What does marketing have in common with recruitment?
Surprisingly, quite a lot.
Both share the same ultimate goal to recruit/find new employees/customers or clients.
It’s the art of getting to know what the target audience needs, then implementing a strategy that gets results as quickly as possible.
As the American-Austrian educator, Peter Drucker once said:
“The aim of marketing recruiting is to know and understand the customer candidate so well the product or service role fits him and sells itself.”
So, how can you use marketing to improve your recruitment strategy?
Here are some examples to get you started.
Build a buyer/candidate persona
In marketing, it’s pretty common practice to create a target audience persona based on the behaviours of past customers.
This can include anything from when they bought the product to how old the person is.
The point of this exercise is to remove some of the guesswork and give themselves a better idea on how to create targeted campaigns for different personas.
Well, the same principle applies when you’re searching for candidates. For example:
Posting jobs – which job board or social media platform should you use to advertise them? Who will see them?
Events – are you looking for graduates? If so, which universities specialise in your industry and are best for job fairs?
Job ad content – what sort of tone will resonate with certain target audiences? What kind of benefits and perks do the target candidates want to hear about? What will encourage them to learn more?
Once you’ve understood the role itself, you should seriously consider building a persona of the ideal candidate.
Create a lead funnel
Lead funnels are the bread and butter of any marketing team.
It’s an industry term that describes the process of filling the top of the funnel with leads, making various touch points along the way via marketing communications and then eventually turning them into qualified leads.
In layman’s terms, it’s a matter of turning marketing prospects into sales/customers:
- Awareness
- Opinion
- Consideration
- Intent
- Evaluation
- Purchase
In recruitment, the same process can be applied to attain top candidates.
At first, you start with interesting social media posts about the work culture, relevant blog content and email communications.
Or for a more direct approach, it’s a matter of calling or message a candidate directly to check what their current employment status is.
The effectiveness of the communication touch points comes down to establishing the right candidate persona.
Once you’ve done this, it will help you make your content and communication skills more relatable to the candidates.
Target top professionals with digital marketing
According to research, the highest quality candidates are usually snapped up within 10 days!
So there’s no time to stand idly by, it's time to improve your recruitment strategy stat.
Some of the most effective marketing tools used today are social media ads, email communications and SEO.
LinkedIn ads is a great place to start when it comes to using social media ads.
Their platform operates in a similar fashion to pay-per-click (PPC), allowing you to bid on certain words to ensure your advert is seen by more potential users.
Using an algorithm to study profiles and behaviours, LinkedIn will only showcase your job advert to the most relevant people.
Email communications are only going to improve your recruitment drive if you use automation.
Otherwise, you’ll have to send out personal emails to each and every individual, which isn’t very time-effective if you’re trying to recruit fast.
For basic outreach, MailChimp and Campaign Monitor are good places to start.
However, for a more advanced solution, you may want to invest in Hubspot.
The Hubspot platform allows you to track what people have been looking at, what resources they’ve downloaded and their contact information.
You can then compile smart lists to send automated emails out.
It’s a more intelligent way of finding potential candidates and gaining a better understanding of their behaviours to build a more accurate persona.
And then there’s SEO (search engine optimisation).
In today’s digital landscape, SEO is arguably one of the most important marketing elements for businesses to consider.
This could be the same in the recruitment industry too with millions of candidates searching for more information about careers and doing job searches on Google.
Using SEO tools like Google Trends and SEMRush are your best (and free) bets to learn what kind of keywords candidates are searching for.
This information will prove valuable to you when you want to post a job ad, as you can tailor the content to help rank it higher on Google.
For a deeper dive, you could even use Google Analytics on your careers page to see how candidates find your job adverts, what sort of time they arrive and how long they spend on the page itself.
This can also help build out your candidate persona even more.
Summary
So who would have known, marketing and recruitment are very similar?
Marketing can directly help to improve your recruitment strategy.
The truth is, both industries are ultimately about getting results.
A recruiter needs to find a top professional like a marketer is required to generate leads or sales.
By implementing these tools, you should be able to achieve these goals quickly – which is a necessity in marketing and recruiting.
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