Recruitment marketing is an expanding industry as job seekers become more sophisticated and discerning in their career progress, employing industry experts or head hunters to help them forge contacts within the industry and moving away from traditional job agency recruitment processes.
But can recruiters make the leap without previous marketing training or instincts? The answer, perhaps surprisingly to some recruiters who do not realize just how much marketing they do in their daily work, is yes, a recruiter can morph into a recruitment marketer with just a few changes to their way of working.
Know the Candidate Pool
A successful modern recruiter must work more like a traditional head hunter. This includes winnowing through huge numbers of candidate details every day – more than a person could read in a week. This might sound like an impossibility, but this is where the first tool of marketing recruitment comes into play: AI software. (More about this under the next subtitle.)
Once the software has presented recruiters with a shortlist of good candidates, they can then devote much more time to each possible employee than they would previously have been able to.
Early studies (circa 2012) showed that with recruiters spending as much as 63% on the telephone during a working day, this left very little time to scan CVs – as little as five to seven seconds, during which time they would check the following six items:
- Name
- Current Employment
- Start and (possible) leave dates
- Previous Employment
- Start and finish dates
- Education
Fortunately, recruiters can now spend long hours checking out each possible candidate – estimated to be around 23 hours per candidate. This gives them more opportunity to find the right people for the position – which results in customer satisfaction and repeat business and higher profits.
Part of the process of vetting the candidates can include speaking to them at length, conducting practice interviews, assessing soft skills such as empathy, politeness and confidence as well as any hard skills (knowledge of computer packages, awareness of legal constraints within the industry and so on) and delving into their situations.
For example, if a candidate is planning a major life change within the next two years, but the company is looking for an employee in whom they can invest time and training, discovering this early in the process can save a lot of worry and stress on all parts.
Try AI Software
AI programs can winnow through lists of candidates in a few seconds. They can be set up to remove anyone without the right qualifications; they can access potentials from as wide a pool as the software is allowed to investigate. AI software can even send polite form rejections to those applicants who do not make the cut.
All the recruiter needs is press a couple of buttons, set their parameters and let the process do its work.
This frees up much more of their time for the shortlist, so they can take the time to get to know each potential candidate and then give the company their best impression of the applicants, confident that they understand each person's motivations and skillset.
Understand the Company
Marketing recruitment involves having a deep understanding of the chosen industry. Recruiters should speak to the hiring manager and analyze not only the needs of the job but also the company culture. This way they can perfect their candidate list, before sending the top picks to sit down with the hiring manager.
Change the Way of Working
The best head hunters have well-filled little black books, prodigious memories and a knack for understanding both their chosen industry and the candidates who fill the positions within it. Whenever an opening arises, they can immediately get in touch with a shortlist of five or so highly qualified candidates, letting them know about the opening, and inviting them for a chat.
This intensive networking is called inbound recruitment, as opposed to outbound recruitment in which advertisements are set adrift on jobs boards. Blanket recruitment processes – outbound processes – don’t work as well anymore, so recruiters must move towards recruitment marketing if they want to remain relevant in the field.
The benefit of inbound recruitment is that it tends to include the very best candidates in the field, those who are seldom unemployed or allowed to become bored because of their value to the company in question. Being able to tempt one of these star performers away from their present work is a real marketing coup for any recruiter to pull off.
Social Network Wisely and Well
Recruiters use social media to their advantage. Social media can be used to pique the interest of potential candidates – sending out 'teaser' tweets about dream jobs and excellent benefits can attract the attention of people who might scroll past blander job descriptions.
A recent survey by Glassdoor found that nearly 80% of candidates are attracted to change their job by posts they see on social media, which is proof positive that engaging social media posts do work..
Having social media accounts also allows recruiters to discreetly check any candidates' posts for unseemly or even illegal behaviors. This is standard operating procedure these days, and most people understand that applying for a position – even a voluntary one – will mean that their online presence will be scrutinized quite carefully.
Recruitment/ Marketing – What's the Difference?
Despite the differences in the end products, the processes of marketing and recruitment are remarkably similar. Recruiters are persuading people into a course of action that they might not otherwise take, encouraging them that the decision is the right one for them, and enjoying a commission from the successful match of an employee to client or candidate to position. Marketing follows an almost identical process.
Marketing and recruitment already go hand in hand. Learning how to actively channel existing recruitment processes into a marketing mindset to improve a recruiter's core skills is a sensible proposition and one that will serve the recruiter well in the long run. As the world of work and business transforms, recruiters should be sure that they are ready to change along with it, riding the wave of change instead of being overwhelmed by it.
