At RallyFwd, we heard from outstanding Recruitment Marketing practitioners from companies of all sizes and industries.
A common theme that came up is that many of us either only have a small amount of time to dedicate to Recruitment Marketing tasks or are working as a solo Recruitment Marketer without a team.
That’s why the focus of this RallyFwd Virtual Conference was on Big Impact Ideas – so you can do more with the limited resources, time and budget at your disposal.
If you missed the event, you can now access all of the RallyFwd sessions on demand.
To get the high-level view of the top takeaways, here are the super smart and resourceful Big Impact Ideas introduced by our speakers:
Big Impact Idea #1: Tell your Employer Brand story beyond just the company level. Focus on the office location and team level too.
In the session, Culture is Local: The Next Level in Employer Brand Authenticity, Meredith Herberg-Waldron shares how localizing their content approach at Eventbrite allowed her team to reach new levels of Employer Brand authenticity – and resulted in some great ROI.
Eventbrite recently dedicated time to reworking their careers site and candidate experience to put a spotlight on their many regional locations.
Previously, their careers site only contained culture and EVP info that related directly to their headquarters in San Francisco. However, 64% of their roles were being hired in other locations.
To bring their regional offices to life, the Eventbrite team connected with local employees to uncover their stories. They provided photography briefings to office managers at each location to get snaps that spotlighted the physical spaces too: like the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the canal in their Amsterdam office.
They also created local interview guides to customize the candidate experience further. These guides outlined the best modes of transportation, how to check in upon arrival and content pieces relevant to that region.
The pages have been in place since late August now and the team is already starting to see some great outcomes. They have received 1,900 applications (up 7% from prior to launching these local pages).
At the end of the day, personalizing your candidate experience can help you to attract more careers site visitors and convert them faster into applicants. You should also consider personalizing through spotlighting regional experiences or by the teams at your organization.
To get more personalization ideas, watch Meredith’s presentation on demand.
Big Impact Idea #2: Share real photos and videos on social media to drive the biggest engagement with talent.
In the session, How We Changed Our Social Engagement Game With Photos and Videos, Eric Clemons from U.S. Cellular shared his learnings about social and video.
Eric has carefully developed and tested his content approach over the past three years. He uncovered that like with any marketing channel, social media success is determined by the quality of content you’re producing: authentic and relevant content, like real photos and videos, will help you break through all of the noise and see results from social.
When it comes to video, Eric shares that it’s one of the most engaging content forms you can use today. He cited the fact that social media posts with video generate 1200% more shares than only text and picture posts combined.
And good news: video doesn’t need to be intimidating to create, Eric assures us. While U.S. Cellular has partnered with agencies to produce professional videos, they’ve also observed the same levels of success (engagement) through creating and sharing organic DIY videos.
He also observed that images of real employees outperform any stock images or generic content. Authenticity grabs people’s attention!
Last up, because algorithms continue to change and prioritize non-business accounts and pages, Eric advises it’s worth adding some paid social ads to your content approach.
Using paid ads on platforms like Facebook results in a lot of ROI with limited spend – as you can see in these results Eric was kind enough to share:
You can listen to Eric’s session on demand for more social ideas to make a big splash for your organization in 2019.
Big Impact Idea #3: Use email marketing to re-engage previous applicants to get new hires faster and cheaper.
In the session, What Email Marketing Can Do for Recruiting Events, Derek Murphy-Johnson from KinderCare overviews how he re-engaged candidates in their talent database to boost turnout at recruiting events and help the recruiting team fill several hard-to-fill roles.
Whether in-person or virtual, it can be tough to get quality candidates to show up to your recruiting events. The team at KinderCare wasn’t seeing the kind of turnout they wanted through more traditional methods, so Derek decided to try out a drip email marketing campaign.
Using their ATS, Taleo, Derek and his HRIS partner identified ideal previous applicants to contact and re-engage. He used Canva to design visuals for the emails and MailChimp to distribute them.
He sent out a total of three emails over the span of two weeks that contained content and calls to action. The first two mails warmed up candidates and encouraged them to join the KinderCare mailing list and engage with content, and the final email encouraged candidates to attend an event.
Derek kept the copy and approach simple and straightforward and saw some great outcomes as a result. Previously, the recruiting team had attracted less than five attendees to their virtual events. After the drip email marketing campaign, they attracted 20 attendees, resulting in five hires.
Check out Derek’s video to learn more about email marketing and drip campaigns for Recruitment Marketing.
Big Impact Idea #4: When you’re ready to activate your employer value proposition (EVP), use employee stories that tell your “Why” to boost talent attraction.
In the session, Activating Your EVP With Content That Tells Your “Why”, Kelley Kaezyk from MedExpress shares how their team activated their EVP with content.
After Kelley partnered with an agency to uncover their EVP, she worked to identify three main pillars that communicated the MedExpress key selling benefits to candidates. She then used content that aligned to each pillar to raise awareness about their EVP and attract candidates.
Here’s what this looked like in action:
MedExpress’ first EVP pillar is “Revolutionizing Healthcare”. Content in this area focused on innovative projects that MedExpress employees work on and blog posts about unique career journeys.
Publishing unique for all EVP pillars and real employee stories has had a big impact for MedExpress, compared with the more generic ads and stock photos they used to rely on.
Since implementing this EVP-aligned content strategy, Kelley has recorded a 13% boost in careers site visits, 28% more time spent by candidates on their site and a 25% reduction in bounce rates. Their social engagement has also increased six-fold.
Listen to Kelley’s session if you’d like to hear more about how to activate your EVP with the right content mix.
Big Impact Idea #5: No volume of content can replace the effectiveness of Employee Generated Content (EGC). Find creative ways to get employees active on social!
In the session, How an Instagram Hashtag is Bringing the Yellowstone Employee Experience to Life, Kelly Burns from Yellowstone National Park Lodges shares the strategy she put in place to source more Employee Generated Content (EGC).
Prior to putting her EGC strategy into place, Yellowstone’s social accounts had limited employee representation. The team was mostly using stock images that weren’t bringing the employee experience to life.
To fix this, Kelly launched an Instagram hashtag contest to encourage employees to share their experiences. They chose Instagram as the platform of choice because the top demographic aligned with their primary employee base (18-24-year olds) and the platform was a great visual choice.
From there, Kelly put out digital ads for the contest on internal employee channels. The team also posted printed posters in places that employees would see on a regular basis.
The contest was intended to help curate more content and raise awareness about working at Yellowstone. And it certainly achieved that and more! The use of the #yellowstonejobs hashtag increased by 500% with the launch of this contest with 4,000 images being tagged with the hashtag.
While the EGC campaign certainly achieved the original awareness and content curation goals, it also resulted in a boost of interest and hiring outcomes! Over the campaign period, careers website traffic increased by 390%, applications increased by 100% and 30% more hires were made.
Watch Kelly’s session on demand if you’d like to learn more about launching an EGC campaign for your organization.
Big Impact Idea #6: Optimize your budget with programmatic job ads. They’ll help you spend smarter if your budget isn’t increasing, but your hiring goals are.
In the session, It’s Not Magic, It’s Programmatic Job Advertising, Brandon Luiszer from Love’s Travel Stops explains how programmatic job ads work and why you might consider using them.
Love’s Travel Stops is growing very quickly in an industry that typically has high turnover: retail and restaurant. To help meet hiring needs, their agency suggested they implement a programmatic job advertising program.
If you’re wondering what programmatic job ads are, you’re probably not alone! Brandon defines them for us as the automation of bidding, buying, placement and optimization of job ads through software. With programmatic, the top spots for your jobs are picked for you and you only pay based on the performance of your ads (typically the number of applies your job gets).
This way, jobs that are doing well are removed or the rate of sponsorship is decreased, and jobs that need more help are boosted automatically without any manual effort required. This makes programmatic a really effective way to spend your budget and see results on job ads.
Check out Brandon’s RallyFwd session on demand to learn more about programmatic job ads.
Big Impact Idea #7: Text recruiting can improve candidate response rates and applicant flow.
In the session, Why Text Recruiting Became Our Go-To Call to Action, Erica Campbell from Dierbergs Markets explains how text recruiting has helped her team to boost their year over year applicant flow by 31% for high-volume roles.
For the team at Dierbergs Markets, physical signs inside and outside of their grocery stores are a crucial part of their talent attraction strategy. However, the team hypothesized that the call to action of visiting their careers site wasn’t capturing a candidate’s interest on the spot.
It just isn’t typical candidate or consumer behavior to pause what you’re doing, enter a URL and start creating an application. You’re more likely to wait until later, and then forget or put off the task altogether.
Text recruiting was her answer to this issue. Using a short code (text TEAM to 97211) on their new ads, candidates could send a quick text on the go to find out about careers with Dierbergs from an AI recruiter they call “Ellie the Robot Recruiter”.
Ellie is programmed to answer a range of typical questions that candidates have, helping them to feel confident to submit an application to Dierbergs. Real recruiters can also pop in and take over for Ellie as needed.
Using this approach, the team at Dierbergs has seen an 80% response rate to their text reach outs, which they were not receiving with email and phone combined previously. Erica also noted a 31% year over year increase in applications!
Watch Erica’s session on demand to learn more about Dierbergs’ text recruiting strategy.
We hope this summary of top ideas from RallyFwd is helpful for you! Check out all the RallyFwd On Demand sessions if you want to dive deeper on any of these Big Impact Ideas.
If you don’t have time to watch right now, but want to hear a few more summary points, our friends at Talemetry have created a recap blog post from the event you can check out for further reading: RallyFwd Recap: How to Make a Big Impact With Small Effort in 2019.
We’d also love to hear YOUR Big Impact Ideas!
Send us a note on your Big Impact strategy and let us know what efforts resulted in great outcomes for you in 2018. If your idea is picked, we’ll include your image, name, title and Big Impact Idea in an upcoming Rally Ideabook.
