It is surprising how effective small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are at marketing their products and services, yet they fail to apply the same techniques to market themselves as a uniquely great place to work. The talent market is simply too competitive to rely on a recruiter or a job posting to provide someone with the information they need to confidently apply. Let’s go back to basics and talk about recruitment marketing.
Recruitment marketing provides employers with an opportunity to attract a greater quality of talent to open job positions within their companies, as well as to build a large pool of qualified individuals who are willing to work for their companies when openings arise. Whether you run a large enterprise company or you’re looking to improve your hiring process for a small start-up, the benefits of implementing a recruitment marketing program are numerous.
Below, we discuss how recruitment marketing works and why it’s a more effective option for attracting the right employee.
What is Recruitment Marketing?
Recruitment marketing entails using targeted marketing tactics to attract talented people to your company. Recruitment marketers use branding, advertising, and marketing to promote the company’s corporate culture and value proposition to talent, in an attempt to attract qualified individuals to open positions and to build a bank of interested candidates to turn to when openings become available.
Why is recruitment marketing important?
According to a survey conducted by LinkedIn, 56% of professionals use social networking to look for new job opportunities. Another finding of this survey uncovered that the most effective talent branding tools were company websites, online professional networks and social media. These findings indicate that professionals aren’t searching for jobs in the same way they used to. Instead, many are job hunting in the same way that consumers search for products to purchase — they’re researching companies and employee reviews online to determine which companies they’d like to lend their talents to.
To keep up with these changes, talent acquisition teams in major cities across Canada are adopting a new set of hiring best practices. This includes using marketing strategies to situate their companies as premium employers. Using channels such as email, social media, mobile, web and text, recruiters are ableto effectively build a solid brand identity for employers and turn them into an employer of choice for candidates who are actively, or passively, searching for a new position.
3 Benefits of Recruitment Marketing👇
When you bring a professional recruitment marketer onto your team, you’ll likely find that your company’s recruiting efforts change dramatically. A recruitment marketer can help you define your ideal candidate and specifically market your company to target the individuals you want working for you most. As a result, you’ll likely find that your recruiting process is simplified dramatically and you’ll experience a variety of benefits, including the ones listed below.
1. A faster hiring process💨
Your time-to-hire is a vital metric that directly correlates with recruiting costs. More importantly, reducing time-to-hire is often critical to achieving your business objectives. In some industries, including education and hospitality, businesses were averaging more than 40 days to hire suitable candidates as of 2018. This time includes time spent advertising job openings, screening applicants, interview applicants and selecting the right person for the job.
Recruitment marketing can lead to a reduction in time-to-hire in two ways. First, by building awareness of your company as an employer, you will proactively build friends and followers who are interested in working for your company. When new opportunities arise, you’ll save plenty of time attracting applicants, because you will have already primed the pump.
Second, you will collect more educated and committed candidates. Even those that learned about you though a job posting will have access to more online resources from your company, so they will know more about your company and be committed to the interview process. This translates into fewer candidates refusing offers, selecting competing offers, or withdrawing from the process before you even get to the offer stage.
2. Better candidates for your company💪
While advertising job openings on job boards or at hiring fairs can attract a high number of candidates to open positions in your company, these methods don’t always return high-quality candidates. The best candidates for the job are generally those who have a strong desire to work for your business, that is, the candidates that consider working for your company to be their dream job.
Google is an excellent example of how a recruitment marketing campaign can attract high-quality candidates that turn into long-term hires. The company is one of the most desirable places to work in the tech industry, and it used effective recruitment marketing campaigns to place itself at the top of the industry. In fact, according to Inc.com, Google receives more than 2 million resumes per year, giving the company a large selection of highly qualified candidates to select from when positions open.
Whether your business is a small startup or a larger, established company, recruitment marketing can help you build relationships with qualified professionals who know your brand and understand what you’re about. Whether you’re ready to hire or not, these relationships are the best way to ensure you’re connected to the right people for the job whenever a position is open.
3. Decreased turnover and increase employee loyalty📈
According to a 2019 survey that was conducted by Express Employment professionals, 33% of employees said they’d been with their current employers for less than three years while only 8% said they’d been with their employers for 10 to 15 years. The results of this survey indicate that turnover across Canada is high. That begs the question: How can business leaders reduce turnover and increase employee loyalty?
Recruitment marketing is the answer to this question. By building an authentic employer brand message, you can position your company as a desirable workplace and attract candidates that are loyal to your brand and its mission. Of course, marketing is only half the battle — as an employer, it’s your responsibility to follow through on the promises you’ve made in your recruitment marketing campaigns.
The Bottom Line
Recruitment marketing is one of the best ways to ensure your team is staffed with qualified, loyal employees who fit your culture and identify with your company’s mission. Professional recruitment marketers can drive interested candidates to your website, mobile apps and other channels and help you to make meaningful connections with individuals who want to work for your company. By engaging in recruitment marketing practices, your business can reduce your time-to-hire, while finding better more committed employees to help you grow.
If you would like to know more about how to get started, get in touch with Pivot and Edge. We specialize in helping small and medium-sized businesses with recruitment marketing programs that fit with your busy team. Contact us today and we’ll provide a free assessment of your recruitment program from the perspective of a candidate and give you some tips that you can use today to improve your recruitment.
