Recruitment Marketing

Posting a job on a job board is no longer an effective strategy for companies to find qualified applicants. The recruiting atmosphere is saturated with various channels and voices, so it can be difficult to stand out without a viable strategy.

Here, we’ll explore how recruitment marketing works, why it’s important, and how specialized software can help with the process.

What is recruitment marketing?

Recruitment marketing encompasses the strategies and tactics an organization uses to:

• Attract talent
• Engage talent
• Nurture talent

so that they may eventually apply for a job. Recruiters accomplish this through the generation of job postings, but also engagement on traditional marketing channels like social media, email, and published content.

Like customer-facing inbound marketing strategies, recruitment marketing involves a series of stages that exemplify a candidate’s journey before they apply. Although there are variations to how these stages are represented, they can generally be categorized as “attracting” candidates and “nurturing” candidates.

These are the stages by which a passive candidate is converted into a lead and then a viable candidate. These stages are followed by the recruitment process, which involves:

• Job application
• Selecting promising candidates
• Hiring

Why is recruitment marketing important?

Acquiring great talent gives businesses a competitive advantage in the marketplace, and it is the people within a company who drive its strategic direction in the long-term.

Unfortunately, it is becoming more difficult for companies to find qualified candidates through traditional job postings alone. This has encouraged many companies to engage job candidates the same way they engage customers: on their preferred channels with a cohesive branding and outreach strategy.

Job candidates have also become more sophisticated in their career searches. They have more information available to them than ever before, including insider reviews of a company’s culture, benefits, and day-to-day work experience. This has made candidates more discerning and selective in their job searches, making it more difficult to encourage qualified candidates to apply.

Recruitment marketing works to solve these problems through:

• Promotion
• Strategic branding
• High-touch experiences
• Real-time responses
• Easy interactions

Investing in recruitment marketing can give your company a competitive advantage and help you hire top talent faster, cutting costs associated with a long hiring process through:

Better employer branding – Recruitment marketing supports employer branding by allowing organizations to be found by both passive and active applicants, indicating that it’s time to go beyond just writing a captivating job description and posting to online job boards.

The relationship between a company and a candidate starts with a first impression. It is extremely important in this pre-applicant stage of the process that candidates start off with a good understanding of the company culture and core values of their potential employer. Applicants often evaluate organizations through company websites and if a candidate is perusing your poorly branded site, it will impact their decision of whether they want to work with your company before they search for an open role.

Essentially, this recruitment method acts as a form of inbound marketing used to entice potential applicants to visit your company career page, subsequently putting top talent directly into the hiring funnel.

Stronger candidate experience – One of the more notable things that frustrate potential candidates about job searching is clicking on an expired or dead link. Fifty-nine percent of job candidates have abandoned an online application specifically because there were issues or bugs with a company’s online career site. Providing applicants with a first-rate experience on your career portal will not only increase engagement but expand your talent pool as well.

Improved hiring process – Accelerating recruiting efforts can lead to cost efficiency and fast-tracking the hiring experience. Recruitment marketing generates a pipeline of top talent, alleviating recruiters who are stretched thin while also allowing hiring costs to be tracked through data-driven marketing.

The recruitment marketing process

Although the recruitment marketing process generally encompasses two categories, “attracting” and “nurturing,” the candidate’s journey can be broken into more stages. These can be categorized as follows:

• Awareness
• Attraction
• Interest
• Application

Some strategists even expand upon this model, including elements like “retargeting” and “direct sourcing.”

The awareness stage refers to when a candidate first becomes aware of a company and its job listing. They may have:

• Browsed an ad
• Visited the company’s website
• Visited the company’s social media page

During the attraction phase, the candidate may:

• Visit a branded career site
• View a job listing
• Follow the company’s page on social media

During the interest stage, the candidate has actively engaged with the brand, perhaps by filling out a form, clicking a link in a recruiting email, requesting more information, or asking a question.

With the right engagement, this may lead to the application phase, in which the candidate submits a formal employment application.

Tips for getting started

Recruiters don’t often receive the support or buy-in they need from their marketing department to effectively launch recruitment marketing strategies or HR recruitment procedures. By understanding what recruitment marketing is you can create a robust recruitment process. Here’s how you can gain a seat at the marketing table:

1. Establish credibility
   Put time on the calendar to meet for coffee or get lunch with individuals on your marketing team. This will give you the opportunity to learn what they are involved in already, explain exactly what the HR team does, and share that there is an exciting opportunity to partner on initiatives that will help the company grow. If it makes sense, have your team do the same. Once you’ve gained common ground or alignment, then begin to think like a true internal partnership.
2. Develop the partnership
   Discuss what it will take for your potential candidates to gain a comprehensive understanding of what your company is about. This could involve working together to create highly targeted ads that individuals can click to view relevant materials. Whatever the decided approach, be sure to have a plan in place to monitor data and analytics, an important step in all marketing strategies. Being able to report on key recruiting analytics, such as time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, and candidate quality can help you hire better and faster, too. Using a candidate applicant tracking system in conjunction with recruitment marketing software gives users access to insightful standard and customizable reports that track email campaign effectiveness and provide insight into event success.
   Remember, most marketers are professionals at connecting with people in an organic and meaningful way and helping companies get the best customers. Therefore, don’t be afraid to discuss other options for attracting the best candidates.
3. Make a business case for recruitment marketing tools
   Eighty-four percent of companies agree that recruitment marketing is a worthwhile investment, but your recruiters are only as good as the technology that allows them to do their job and compete in the war for talent.

Did you know that the average business uses 77 applications for HR and 97 percent of them are not well-integrated? Does your executive team know this?

Advocate for recruitment marketing tools to live within a single talent acquisition platform that empowers your recruiters with centralized communication, candidate lifecycle trackability, and streamlined steps in recruitment and selection, in addition to new hire policy and procedures. Investing in best-of-breed talent acquisition technology with robust recruitment marketing tools is key to success and profitability. By working closely with your marketing team, your case can be validated for such technology to improve the company’s hiring efficiency and success.

Now, let’s talk about what to look for when evaluating recruitment marketing software.

What is recruitment marketing software?

Recruitment marketing software is a software application that helps companies attract talented candidates and get them to apply for open positions. The software enables recruiters to apply marketing strategies like:

• Digital advertising
• Organic social media engagement
• Website marketing

This is generally accomplished through a user interface like a dashboard, which grants access to various marketing tools, including analytics.

Many recruitment marketing solutions integrate seamlessly with other HR software, including an ATS, an HCM, or a candidate relationship management (CRM) solution. They may also include features like text recruiting, automated workflows, and AI-enabled recruiting solutions.

Where does recruitment marketing software fit into the recruiting process?

Companies typically utilize recruitment marketing software at the top of the recruitment funnel, or at the beginning of the recruiting process. This is because the software enables them to attract candidates to apply for positions and nurture them so that they become active applicants

With the right software, the candidate can move seamlessly from passive to active status after submitting an easy-to-use application. Once they enter the applicant tracking system as an active candidate, recruiters can take steps to vet them, communicate with them, and schedule an interview.

Why is recruitment marketing software important?

Recruitment marketing software serves as a central platform for a company’s recruitment marketing efforts. Instead of disjointed systems, the right software solution can integrate an entire recruitment technology suite to allow for a unified candidate experience. Although the software has been available for over a decade, it has matured rapidly in recent years, incorporating important solutions like artificial intelligence, automation, and myriad integrations.

Furthermore, many of today’s existing recruiting systems don’t offer the capabilities inherent in recruitment marketing software. A recruitment marketing solution can help a company:

• Attract candidates through the channels they prefer
• Respond to candidates quickly
• Surface more viable candidates from existing talent pools

What to look for in recruitment marketing software

Top-of-the-line recruitment marketing software doesn’t just provide companies with a way to launch marketing campaigns. They should include a comprehensive suite of tools that attract talent with branded career sites and nurture talent through engagement on their preferred channels. It should provide candidates with a modern, personalized experience and encourage them to interact and apply with ease.

Finally, a recruitment marketing software platform should integrate with other recruiting software, such as an ATS, HCM, payroll system, and more. It’s usually best to avoid standalone solutions that don’t integrate with other technologies, as these will only add redundancies and manual tasks to the recruiting process.

iCIMS’ Recruitment Marketing

iCIMS’ Career Sites and Candidate Relationship Management recruitment marketing products are designed to get the attention of qualified candidates, engage them, and drive their interest.

iCIMS’ career site offering is powered by machine learning and optimized for Google, enabling employers to:

• Make job searching more intuitive for candidates
• Create world-class career sites that encompass their brand
• Customize landing pages to support diversity recruitment initiatives
• Create comprehensive engagement campaigns through candidates’ favorite channels

iCIMS’ candidate relationship management offering is a candidate relationship management platform that simplifies talent pool engagement. Employers can use it to:

• Automatically surface candidates from talent pools
• Launch virtual career fairs
• Engage in text recruiting, and more

Both solutions provide data and analytics tools to help employers visualize their recruitment marketing success and track ROI.