Ever notice how the internet is getting pretty great at getting you to buy things?
Every time I have even a slight interest in a product or service, the connectedness of the modern web and the rise of programmatic, personalized email campaigns and more, have made it so that jacket, vacation or sous vide cooker just follows me around until my brain finally believes I have to have it.
Now imagine if we could use the power of this technology to tell the story of our jobs?
The reality is, regardless of the “product,” the more customization we create for the audiences we’re trying to attract, the greater chance we have of winning them over. So why not apply a well-tested consumer marketing approach to persuade our active and even passive candidates?
The only difference is we’re now asking them to join our talent network, attend a recruiting event or apply to our org rather than simply picking up that vintage T-shirt they never knew they wanted until they saw it.
At RBC, our team is leveraging the power of personalized marketing as much as we can. To do so, our Recruitment Marketing specialists take a cue from the one-to-one reach-outs that our sourcing team is doing.
We’re customizing our Recruitment Marketing campaigns to feel more like direct messages by creating personas for the talent we’re hoping to attract. We then further collaborate with the teams that are marketing products inside our lines of business to stay on top of the latest targeting trends and technologies to ensure we’re speaking with the right candidate with the right message at the right time.
Personalization is also critical to our success because our business units and their own “personalities” are so distinct.
To account for this, we must craft unique stories to get people excited about the specific opportunity offered by each.
It’s a very different experience to enter the RBC Capital Markets trading floor compared to a customer service role in a branch or an internal data analyst position versus a role on one of our agile development teams.
When you consider our Global footprint, we also need to account for the varying levels of brand awareness in our different markets. Outside of Canada, we need to spend more time talking with candidates about our culture – how our purpose, vision and values guide our business strategy – than we might in our own backyard, as just one example.
Clearly, we aren’t operating in a one-size-fits-all talent market, so we use flexible storytelling frameworks that allow us to deepen the interest of our prospects along their journeys.
So, how do we personalize our Recruitment Marketing campaigns?
To begin, we’ve set up our team structure to help us succeed.
Each of our Recruitment Marketing Business Leads is focused on a small and dedicated group of business units to create familiarity with the needs of the business and their story. Whenever possible, we partner with the Marketing, Brand, Content or Comms teams from those business units to ensure our messaging is consistent and that the stories we’re telling directly align to a candidate’s experience from the first interview to day one on the job and beyond.
To ensure our performance specialists and creatives can collaborate to deliver the right messaging and appropriately target our media, we also apply the following approach:
We conduct research into the talent market.
Leveraging our Sourcing team’s research capacity, we partner to develop insights into the talent market and begin to determine the profile of the candidate we’re interested in attracting, and where we might find them.
We hold insight sessions with employees – just like a product marketer would hold a consumer focus group.
During these sessions we’ll meet with recent hires, leaders and specialists that the business identifies as representative of the type of talent they want more of. We talk with them to find out what they appreciate about working at RBC, what drew them to the opportunity and what they love about their work, to help refine our messaging. At times we also use this as a “casting call” for employees who might be featured in original content we’d create to tell the story.
We talk with our recruiters to find out what their experience is like with a specific demographic.
What are some of the FAQs that group asks? What do people want to know before they commit to being considered for a role? This helps us to formulate our messaging so it not only resonates, but so we’re addressing actual questions that can help people self-qualify as good fits for the company, saving our recruitment team time and ensuring our candidates are more informed about their decision to apply.
Information gleaned from these activities (as well as a few “secret sauce” ingredients) helps us determine what types of media to use and the stories to tell to reach a unique individual, well-suited to our roles.
It can also provide valuable insight into where we can best reach each audiences online. For certain groups it makes sense to reach out on Instagram or Snapchat, while for others we might leverage job boards or LinkedIn, or focus on referrals or in-person events. We then finalize candidate journeys that map to campaigns designed to attract a specific type of individual to RBC.
The rigour we place around storytelling and targeting allows us to consistently focus on the right foundational skills and cultural fit for our teams.
Our team fundamentally believes that taking the time to consider how you can personalize your content strategy and leveraging technology to target your story is a game changer.
If, as Recruitment Marketers, we commit to improving our personalization practices, I can just imagine a future where we can inspire candidates to discover new, unexpected career opportunities that bring the same joy you feel when Amazon delivers that new jacket (you never knew you needed) to your front door.