Twelve Marketing Lessons You Can Apply To Recruitment
One of the greatest assets in your business is your staff. They are the force who meet and greet customers, produce products and deliver services, and essentially help you generate revenue and profit.
But, when an employee is a poor fit for your organisation, you can experience excessive wastage, poor customer retention and lower profits. Therefore, it’s your job to attract and hire the best candidates while recruiting.
Similarly, those in marketing face a similar problem when raising awareness for their brands. They can’t just market to everyone. Marketing professionals are selective to the audience they want to communicate with and convert into customers. To this end, they’ve learnt some tough lessons which can be applied to your recruitment process.
So here are twelve marketing lessons that can be applied to your recruitment process.
1. Identify Your Key Candidate Profile
When marketing departments start a campaign, they know exactly who their target market is. They know the gender, age, profession, lifestyle and purchasing behaviour. This is because certain content will only entice a specific audience to engage with them.
This applies to your job opening. You’re only going to be looking for a certain group to apply. So, imagine the type of person you want to work in your organisation and create a profile for them. Remember you can’t discriminate based on gender, age, race or sexuality – but you can include experience, skills, qualifications and personal values.
You should also know their typical behaviours and ideal location (unless you are offering a relocation package).
2. Write Content Targeting Your Ideal Candidate
The content a management consultant reads is going to be vastly different to what a handyman or plumber might read. Both the language used, and the main message are going to be significantly different.
Ensure you understand what your target candidate is reading and match their style. This way you’ll be better at creating job advertisements that engage them and not the wrong candidate. Don’t forget to target the right keywords too.
3. Promote Your Job Opening In The Right Location
If you don’t market your products in the right locations, then you can’t expect to sell your products or services.
Just like the reading style, candidates will search for jobs based on their preferences. For instance, those looking for a part-time office job might look on notice boards, in shop windows, and in the local newspaper, or ask friends. Other professions might seek employment through specific online job boards, head-hunters, or on your website.
It’s about knowing the behaviours of your target audience and using those to determine where you should advertise your job opening.
4. Understand Your Target Candidate’s Motivation
Marketing executives have long known that money isn’t always a prime reason why people buy products or services. They know the benefits of an organisation’s behaviour can sway a customer to buy from them, even if the same product is more expensive than that provided by another.
The same can be said for your candidates. Pay might not be the only factor they consider. Perhaps they are looking for better working hours or shorter commuting distances. Identifying these motivators can help you pitch your job advertisement to match the benefits they seek.
5. Use Automation In Your Recruitment Process
Automation is an important part of any marketing process. It helps drive a customer to take specific actions in a pre-set series of communications. The biggest advantage of automation is the time it saves, giving marketers more time for analysis and perfecting their campaigns.
The same can be said in the recruitment process. The more parts of the process you can automate, such as sending out a letter acknowledging applications, rejection notifications or important documents for new hires, the less time you time you spend on recruitment and the better your process can be.
6. Use Technology
Marketing used to be very manual. People would write content and publish it and not have any technology to help them optimise marketing activities. Now there’s technology that can help them release it at certain times, analyse results, and help them optimise content based on audience interaction and behaviour.
This same technology can be added to your recruitment process to make it easier to optimise your content. For instance, you can see which job adverts are attracting a better class of candidate, or display adverts to only a select group of potential candidates based on their location or pre-set criteria.
Also, you can use technology to streamline your selection process. Your desk can be kept clear of CVs and applications, and they can be stored on an HR system that organises them based on your criteria. As mentioned here you can also make use of an hr system to embed a video into a job application to make a job vacancy really stand out.
7. Communicate With Candidates Regularly
Communication is key to converting prospects into customers. The average sale now takes more than five interactions. It might not take that many interactions to convince job seekers to apply, but they still like good communication, and they will judge your company’s culture based on those interactions.
So, when a candidate applies, send them a series of communications via email, SMS, or letter, informing them of their position within the application process until their participation is over. This regular communication can improve their perception of how professional you are.
8. Use Social Media To Promote Your Jobs
Social media has become an important part of marketing. Customers expect your brand to have a social media profile on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This is how potential employees learn about your brand, it’s values and what you represent.
Likewise, you can use your social media profiles to promote your job. In fact, 73% of millennials have found job opportunities through social media. LinkedIn is a strong potential for finding your next star employee but don’t dismiss Facebook or Twitter either.
9. The Power Of Video
Video is one of the most engaging forms of marketing and each year more money is being spent on video marketing. Audiences engage better with videos, and it helps improve reader retention on websites.
A video about your company and your available position can help you acquire a higher calibre of candidates. It helps to set more tangible expectations for your company in the audience’s mind and sets you apart from the rest of the crowd.
Videos can be uploaded to your website, YouTube, Facebook and other video sharing websites for wide exposure.
10. Testimonials
You aren’t going to say you are a bad employer, like a company wouldn’t say its products are rubbish. So what trust can candidates put into your job postings when you say you are the best company to work for? Instead, you need to persuade them using the experiences of others.
Peer reviews are very compelling for purchasers and should be the same for job seekers. You can use third-party websites like Glassdoor to promote positive stories about your workplace or collect them from your employees and use them in other marketing material.
11. Under Promise, Over Deliver
Do you know how to make your candidates happy? You need to under promise and over deliver. This is the basis of how marketers help to convert potential customers, they under promise what they will deliver and then deliver more so the customer thinks they are getting a great deal.
Likewise, you can under promise the benefits your employees will get and then when it comes to the interviews, over-deliver on their expectations and tell them about some of the other benefits they’ll receive.
12. Create A Candidate Marketing List
This is an important aspect of marketing – the email marketing list. Email marketing returns the best ROI than any other digital marketing channel.
So, if you have similar jobs that regularly appear within your business, have a database of applicants and email them to let them know when a new opening becomes available. This can sometimes speed up your recruitment process because it lessens the time to receive applications and old applicants could use their old applications immediately.
It can even save you money by not having to pay for advertising.
Conclusion
Improve your recruitment processes by looking at how marketers communicate with their prospects and convert them into customers. While they are different departments and speak to a different audience, there’s a lot your recruitment team could learn from marketers whether it’s how to write a job description to what tools are needed to manage the entire process effectively.
What could HR teach marketing? What could other departments teach HR?