ type videos and career paths shared across your career site and social media platforms will help candidates determine if your culture is the right place for them.
- Maintain the conversation – While a candidate may not be ready today for your job opportunity, they may be perfect for another opening in six months. Keep them engaged with relevant and personalized content delivered when and how they like.