Recruitment Marketing 2020: Getting Back to the Basics

Seemingly every day, a new technology or trend appears as the silver bullet for candidate recruitment. With the constant struggle to find quality candidates, your staffing agency strives for any competitive advantage to fill more job orders.

That can do more harm than good.

I’m not saying to ignore the new trends (trust me – I’m as big of a believer in programmatic job advertising as you’ll find!). What I am saying is to stick to these three basics of recruitment marketing in 2020 when implementing new trends and technology.

1. Make it easy to work for you. Choose your word: “blame” or “thanks.” Amazon has changed the way we experience everything as consumers. Those changes have now made their way into talent acquisition.

Think about an experience on Amazon. It’s perfect in removing friction to complete a transaction – click once and a package arrives in two days.

What does this mean for candidate recruitment? Let’s think about the transactional experience of a job application. Does your job application meet these basics?

  • Mobile-friendly: As people spend three hours per day on their mobile device, active and passive candidates apply for jobs from their phone. Can they read your job postings without having to pinch or zoom? Can they apply on an easy-to-complete form?
  • Speed to Complete: If someone finds your job and wants to apply in the moment, capitalize on that emotion by requiring only their name, email and phone number. That’s it. (Who has their resume on their mobile device? Don’t require it!) Use the initial application as a capture form and follow up later.

The best tip for gauging your application experience? Apply for your own job. Or better yet, ask someone you trust to apply for the job and solicit their honest feedback for how it relates to their consumer experiences.

Because of the challenging candidate market and resulting application drop off, we shortened our standard application at the end of 2018. In the first six months of comparative data, application complete rates increased overall by 27%, and by 37.5% on mobile.

Make it easy for someone to apply for your jobs.

PREMIUM CONTENT:  Global Staffing Company Survey 2019: Vendors recommended by staffing executives

2. Where is your audience spending time? This basic is an offshoot of the real estate adage of “Location. Location. Location.”

It’s the same principle in 2020 that it was in 1990: Where is your audience spending time? Thirty years ago, it was in a newspaper, on the radio, or in front of the TV. People woke up in the morning and checked the classifieds. They got home from work and watched the evening news.

Today? We spend our time engaging with apps on that six-inch screen in front of our faces. We refresh social media constantly. We open text messages instantly. We tirelessly monitor email.

The medium changes. The type of content changes (a classified vs. an online video). But we still must get in front of candidates with the right content at the right time.

3. ROI – what’s the cost of a quality applicant? The importance of return on investment will never change. Business owners want to know the amount of revenue generated by their expenses.

It’s always been a challenge, but with more data easily available, it’s becoming more possible for recruitment marketers to calculate ROI.

Can you create tracking codes that appear in your applicant tracking system to show where candidates came from? For example, can you see if a candidate is applying from ZipRecruiter, Facebook, email or any other method? Then, we need to determine if they were quality applicants for your open job orders.

Now, a bonus challenge to take it to the next level. What’s the cost of a candidate you sent out? What’s the cost of a placement? How much gross margin was generated by each source?

Completed applications may cost triple from a source, but if it’s delivering six times as many placed candidates, you’ll pay for that quality every day of the week!

Stick to the Basics in 2020!

We should be trying new tactics and new technologies. However, we can’t lose sight of the basics. Chasing too many shiny objects becomes overwhelming and makes it impossible to determine if they are making a positive impact.

Follow these three basic principles to get the most out of your recruitment marketing in 2020.

Matt Lozar

Matt Lozar
Matt Lozar is social media marketing advisor at Haley Marketing Group.

Matt Lozar

Share This Post

Tweet

Recent Articles

Powered by staffingindustry.com ·