Today, managers and executive leadership teams understand that employees are the most valuable resource within an organization. On the flip side, top-tier employees value organizations that recognize and appreciate their personalities, passions, and skillsets. The demand for A-Players has every hiring manager wondering how on earth they will fill all of their open positions, in addition to how they can get to the right talent before their competition. With the help of automated recruitment marketing campaigns, recruiters can seamlessly attract the right candidates and effectively spread the word (to the right people) about their company and job postings.
Automated recruitment marketing involves outreach across different channels to engage with ideal candidates, nurture talent pipelines, and maintain contact on a consistent basis. Recruiters can achieve this in many ways. Some include scheduling content or email campaigns, sharing career opportunities, sending newsletters, or having company hiring events. Building an automated recruitment marketing campaign is essential to developing your employer brand, getting candidates’ attention, and making sure top talent is consistently engaged. Recruitment marketing follows the basic principles of marketing. Here are four stages in the marketing recruitment funnel:
Not every candidate is actively looking for a job. Many are most likely content at their current positions, and actively sitting at their desk as they receive your first email or text. How can you get their attention? It would help to identify which platforms these candidates most active and engaged on. Which sites and social media platforms do they frequently use? What content are they most occupied with? With these things in mind, tailor-make materials and outreach initiatives to get their attention, stay in front of them, and keep them engaged.
Now that you have their attention, however, it becomes essential that you maintain interest and intrigue going forward. Automated recruitment marketing campaigns can not only help recruiters stay in front of top candidates, but also keep them connected to their company and the positions available.
Building out robust content calendars that align with your brand and candidate’s interests will enable you to stay relevant and fresh in your candidates’ minds. As a result, once the right position for that candidate opens, they will be quick to start the conversation with you.
For your ideal candidate to choose you and your open role, you must be able to act quickly and break through the noise of recruitment. For instance, most recruiters use the same cookie-cutter outreach across the same platforms. Top candidates get flooded with LinkedIn InMails, generic emails, and canned messaging. Because of this, most recruiters face difficulties getting a response from top candidates.
Being proactive with your outreach campaign can not only help you break through the noise of other recruiters, but also give candidates original and personalized outreach messaging that sticks with them. We’ve already created awareness of our roles and stirred interest for the candidate, so now is the time to take action and quickly get in front of the candidate with the right messaging on the right platform.
At this point, you have to help your ideal candidate make a decision. What differentiates you from other organizations? Why is your open position better than the next? How will you be able to help them achieve their full potential? Be specific with any open positions and professional development opportunities. Let them know what values drive your organization, and how you are making strides to ensure a great working environment. What are your terms once employed? What are the benefits? Find a sure way to be distinguished from the sea of other positions, companies, and recruitment firms out there.
From there, candidates will have a clear understanding of the role, expectations, and will have established rapport with the company right from the start – thus ensuring a successful hire.
What are your recruitment marketing goals? Are you just trying to spread the word about your position? Mostly, you want the right candidate to apply for the job or to interact with your team. It may seem simple to define, but there are many goals for a recruitment marketing campaign. Some include creating awareness, establishing a company or firm brand, driving engagement, and staying in front of your talent pipeline. All of these goals can require different strategies to fulfill, but all can be fulfilled with the help of automated marketing campaigns.
Whatever your goals may be for this campaign, above all, it is essential that they are both measurable and objective. Therefore, you can have a clear understanding of the success of your campaign and iterate accordingly to ensure optimum results.
A candidate persona is crucial for your recruitment marketing campaign. Your candidate persona must capture more than the relevant data, as it involves both soft and hard data. Because of this, it is essential to dig deep into your ideal candidate’s goals, motives, and habits. To do this, you have to create a list of things that the perfect candidate would have—the level of experience, education, current title, current salary range. This will help you get in front of candidates that fit this description and are a good fit beyond what is on paper.
Now that you understand your objective and the persona of your target candidates, it is then time to tailor your outreach to these variables.
Build automated campaigns across multiple touchpoints, but stay focused on the platforms that your target candidates are most active on. Tailor your outreach to the candidates’ interests and needs, and provide relevant insights into your organization and the role you are recruiting for. While these outreach campaigns may be automated, that does not mean that they can not be strategic, personalized, and best tailored to the individual.
Content is always king, regardless of the channel. Content promotes your brand to potential employees and the world. You must create high-quality content that makes your brand, your open position, or yourself interesting and pertinent to your target candidates.
Resources must be available to help your team come up with captivating and relevant content. A content calendar can be instrumental in helping your team publish the right content and remain consistent. Please work with your clients and hiring managers to ensure their employer brand content is of the highest quality.
Here are types of content you can use:
When it comes to your career site, keeping it short and simple is critical. Simplicity is great for your talent pool to navigate through the multitude of job openings and opportunities. Optimize your site or help your clients with their career pages and make it mobile-friendly. This way, you increase your chances of being found by the ideal candidate and making a placement.
Social media is a great tool to reach your candidate. Paid advertising is even better. Recruitment firms often spend a lot of time and money creating meaningful ad campaigns to spread the word about open positions. An excellent candidate persona is necessary to reach your perfect candidate and make investing in social media ads worth it.
Let your employees help with your recruitment marketing campaigns. What better person to sell your brand and company other than your own employee and brand champions? Please encourage them to blog about the organization, culture, engagements, or job openings. It will speak directly to the ideal candidate.
Use CTA’s to pull in your ideal candidates and generate a pool of talent for future recruitment needs. Attracting your talent pool is one thing, but managing and maintaining candidates can be a whole other ball game. It would be best to stay in touch with those you contact and source, engaging them until they apply for job openings or interact with you over Linkedin or email. You can do this by sharing relevant and useful content to their inboxes, like newsletters and relevant social media messages, and valuable thought leadership assets.
By evaluating and measuring the key metrics of your automated recruitment marketing campaigns, you can understand what has worked and what needs improvements. The best way to improve is to test, and most automated marketing campaigns enable you to gain a holistic overview of the successes and failures within. From there, your team can make adjustments, change the strategy as a whole, or keep doing what works. By paying attention to the KPIs of your campaign and iterating accordingly, you will be best set up for your campaign to succeed over time.
The good news is that today’s recruitment marketing tools are automated. Loxo has automated recruitment marketing campaign features across multiple touchpoints ranging from email, call, text, LinkedIn, and voicemail drop engagement tools. Building out automated recruitment marketing campaigns can be essential for recruiters to find and engage with top talent at a fraction of the time and resources.
For more information on how you can build your tech stack for a multi-channel approach, click here for more details about this tool.
