Growing pains and unexpected stretch goals are common among growth-driven companies. Unfortunately, something that is also common is a lack of proactive personnel sourcing. Typically during the growth stage, companies find themselves scrambling to execute their master plan and that’s when clients find themselves underserved, existing employees find themselves wanting to jump ship and candidates become much harder to locate.
The key to a more comfortable growth process is an ongoing recruitment marketing strategy. What is recruitment marketing? We’re glad you asked! Recruitment marketing is essentially the tools that allows talent acquisition to run smoothly. Some elements include dedicated mobile-friendly microsite creation, the design, monitoring and networking on Social Media Career Pages, behind the scenes work on SEO, actual job postings on boards like Indeed, live career fairs, radio promotions, and the placement and analysis of digital recruitment campaigns. Honestly, it’s anything that helps drive candidates towards applying for open positions or submitting their applications for future openings so that you can hire the right people in the immediate sense and build a talent bench for later use. It sounds overwhelming, but believe us when we say an ongoing strategy is much less work and much more effective than reactive, one-off style advertising.
So how does all of this effort power your growing company? Well, there are several ways...
You’ll Interest New Employees By Promoting Existing Employee Accomplishments
We’ve written about employee brand evangelists in the past and that’s because they are essentially the best form of free advertising you can utilize. “Brand evangelists are enthusiastic promoters of your brand who want to share their positive experience. The key aspect of that kind of employee is their genuine feelings about your company and the fact that they aren’t requesting something in return.”
First and foremost, recruitment is about people. Employee brand evangelists will be able to reach passive candidates by being what they are; real. You can use their testimonies for social network posts, video interviews and much more. In fact, some of the best social media posts highlight company culture and existing employee achievements.
Once passive candidates are interested in your overall recruitment brand and company culture, it becomes much easier to drive them to a centralized system like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM), a recruitment microsite or even a live recruitment event where you can continue to grow the relationship.
You’ll Build Strong Employer/Candidate Relationships
Building relationships is a key part of recruitment marketing. Those relationships can be built through social media interaction, personal follow-ups, targeted email and radio campaigns and more. They might not necessarily amount to anything initially, but in the end they will pay you back with interest.
An established recruitment brand identity together with the idea of relationship building with candidates in all interest stages will help you cut down your time-to-hire and will net you a better Return on Investment (ROI)! Now that’s news your Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) want to hear!
*Pro-tip!: The best recruiters know that you can receive an application from the right candidate for the wrong job or the right candidate at the wrong time. Luckily, if you’ve built a relationship with them and have shown them that you are an employer of choice via highlighted recruitment branding, you will probably be able to utilize that person’s talents in the future.
You'll Make a Lasting Impression on Candidates
By building a recruitment marketing strategy and creating helpful tools like the previously items we previously mentioned, you are really cultivating a lasting recruitment brand identity and improving your image for future employees. Centering your recruitment efforts around your ideal candidate will allow you to pull in the best possible people when you are ready to hire.
Speaking of your ideal candidate, shouldn't a system be designed for them specifically? Ease of use (or lack there of) is a key element to getting the right people to actually take the leap and apply. If your application is too long-winded or the registration process for an event is too complex, you will definitely lose busy candidates. Think of this stage of the process as the time where you reaffirm your brand with supporting elements. Effectively written job descriptions designed to interest candidates (not put them to sleep), a clean career portal, information about the company and real pictures are great options to achieve that. Help candidates end their application with a smile. Applying should be easy! Trust us when we say easy application methods are worth talking to friends and colleagues about!
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The fact is recruitment marketing is essential for all businesses, but businesses that expect to grow quickly in the near future need it even more. Recruitment marketing will help cut down your overall spend, will help you show existing and potential candidates who you are and will take away the stress of last minute recruiting.
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