Recruitment Marketing should play a role in helping to ensure that your Talent Acquisition team’s recruiting events are a success.
In this post, I’ll share the approach we take at Qualtrics to boost the brand and pipeline building possibilities associated with the recruiting events our TA team attends.
First off, who should “own” events? And where does Recruitment Marketing fit in?
This one is tricky and might vary a bit at each organization, but in my opinion the actual event logistics should not be owned by Recruitment Marketing.
It should be our job as Recruitment Marketers to help though with building buzz around your company’s event participation using some of the approaches from our digital toolkits, like social media and our careers blogs.
Using our channels and content, we can reach event attendees to let them know that we’ll be attending and why it’s worth interacting with us at the event. You then have the opportunity to build up brand awareness before day one to increase the chance that the event will have the in-person ROI you’re looking for.
How do you build a Recruitment Marketing Event Plan?
A straight-forward approach to building out a Recruitment Marketing Event Plan is to create a timeline with a repeatable set of actions that you take during each stage of an event: before, during and after.
Here’s what our typical Recruitment Marketing Event Plan looks like at Qualtrics:
Here’s a bit more information about the rationale behind how we build out our plans at Qualtrics:
Before an event:
The goal is to let people know who we are and that we’ll be attending the event! We leverage the official event hashtags and push out messages about our attendance from our careers and corporate channels. We also share where people can find us at the event and pick a call to action to encourage engagement.
During an event:
A member of the Recruitment Marketing team doesn’t always need to be physically present at the event for us to participate. At Qualtrics, we stay in close contact with someone else attending and have them share photos and video snippets with us.
The goal during the event is still to let people know who we are and why they should visit our booth. There’s an added goal though of trying to engage with attendees. We monitor and check in on the event hashtag and respond to attendee tweets or other social posts where relevant.
Participating in the event over social elevates Qualtrics’ presence at the event. Rather than just being a recruiter standing behind a booth, we gain the chance to have more meaningful interactions to attract and engage attendees.
Post-event:
If the event is pretty meaningful, we do some sort of post-event wrap-up, like a blog post listing our team’s takeaways from the event. We then share the post using the event hashtag and remind people to check out our careers site for opportunities!
This is one last chance to remind people who may have crossed our path at the event to follow up and actually take action by applying or joining our talent community.
Lastly, here a few other quick Recruitment Marketing event dos and donts that I’ve picked up over time:
- Look to events outside of TA. Sometimes your marketing team might be attending or sponsoring a conference or other event where you might be able to insert a Recruitment Marketing presence and build up your employer brand! Keep your mind open and always be on the look-out for opportunities and platforms you might be able to leverage.
- Research your hashtags and double check them! This year, our TA team was attending a campus event at Chapel Hill in North Carolina. We were using the hashtag #northcarolina. However, we had to adapt our approach pretty quickly as that hashtag started trending the week of the event in association with a hurricane that was happening! It might have been seen as insensitive for us to appear as if we were using that conversation to let people know that we’re on campus and looking to hire. Instead, we just stuck to the school hashtags – #goheels!
- As with any other Recruitment Marketing program, measurement is key! Aim to track the ROI as closely as possible in terms of the number of applicants, hires and talent community joiners that emerged from a given event. You can provide this data back to the rest of the TA team to help inform their events strategy for the following year.
I hope this information and the Recruitment Marketing Event Plan example is useful! Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know what your Recruitment Marketing team is doing to elevate your events strategy next year!
