How many digital and social strategies do you have in your Recruitment Marketing back pocket? As a practitioner, we hope you have a lot! But if you aren’t sure, we’re here to help.
Digital and social are some of the top tactics you have at your disposal to attract, engage and even retain great candidates. Incorporating these strategies and their various associated methods puts you in front of the right talent at the right time on the right channels.
To learn more about the digital and social approaches that you can incorporate into your recruitment plan, download our ideabook 9 Digital & Social Recruitment Marketing Hacks to see how leading employers are putting these strategies to the test and creating stronger connections with job seekers to turn them into applicants.
When using digital and social as part of your Recruitment Marketing plan, there are ways you can take it even further to develop a better experience for candidates and increase your chances of converting them.
Take, for example, Hilton Grand Vacations (HGV). They are a leading global vacation-ownership company and their 300,000+ Club Members worldwide have access to more than 5,500 Hilton properties as well as 4,300 timeshare exchange RCI resorts. With this high number of locations and members, the HGV recruiting team needs to ensure the company continues to appeal to job seekers and keep them coming back to explore new opportunities.
So how do they do it? One of their key strategies is personalization. HGV integrates their employer value proposition into every Recruitment Marketing touchpoint to attract right-fit talent, and then personalizes the content that a candidate sees to make the experience hyper-relevant.
Here’s how Hilton Grand Vacations’ innovative media strategy creates a personalized candidate experience that leads candidates to relevant jobs and increases the conversion rate to apply:
Creating a personalized careers site experience
As candidates browse Hilton Grand Vacations’ careers site, their interests are tracked and analyzed, from the content they browse to the jobs they view and apply for. When candidates return, their careers site experience is dynamically personalized according to the job family they showed interest in, and further personalized with the candidate’s name if they previously joined and are logged into HGV’s talent network. For example, this is the homepage of the careers site that is automatically displayed for returning marketing candidates.
Personalizing the careers site keeps candidates from having to dig around again for the right open roles.
What results has HGV seen from this improved careers site? Personalizing the content for candidates has a huge impact! HGV reports that careers site visitors who start from a personalized homepage have a 135% higher apply attempt rate, stay on the website 70% longer, visit 35% more pages and bounce 56% less than candidates starting from the default homepage.
Bring it from social to personal
Candidates will visit various employer review sites and social channels to learn about your company and culture before deciding to apply. Because HGV uses personalization technology on their careers site, they can optimize their job advertising budget and resources and maximize their social reach by publishing broadly appealing posts like the LinkedIn one below. Then, when a candidate clicks, if they already visited HGV’s careers site, their job family preference is remembered and the content is personalized to their interests. In this case, candidates are led directly to marketing career opportunities and shown related jobs, events and more.
Even if they are on social media, candidates are brought back to a personalized experience on the HGV careers site.
Clicking on the LinkedIn post above leads returning visitors to the personalized careers site experience seen here. HGV incorporates this strategy throughout all of their social channels, including Facebook, Twitter (@HGV_careers) and Instagram (@hgvcareers).
Getting candidates to come back
Retargeting is an effective component of the HGV media strategy to bring candidates back to the careers site to complete their application if they started but didn’t finish. These 3 digital ads are an example of what a candidate sees if they did not complete their application for an HGV job. The strategy of retargeting delivers banner ads to candidates when and where they are online, as candidates browse internet sites and social media. This ensures that HGV stays top of mind when candidates are in the job search process. It also allows HGV to advertise to a hyper-relevant candidate audience using their own data.
Candidates who see these types of ads might be more inclined to revisit HGV’s careers site and learn more about their opportunities.
Retargeting enables HGV to reconnect with candidates who have already interacted with the employer but did not finish the application process. For HGV, this retargeting strategy is their most successful in terms of conversions to apply.
Creating a personalized experience for candidates, whether on your careers site, social channels or in the ads they see, helps them feel like you view them as more than just another job seekers. If your company takes the time to implement personalization and retargeted ads to attract and draw talent back to your open roles, your chances of turning them into applicants and eventually employees can grow significantly.
Note: Symphony Talent is a sponsor of Rally and supports our efforts to provide educational content and events on Recruitment Marketing.