Recruiting Is Marketing – 4 Lessons Your HR Team Can Learn From the Marketing Department

…HR ideas from #Jeffery Giesener – CEO – #SourceMob

Today’s companies find themselves in one of the most challenging times to build sustainable and strong organizations. Between competition for talent, it’s never been harder to land qualified niche talent. But it’s your employees that ultimately make the company, and true talent in today’s marketplace is scarce and fickle. Finding specialized talent and keeping those employees is now become a company priority, which has demanded a shift in how recruiters approach their jobs.

It used to be that changing jobs was a momentous decision that only occurred every 5-10 years, like buying a home or a new car. These days however, it’s common practice for professionals to shop for jobs on a continuous basis. So there is an ongoing battle for talent and it has become a much more competitive environment for jobs across all industries.

Much like marketers have to market constantly to find their new and existing customers, recruiters must also now recruit constantly. They now have to find new candidates to apply and leverage those who have already applied but have yet to be hired. For years, sales and marketing professionals have successfully used “the funnel approach” as a means of finding, engaging, and closing prospects. I’ve found that the most successful recruiters use many of these same tactics as they source, vet, and ultimately hire candidates.

It always helps to take a refresher course on some general best practices I believe recruiters must adopt and use to ensure your company attains and keeps top talent.

Market the Opportunity

The more you market an opening, the more — and higher-quality — candidate options you’ll ultimately have. Be proactive about filling the position: think beyond the online job board or cold calling/emailing.

Instead activate your current employees’ and company’s social networks. Make a compelling hiring video or build a unique career microsite (perhaps one for each tough to fill position) and let your candidates know why they should come to work at your company. Use social, mobile and web job distribution. The wider you cast your net, the more likely you’ll find the ideal candidate. With more options, you naturally build a spectrum of candidates and can pick and choose based on their qualifications and fit with the company. Building your talent pool is the first step toward connecting your company with top talent. The second is making sure you onboarding meets the expectation you sold to your candidate. Look at your six month exit metrics for how good of a job you are doing?

Keep Track of Your Candidates

Use a centralized database to build, manage, and mine a lasting talent pool. With an organized system to manage prospect information, you’ll know exactly how to engage candidates through social, mobile texting, career alerts, email, and targeted digital campaigns. A database with everything in one place and accessible by those who need it is the most efficient way of filtering through prospects. It gives you the perspective and efficiency to sift through large numbers of people until you’ve reached a manageable pool of candidates.

Additionally, a centralized talent pool that you own will prove to be a long-term asset towards future hiring campaigns. You’ll often find candidates who apply for a position not because of the role, but because of the company brand. Even if they’re ultimately not the right fit for the job, you can still have that candidate’s information for when you are hiring for that position. Application Tracking Solutions Companies (like SuccessFactors/IBM/Oracle/Workday/UltiPro/SilkRoad) or Talent Community solutions like CareerBuilder or TalentBin often say they have you covered in this area but do your own due diligence. Most can’t take a mobile application and then take it all through the candidate engagement of sending a post apply email campaign to those with specific skill sets. Can yours?

Stay Top of Mind

Staying relevant is a priority for marketers, and equally as important in filling your open role. Marketers use powerful digital campaigns to stay top of mind in e-commerce, and now recruiters must do the same. With a well-organized database of prospect information, for instance in your Applicant Tracking System (ATS), recruiters can execute highly specialized campaigns that target skill sets, job titles, geographical locations, or even interests and friend groups. Knowing your talent pool and strategically reaching out to them with targeted, consistent, creative and relevant information is the best way to turn a prospect into a candidate and eventually, a hire. Can you do this with your in-house systems?

Analyze, Learn, Improve, and Repeat

Successful salespeople and marketers analyze where their sales come from and how they can improve their process. Recruiters must implement the same process. Use your best employees and past hires to educate yourself on what is and is not working to strengthen your entire recruiting process. Where do most of your applications come from? How much are you spending per candidate? Are your social accounts or website driving traffic to the career page? How long is your average time-to-hire? How can you make the time frame shorter? There is always room for improvement, lessons to be learned, and inefficiencies to be weeded out. With modern software and analytics, recruiters can measure their performance and efficiency, and improve their quality of hire. What is your Return on Recruiting Investment™ (RORI) metrics? Do you know yours? Who is keeping this data? I can guarantee you that eCommerce marketers know their metrics in an instant and always have access to their data in real-time.

Attracting top talent in today’s market is more difficult than ever before, and demands a change in the way recruiters do their job. However, with a “funnel-driven” approach and the tools to find, engage, and close candidates you will be well on your way to providing your Boss the metrics you need to secure more recruiting budget to continually improve results.

But the bottom line is now is the time to launch your HR Marketing strategy… And yes – you can also do it yourself…Here’s How!

Back By Popular Demand…

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See www.SourceMob.com/Events for more details…

 

ABOUT SOURCEMOB:  We are the Leaders in Web, Social, Mobile and HR Marketing Education!        

SourceMob integrates Internet, social, talent community, HR Analytics, social listening solutions, HR Marketing Services and mobile recruiting solutions to help talent acquisition professionals recruit the very best candidates for tough-to-fill positions. SourceMob’s solutions seamlessly integrate and distribute conversations, engagement and job content, all done on autopilot, providing a job posting springboard to over 3.5 million candidate profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, plus all of the major search engines. We help you engage with your candidates and capture niche passive candidates. Our solutions also enable Mobile Quick Apply and candidate application management services to create more efficiency and lower recruiting costs. You won’t need your IT Team or HR Department to implement them. That is the beauty and ease of the SourceMob platform.

Looking forward to seeing you one of my many Educational Webinars.

Jeffery 

Jeffery Giesener

CEO/Founder

SourceMob.com

jeff@sourcemob.com

952-417-6955

Twitter: @thegies

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jefferyjeffgiesener

 

 

 

 

Post by Dan Finnigan…edited for HCM by Jeffery Giesener