…ideas from Jeffery Giesener 4 Superpower Strategies for HR Marketing – SourceMob.com – CEO
Did you know that the highest grossing action movie of all time is The Avengers, which brought together four superheroes as a single team?
Today’s top Talent Acquisition professionals recognize the importance of recruiting great teams. They also recognize that the key to capturing recruits with superpower skills is to use HR Marketing.
Four Ideas To Make Your HR Marketing Reach New Heights
1. Be Where Your Candidates Are…Know Your Stats…
You already know that top-tier candidates are more connected, engaged and empowered than ever before. What is rapidly changing, however, is that candidates also spend a large amount of time searching for jobs in social networks and on their mobile devices. So if you want them to notice your company, you have to position your HR Marketing wherever your candidates are on the web (your career portal), on Indeed.com, on mobile, and through social portals like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.
Additionally, don’t let your IT or Marketing departments tell you what your HR metrics are.
- Hook up an independent third-party analytic reporting solution to your HR web, career, social, and mobile sites.
- Make sure your analytics are reporting data in real-time.
- Dedicate HR staff – not Marketing or IT – to collect, analyze and report on the key performance indexes (KPI) of your Talent Acquisition processes.
- Continuously improve through frequent tests and retests of your HR Marketing strategy.
2. Stop Talking and Start Listening…
The best Talent Acquisition pros are amazing listeners. Top candidates today want a voice in their own recruiting. In fact, not only do they want a voice, they already have a voice that can broadcast positive and negative feedback about your HR brand. That means if you are not engaging candidates in two-way conversations on the web through social and mobile networks, they will go elsewhere (perhaps to your competition).
An example of a flaw in your HR brand: When you go to Career Fairs, can you take electronic applications from your candidates on-site? Are you are stuck taking business cards or paper resumes? If that’s the case, what do you think your candidates think about your brand?
Not being able to collect electronic resumes is simply unacceptable in 2014. You need to locate a third-party solution and allow the candidate to give you their electronic resume. You must be able to capture it in a Talent Community or place it directly in your ATS.
3. Be Part Of The Conversation…
Thanks to social and mobile, candidate and employee conversations about your jobs, your company, and your culture among your candidates and employees has exploded exponentially. Today’s Tweet or sharing of a post can easily be tomorrow’s headline.
How does your Talent Acquisition team participate in the hundreds, thousands or millions, of these conversations? My hope is that you don’t spend time talking among yourselves. Instead you should create an environment where candidates feel comfortable talking about themselves.
An example of a flawed candidate conversation procedure: Your Customer Service department goes out of its way to satisfy customers. Why should it be any different with your candidate customers? If I apply on your Career site and do not get an acknowledgment to my application or, perhaps worse, I get only a candidate auto-response, what does that say about your Candidate Service and your HR brand? You should change the terms in which you engage with your candidates. You will immediately see a better apply performance!
4. Follow Up On Your Conversations…
Two-way engagement is the key to HR Marketing. HR Marketing is not just about pushing jobs in front of your candidates. It is about using technology to enable two-way conversations with your candidates. That means using a Talent Community and a database to easily retrieve candidate applications by the specific job niche, location, keyword, or any other searchable data. Once you have found your candidate data, develop follow-up communication strategies that target candidates where they are on social and mobile.
An example of an ideal follow-up communication practice: A client who was recruiting for a PhD position in a niche R&D Pharma category was struggling to find candidates. Having the right technology solutions improved their ability to find and reengage past applicants in their Talent Community who weren’t originally hired. Once they started to use both a Talent Community solution and a follow-up communication strategy, they began to see a solid growth in Talent Community membership and hires. They also saw an immediate decline in outside recruiter payments and a significantly reduced hiring time.
Now… What’s Your Superpower Story?
I would be happy to have a phone conversation with you or an email discussion regarding your 2014 recruiting goals.
Email me at jeff@sourcemob.com or give me a ring at 612-349-2740.
Best,
Jeffery
Jeffery Giesener
Adapted from a post by Mark Bonchek and Cara France