For the second year in a row, Rally and The Muse have teamed up to share the biggest Recruitment Marketing trends from the past year.
What made our list? Here’s our top 3 Recruitment Marketing trends that are here to stay in 2019. They represent a massive shift in candidate expectations that are influencing our Recruitment Marketing plans and talent acquisition strategy.
Trend #1: Improved Communications
In 2018, many Recruitment Marketing practitioners focused on improving candidate communications at every touchpoint in the candidate journey.
Candidates often put a lot of thought and work into applying for a role with your company. You want to affirm that decision and effort by providing a positive experience where they enjoy clear communications throughout.
This type of transparent communications will keep your employer (and consumer!) brand strong with candidates so that they will do business or apply to more roles with you again in future – even if they don’t land the job this time.
A few concrete ways that practitioners improved their communications in 2018 that we observed include:
- Improving the speed of their responses to candidates through text recruiting.
- Using chatbots on the careers site to answer candidate questions 24/7.
- Sharing the different steps in your hiring process with candidates by posting on your careers site (like the example below courtesy of SeatGeek) or emailing these steps to candidates directly after they apply.
Trend #2: Better content
Content marketing has officially come to recruiting! This year, we witnessed a higher quantity of really great content. Leading TA teams are using content to communicate their Employer Brand to candidates, not just to market open jobs.
What did organizations do better when it came to content in 2018?
They became better storytellers! Employer Brand messages shouldn’t sound like they’re coming right from your marketing department.
Instead, the messages should ideally be coming from your employees themselves. Your employees are the ones experiencing and shaping your culture, and candidates will trust what they have to say.
This year, Recruitment Marketers got craftier when it came to finding ways to tell these stories. They also prioritized empowering employees to share these stories themselves first-hand through employee-generated content and social recruiting hashtags.
We saw phenomenal Instagram takeovers from companies like 84.51 (see pictures below), along with hashtag contests from organizations like Yellowstone National Park Lodges that resulted in some serious results for these organizations. Like a 100% boost in applicants, in Yellowstone’s circumstance!
Trend #3: Attracting fit
It wasn’t so long ago that we would hear Talent Acquisition teams talking about “recruiting for culture fit”. However, as an industry we’re moving towards the more concrete approach of “recruiting for values fit” instead.
What does this mean for Recruitment Marketing?
We saw savvy TA teams this year working to communicate their values upfront through the content they were producing. More companies are also explicitly stating their values early on in the process and assessing whether candidates align with what the company stands for.
In terms of content, organizations worked to inform candidates about values through employee-focused content that highlights their values in action. This might be a video or blog post that shows an employee living out the company values.
We also saw many teams showcasing their values front and center on their career pages, like with Babylon’s culture page below:
This is information that candidates want and expect today! And when employers tell an authentic story about what they value and stand for as an organization, candidates are able to better understand if they would be a long-term fit and whether they should apply.
We hope this brief overview of key trends from 2018 is helpful as you continue to plan out your approach for the upcoming year. If you’d like to dive deeper or take a look at our first few predictions for 2019, you can watch our Webinar On Demand with The Muse: 2018 Trends, 2019 Predictions in Recruitment Marketing.
