Practical advice on how to build a recruitment marketing strategy
Unfortunately, many recruiters rely on templated approaches to attract candidates, and that strategy is falling flat. In this recorded webinar, Katrina Kibben of Three Ears Media and Kieran Snyder of Textio share tips on how to create a true recruitment marketing strategy.
Know your weaknesses
Today recruiters are required to be a utility player. Recruiters need to excel at hyper-technical discovery of candidates, write great emails, have sales-like pitches to convince people to come in, market their company to candidates, and more. Inevitably, a lot of people are not going to thrive at one or two of those things. By knowing your weaknesses, you can fill in the gaps. You can amplify your abilities with the right platforms. If you’re not a great writer, try using Textio. Or, if discovery is a challenge for you, utilize Hiring Solved.
Create a persona
One reason why recruitment marketing strategies fail is because unfortunately you’ve built the strategy to be all about you and your companies needs instead of the people you are trying to attract. Start by understanding who you are trying to attract by profiling the best people who currently work at your company. Take the five best sales people, the 10 best engineers, etc. and find the trends among those people through conversations and surveys. Turn these insights in to your recruitment marketing personas.
It’s not about throwing away every template, as much as creating better structures to address a broad audience. One thing Three Ears Media does is have five persona job description templates that all address different personalities. Then they run all the variations in the job post and will end up getting different types of people applying.
Don’t recycle old job posts
Many times the first thing companies do when they open up a role is look for the previous job posts, edit a few things and put it up. This will hurt your hiring. According to Katrina, one company she works with posted a job post last year and got 100 applicants, they posted the exact same job post this year and only got 31 applicants. And Textio sees is that if you’re recycling a job post word for word from one year ago, it feels a week slower today than it did a year ago.
This kind of degradation in job post performance is typical, because the language that works changes over time. You have to stay thoughtful and intentional about your language every time you communicate. One example, in 2015, engineering job posts containing artificial intelligence or AI filled nine days faster than average. But in 2017, the effect cooled, jobs with any of these phrases fill between one and two days faster than average.
Treat candidates like consumers
Most forward thinking companies recognize that reaching prospective employees is the same as reaching consumers. Johnson & Johnson is a really great example. Being mindful of their language, they increased their response rates to cold recruiting messages by 25 percent. One data point: when you close your recruiting mail with, “Hey, if this isn’t right for you, please pass it on to your networks, or send this to other colleagues you think might be interested.” That drops the response rate by about 50 percent. Because people feel like they are no longer special, they feel like you are just trying to reach a number.
Hear more tips from Katrina and Kieran in the recorded webinar above.
