After a long hiatus due to COVID-19, RecruitCon took place in Denver, Colorado, last week, and boy was it great to be back at a live event! Our event agenda was packed with an amazing lineup of presenters, and the covered topics included sourcing, automation, diversity, college recruitment, strategy, and more. During the preconference sessions, Craig Fisher, Founder of TalentNet Media, took attendees through extensive training on recruitment marketing.
In the session “Start Your Recruitment Marketing Journey: A Comprehensive Training,” Fisher uncovered the key steps you must take when implementing a recruitment marketing strategy. He started this interactive by telling attendees that if your process is broken, none of your recruitment efforts will work, and you’ll waste time and money. For instance, not having proper applicant tracking software (ATS) impacts timely communication.
One interesting piece of advice Fisher offered during this interactive and engaging session was fix your reviews before you waste any money on advertising your job posts. He said jobseekers are notorious for going to Glassdoor to check reviews before applying to companies, and if your reviews aren’t the greatest, you’re wasting your marketing spend. Clean up your reviews and the processes that lead to these negative reviews before you waste any additional money.
Once your reviews are good to go, it’s time to start planning your recruitment marketing strategy using these key tips:
- Design sessions with the recruiting team and management to jump-start pipeline development actions for your positions.
- Audit—Perform recruitment process discovery and brand audits vs. competitors.
- Interview employees at various levels to discover the organic value of your company to employees and candidates.
- Create ideal candidate personas via empathy.
- Gather and utilize demographic and market data for hiring locations.
- Create social, digital media, and job board/review sites strategy, messaging, and templates.
- Update job descriptions.
- Develop and roll out a strategy for recruitment process improvement.
- Perform a technology audit and ATS requires creation improvement.
- Perform a job board audit and quick fixes.
- Train “brand” ambassadors.
Talent Attraction and Message Alignment
Additionally, you want to ensure that you focus on the candidate experience throughout this process. To create an authentic and attractive value prop for your company, you must interview employees. Fisher says, “Do not survey. Surveys are for suckers.” But, that’s not to say you still can’t use them.
Instead, Fisher suggests you survey past candidates to get their feedback and use that feedback to audit your candidate experience. Fisher recommends checking out winners of The Talent Board’s “The Candidate Experience Awards” to see how top brands are winning over candidates through the experiences they offer.
Give Employees a Voice
Ask employees how they feel about their jobs and how their jobs impact customers, teams, and the bottom line of the organization. All these feelings impact retention rates, he says. He also suggests asking candidates what can be done better in the recruiting process—for instance, how long did contact take after application?
Through employee and candidate interviews, you can get a sense of how good—or terrible—your hiring process truly is. Fisher suggests having your interviews transcribed and then pulling together the most common words in a word cloud to see which areas need improvement.
Technology Optimization
Another area that impacts your recruitment marketing strategy is your tech offering. Where needed, implement smart tech improvements to automate, track, or improve efficiency. Fisher says our goal is seamless attraction and hiring. And fortunately, there is a variety of inbound, outbound, and bot technology that can help streamline and speed up your hiring process.
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