Hireology Guide
the digital Marketing playbook
DRIVE QUALITY HIRES AND BUILD YOUR BEST TEAM WITH AN EFFECTIVE RECRUITMENT MARKETING STRATEGY
INTRODUCTION
The pandemic has turned the world upside down. Over the course of the last year, every industry has seen drastic differences in their daily operations. Throughout the turmoil, though, businesses have switched gears and remained resilient, adapting to the challenges that each day brings.
One of the biggest takeaways of 2020 has been the importance of technology to run a business smoothly. Due to restrictions on gatherings and social distancing requirements, reliance on digital platforms to perform everyday tasks has increased exponentially. Companies that already had a robust technology stack had an easier transition into the new reality of digitization, while those that still relied heavily on manual, paper-based operations quickly understood the importance of investing in technology. Regardless of what the future holds, technological efficiency is here to stay.
Another element that has become all the more essential this year is the need for quality team members to ensure the success of organizations. Whether your industry has slowed hiring — like the hospitality and foodservice industries — or has seen a dramatic increase in the number of hires needed — like the home healthcare industry — hiring the right person to fill every open position is more essential than ever.
To help attract these top performers, it’s critical to ensure your recruitment marketing efforts are driving results. The hard costs like overspending on recruitment marketing channels, and hidden costs — such as wasting time on unqualified applicants, lost productivity due to open roles, or hiring the wrong employee who inevitably leaves — add up quickly in today’s competitive hiring market. Your team needs to have a strategy in place to ensure you’re attracting qualified candidates without overspending to fill your open roles.
Today, many organizations rely on job boards for a majority of their recruiting needs. While job boards are a key ingredient to any employer’s hiring efforts, it’s important to consider other channels to create a diversified sourcing strategy for your open roles.
One way to improve your recruitment marketing efforts overall is by partnering with a digital recruitment CRM platform, which offers job board capabilities in addition to integrated solutions to help you attract and hire your best team while saving time and money. A recruitment CRM platform also includes actionable insights that provide visibility into your recruitment and hiring efforts, helping you continuously improve.
In this playbook, we’ve outlined several steps your team can take to improve your recruitment marketing strategy, including:
- Taking inventory of your recruitment marketing channels
- Measuring quality and ROI by channel
- Building a strong employer brand
- Continuously improving your recruitment marketing strategy
We’ve also created a digital marketing checklist that you can use as you read through this eBook to help you keep track of where improvements need to be made. You can download it here.
In addition to highlighting the importance of a digital marketing strategy, recruiting technology can make your hiring process more streamlined and make the lives of your hiring managers a lot less stressful. Hireology recently launched a mobile app that lets your hiring team vet and move candidates through the hiring process, all from your smartphone. You can download the app directly from Google Play or the Apple App Store to start building your best team from anywhere!
Download the Digital Marketing Checklist to mark as you read.
TAKE INVENTORY OF YOUR RECRUITMENT MARKETING CHANNELS
When it comes to hiring, it’s important to have a diverse recruitment marketing strategy to increase the likelihood of attracting quality candidates. In fact, a multi-channel recruitment marketing strategy can help you drive ten times more quality applicants than job boards alone. Compelling job descriptions for open positions should be posted across many channels, rather than limiting your reach to one or two applicant channels. Additionally, mobile-friendly recruitment efforts should be of high priority to your business. Applicants should be able to browse through your open roles and submit applications from their smartphones.
TOP RECRUITMENT MARKETING CHANNELS
Compare your current recruitment marketing channels to the descriptions below, then download our checklist here and mark whether or not you’re taking advantage of each channel to maximize the impact of your recruitment efforts.
CAREER SITE
A well-built career site is often the top source for quality hires. Top candidates turn to career sites rather than simply clicking “apply” through a job board, as they’re deeply invested in their professional growth and want to better understand potential career opportunities and workplace culture. As a result, career sites are seven times more cost-effective than job boards alone when it comes to attracting top talent.
Ensure your career site showcases your company’s employer brand, workplace culture, career paths and overall benefits to excite top talent about joining your team. When you’ve got your career site built out to your liking, drive traffic from other channels by linking to your careers page in the job descriptions. This will give candidates who find your job postings on job boards a better feel for the role and your culture — and weed out candidates who might not be a fit. Make sure your career site is search- and mobile-friendly so job seekers can easily find and apply to your open roles via any device.
JOB POSTINGS AND APPLICATIONS
Your job postings should include a summary of your company, an outline of the responsibilities of the role, a brief summary of benefits offered, and an equal opportunity statement. Though you may think quirky titles and overly casual language are a good way to stand out, a study by LinkedIn found that 42% of survey participants had a negative response to casual job descriptions. And, for the sake of SEO, using proper keywords and job titles will help you get the most visibility.
Your application process should also be straightforward. A long process is an easy way to deter qualified candidates from applying to your open roles. Keep the process short and concise, and make sure your applicants are able to apply via their smartphones.
SEARCH
High unemployment rates doesn’t mean applicants are willing to settle. Top talent that’s been displaced due to COVID-19 know their worth, and today’s job seekers are doing extensive research and remain highly selective when it comes to making a career move. In fact, over 70 percent of job searches begin on Google and other search engines. If your job postings don’t appear in search results, you are less likely to get applicants.
To be successful with SEO, keep job titles and descriptions short, share what makes your team stand out, and add an equal opportunity statement. A concise job description with keywords that match the job title will help your postings get more applicant visibility.
JOB BOARDS
Job applicants who don’t have specific employers in mind tend to do broader research to find out about new job openings using job boards like LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter. With job boards, you can broadly distribute job openings to many applicants, however they might not be as engaged as other channels. For this reason, it’s beneficial to drive applicants back to your career site. Identify general hiring job boards as well as niche, industry-specific job boards that make the most sense for your business and open roles.
GOOGLE FOR JOBS
Google for Jobs, an interface to help job seekers easily find their next job, was launched a few years back. When you search for “jobs near me”, “caregiver jobs”, “service technician jobs”, or similar job-seeking queries, you’ll see in-depth results that enable job seekers to explore open roles from across the web.
To boost results and make sure your job postings are discoverable in this new feature, you should take several proactive steps. One is refreshing your jobs, as Google for Jobs will remove roles after 30 days. Also make sure your company profile, address, social links and any salary information is updated, as Google highly values accurate information about your business.
JOBS ON FACEBOOK
Facebook is known best as the world’s largest social media platform. Recently, Facebook introduced tools that allow companies to connect their Facebook business page with their applicant tracking system, allowing for job openings to be shared across the social network automatically.
By linking your hiring system to your Facebook business profile, you can reach an entirely new set of local talent organically, adding more applicants to your open jobs. And because Facebook allows job applicants to use the job history already included in their Facebook profile, it creates a simple candidate experience resulting in more job applications from interested job seekers.
REFERRALS
Top employees can be your best recruiters, as they tend to have extensive networks and can quickly spread the word of any new job openings. Referrals enable you to receive recommendations from employees you trust and can save your business time and money. To encourage referrals, consider implementing an incentive program — such as cash incentives or gift cards — and adjust the incentive based on the level of each open role. Remind employees of your referral program throughout the year to always stay top-of-mind with your top networkers.
A NETWORK OF CANDIDATES
In today’s competitive hiring market, it’s critical for your team to always be hiring. Keep roles you fill regularly open on your career site and across other channels, and build a pool of prospective candidates who might be a fit for your open roles down the road. Keep these prospective candidates engaged by sharing your open roles as they become available. By nurturing this talent pool over time, you’ll have a better applicant-to- hire conversion rate when you need to fill open roles.
Get a printable digital marketing checklist here.
MEASURE QUALITY AND ROI BY RECRUITMENT MARKETING CHANNEL
Your team already tracks which advertising channels lead to sales for your business on a daily basis. A good marketer knows how to get the most leads for the least amount of money. Your team should take the same approach to hiring.
Applicants → Quality Applicants → 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 astronomical, you should eliminate these channels from your recruitment marketing strategy — and only invest in recruitment marketing channels that drive results.
BUILD A STRONG EMPLOYER BRAND
If you invest in recruitment marketing channels but don’t have a strong employer brand, or your career site isn’t doing your employer brand justice, you’ll miss out on quality job applicants, also known as an applicant deficit.
Maintaining a strong employer brand is critical in today’s applicant-driven economy. Despite the pandemic, the unemployment rate is rebounding and filling open roles is still difficult. In order to remain competitive, you should be showcasing all that working at your company has to offer. Featuring photos or videos of your team, highlighting testimonials from current employees, and providing avenues for career development are all great ways of showing off your employer brand and making it so top applicants flock to your open positions.
Your career site offers you the opportunity to answer the “What’s in it for me?” question for job seekers, and without these elements, you might drive top talent away and face an applicant deficit.
KEY TAKEAWAYS & NEXT STEPS
Following an effective, measurable digital recruitment marketing strategy can help you build your best team while saving your business time and money.
Make sure you have a diverse recruitment marketing strategy that includes applicant channels such as a career site, search, job boards, Google for Jobs, Jobs on Facebook, referrals and a network of candidates. Regularly measure the number of quality candidates and hires by channel to continuously improve your recruitment marketing efforts.
A Strong recruitment marketing strategy is just one piece of a powerful hiring process.
Hireology helps businesses of all sizes attract top talent, hire qualified employees and integrate them quickly with our recruitment CRM platform.