Future-Proof Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy

The U.S. economy is booming and unemployment is historically low. While the strong economy benefits businesses across industries in many ways, low unemployment presents unique challenges. Qualified talent is in high demand, as job creation is growing two times faster than the available talent pool.
Organizations that prioritize the people side of the business are more likely to succeed and maintain profitability no matter the economic conditions. Whether the U.S. is facing a strong economy as it is now, or a recession as was the case from 2007 through 2009, employees are any organization’s greatest source of competitive advantage. Your employees are ultimately responsible for driving your productivity, profitability and customer experience.
Some economists are predicting the possibility of a recession by the end of 2020. If you’re already struggling to staff with quality employees given the tight labor market, now is the time to focus on your recruitment marketing strategy – so you can have the right team in place now and prepare your business for any economic shifts. Here are some tips to future-proof your recruitment marketing strategy.

Take Ownership Your Employment Brand

Beyond the low unemployment rate, the job board landscape is constantly evolving – presenting challenges to employers that rely on job boards alone to drive top talent to open roles.
One recent change to the job board landscape is that some job boards are changing their posting policies. For example, Indeed has formally blocked all staffing and staffing-like agencies from their organic feed effective January 7, 2019. Employers impacted by this policy change must pay Indeed for sponsored postings rather than appearing in the organic feed.
Another change in the job board landscape is that Google entered the job board market with Google for Jobs, which helps job seekers easily find their next opportunity. With millions of job seekers starting their job searches on Google, you want to make sure your open roles are appearing in Google for Jobs search results.
Job boards will likely always be a key piece of any successful recruitment marketing strategy. But your team has no control over any changes to the job board landscape that might impact your applicant flow – from both a quality and quantity perspective. What you do have control over is owning your employment brand to ensure your open roles reach job seekers where they’re searching.
Today’s job seekers complete extensive research before applying to open roles and if your job descriptions and career site don’t show up in search results, you’ll miss out on quality candidates. So it’s critical for your employment brand materials to be both mobile- and search- friendly.
Some tips to craft search-friendly job descriptions and career site content include: keep titles and descriptions short, share what makes your team stand out and add an equal opportunity statement.
Beyond helping your open roles appear in search results, a strong career site and employment brand can help you get top talent excited about joining your team. In fact, the most engaged job applicants apply to open roles via career sites – as they’re interested in learning more about opportunities, rather than simply clicking “apply” on a job board. And Hireology data found that a strong employment brand can boost your applicant-to-hire conversion tenfold.
Your employment brand offers your team the opportunity to answer the “What’s in it for me?” question for job seekers. On your career site, share an overview of your company’s employment brand, workplace culture, career progression and overall benefits to help top candidates see the opportunity your team offers.
By owning and elevating your employment brand, you can stay a step ahead of any changes to the job board landscape and continuously keep job seekers excited about joining your team no matter the economic conditions. Ultimately, this will enable you to build your best team, boosting productivity and profitability.

Be More Strategic About Your Recruitment Marketing Spending

Most businesses have a process in place to assess which advertising channels lead to sales on a daily basis. Your team likely has an understanding of how to get the most sales leads for the least amount of money – and you should take the same approach to hiring.
Many employers make the mistake of investing significantly in only one or two recruitment marketing channels – such as a one-off job board posting each time a role opens. In many cases, job boards drive a high quantity but low quality of applicants, and employers have limited visibility into which job boards drive the most quality applicants and eventual hires.
To measure the success of your hiring efforts, take a look at your applicant funnel – applicant, quality applicant and hire – and the cost per hire across channel and job type. If certain channels aren’t driving hires or the cost per hire is significant, you should eliminate these channels from your recruitment marketing strategy – and only invest in recruitment marketing channels that drive results.
Rather than manually measuring which applicant channels drive results, by partnering with a recruitment CRM platform like Hireology, you can have clear visibility into the success of your recruitment marketing channels. Insights, Hireology’s analytics platform, helps you measure the success of your recruitment marketing and hiring efforts. Two of Hireology’s Insights focus specifically on ROI from your recruitment marketing channels. One answers the question, “What is my best source of applicants?” while another insight measures the ROI driven by your career site.
Hireology’s recruitment marketing Insight offer centralized visibility into sponsored job board performance, including total sponsored posts purchased, dollars spent, quality applicants sourced, and average cost per quality applicant. And the career site ROI Insight includes data about career site performance, including subscription cost, number of applicants, number of quality applicants and cost per quality applicant.
Using Hireology’s Insights, you can eliminate recruitment marketing channels that don’t drive results, helping you be more strategic about your spending. And by diversifying your recruitment marketing channels – rather than buying job board postings as the need arises – you can drive more quality candidates to your open roles. Hireology data found that a multi-channel recruitment marketing strategy can drive increase your total number of quality applicants tenfold.
Hiring quality employees is highly challenging in today’s competitive market. By prioritizing your employment brand and optimizing your recruitment marketing budget, you can drive more top talent to your open roles while saving money. For additional tips on attracting qualified job seekers, read our resource, “The Hireology Employment Brand Playbook.”


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