Top 10 FAQs about recruitment marketing

November 23, 2022

 

iCIMS Staff

5 min read

Recruiting used to be pretty straightforward. Advertise open positions in the right places, create a pool of candidates and bring the best ones in to interview and hire. But times have changed. Simply recruiting isn’t enough to attract candidates in a tight labor market. In today’s candidate-centric environment, talent acquisition professionals must use recruitment marketing strategies to find, attract and engage candidates for current and future positions.

1. What is recruitment marketing?

Recruitment marketing attracts and nurtures candidates to your organization by promoting your company and open roles. It’s the earliest stage of talent acquisition. As the name suggests, it uses techniques from both recruiting and marketing to find, attract, hire and onboard candidates while promoting your employer brand.

2. How do you create a recruitment marketing strategy?

TA professionals can’t afford to continue using antiquated “post and pray” methods to find candidates. Instead, you need to create a recruitment marketing strategy that generates interest in the brand. Start with knowing your company’s employer value proposition (EVP). Why should people work there? Use that answer as a centerpiece, so your marketing efforts reflect your EVP.

Next, when recruiting, go where your candidates are. Look at new ways to find and reach them, creating a pool for current and future openings. Use the power of AI to streamline and scale tasks and employ analytics to show the most effective methods.

3. What strategies work for companies on a tight budget?

Nearly every business is trying to do more with less. Even if budgets are getting tighter in an uncertain economy, companies still need to recruit – they just need to be smart about it.

One way to approach this is to supplement your job ad spend with an organic online strategy. Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) to help your career site rank high in search results. This way candidates can seek you versus you paying to find them.

While advertising open jobs can be one of the most expensive parts of recruiting, you can still incorporate it into a tight budget. Job advertising within your ATS can simplify a typically complicated process and provide the visibility recruiting teams need to fine tune their campaigns.

4. How can recruitment marketing aid DEI initiatives?

Companies with diverse teams are more creative, innovative and profitable. But creating a culture that promotes diversity, equity and inclusion isn’t always easy. One place to begin is with your recruitment marketing efforts. A robust ATS that uses applied intelligence (AI) can surface more diverse candidates by mitigating bias within your recruiting process. Marketing automation can also help develop pipelines of candidates and provide data to measure progress and identify areas of improvement.

5. How does recruitment marketing help build a better candidate pool?

Even before the Great Resignation, companies struggled to find candidates with highly in-demand skills. By thinking ahead and using recruitment marketing, you can build a pipeline of candidates with highly sought after skills so that when an opportunity arises, you’re not starting from scratch. Recruitment marketing can help you develop an effective outreach campaign to attract diverse candidates, keep in touch with strong candidates who weren’t hired, identify passive candidates and encourage employee referrals to create a strong talent pool to tap when an opportunity arises.

6. What is recruitment marketing software?

Recruitment marketing software combines recruiting and marketing activities to help organizations find and connect with candidates. This dedicated software automates and speeds processes so you can deliver consistent, clear and authentic communications throughout the candidate’s journey, with reduced effort and better results.

Recruitment marketing software also helps build a pipeline of talent and maintain an engaged network for future positions.

7. Do I need recruitment marketing software to do recruitment marketing?

Some aspects of recruitment marketing could be done manually or on spreadsheets, but if your company has more than a few employees, that process will get complicated quickly. While you may be able to track applicants through the candidate journey, it’s nearly impossible to develop tailored communications with them at each step, especially once you’re filling multiple positions. Creating the right outreach to build and nurture various talent pools, then identifying the best candidates from those pools for new jobs is overwhelming, especially as you grow. Recruitment marketing software helps automate and scale tasks and provides the data to stay on top of recruitment marketing efforts for every position, at every stage.

8. What’s the difference between point solutions and comprehensive platforms for recruitment marketing?

Point solutions work on one specific recruiting issue, such as email marketing. They can be stand-alone or purchased to work with a talent acquisition platform.

In contrast, a comprehensive platform, often called candidate relationship management software (CRM), has many solutions you need to attract and engage candidates.

In addition to email marketing, a CRM might include candidate text and video messaging, talent matching and connected career sites. These features help you stay connected with candidates from first touch to beyond onboarding.

9. What analytics can software solutions provide to help recruitment marketing efforts?

Your TA team has data. You probably have so much data from various sources it’s difficult to make accurate and timely decisions. Recruitment marketing software provides the analytics you need to know how effective your hiring sources are, the performance of pages on your career site and if your email campaigns are reaching your candidates. From the number of open positions, sources of hire, cost per hire, time to fill and other metrics, recruitment marketing software gives the metrics you need to measure the pulse of your recruiting efforts at any point.

10. What features should a recruiting marketing solution have?

Recruiting marketing software platforms can offer a variety of features, but most companies benefit from platforms that include:

1. Talent networks that let you build pools of candidates and source from that pool as needs arise
2. Applied intelligence, or AI-powered talent matching to quickly identify the best candidates based on skills data, saving recruiters valuable time
3. A career site that connects with your ATS and CRM that provides intelligent search and analytics to deliver a better recruiting marketing process
4. Email and text campaigns that allow you to keep in touch with candidates throughout the recruiting process
5. Employee-generated content with video that gives candidates an up close and personal introduction and welcome to the organization. This is especially useful when hiring employees not working in the office.

Recruitment marketing is a core competency of talent acquisition. The integration of recruiting and marketing helps you and your team accelerate your efforts and reap the rewards of better, faster hiring.

Want to amplify your sourcing and engagement efforts? Learn more about our award-winning marketing automation.