Getting buy-in for your Recruitment Marketing campaign ideas can be challenging — even for seasoned practitioners. You might be proposing a new Recruitment Marketing strategy that your company hasn’t tried before, maybe that you haven’t tried before! The secret to winning the support of talent acquisition leadership and hiring managers is in how you present your plan.
In this blog post, we’ll show you how to create and present a campaign using a professional Recruitment Marketing Campaign Template and a data-driven approach. Even if you face a few skeptics, they’ll be persuaded by the substance of your ideas, the discipline of your strategy and the analysis of your results. It won’t take long for you to earn their confidence and more budget so that you can keep bringing effective Recruitment Marketing strategies to your company.
Let’s go!
Setting and Managing Expectations
When presenting your Recruitment Marketing campaign plan to talent leaders and hiring managers, a good place to start is to set their expectations up front about the steps you will take and when results will be delivered. It demonstrates that there is a method behind your proposal, and that you are clear on what’s needed to be successful. It can also help correct a stakeholder’s notion that there’s a “quick fix” to a recruiting challenge. (If only there were!)
An effective way to set and manage expectations is using a visual timeline that walks your stakeholders through each stage required to plan and execute a Recruitment Marketing campaign. For hiring managers that are used to simply posting to job boards or traditional sourcing methods, they may not understand how a Recruitment Marketing campaign is different and why you need certain information in order to be successful. Show them a projected timeline from beginning to end, use it to explain your methodology, outline where you’ll need their input and let them know when you’ll provide them with progress updates. At the very least, seeing a timeline may help change their perception that — while you fully expect the campaign to be effective — it will take weeks or months (not days) to implement.
Aligning Business Needs to Campaign Goals
Typically, a Recruitment Marketing campaign is created to support a hiring initiative, which could be a large-scale hiring initiative like opening a new business unit or office location, or a focused hiring initiative to recruit for a hard-to-fill role or next semester’s internship program. Your stakeholders may only be thinking in terms of the number of hires that they need to make. But a successful Recruitment Marketing campaign can produce many benefits to the business, both short term and long term, and both quantitatively and qualitatively.
For example, your company may need to staff up a new customer service unit. The hiring manager needs to make 20 hires by the end of March. But you uncover that there is also a need to build a talent pipeline of qualified applicants to support rapid expansion later in the year. In addition, many of the customer service representatives at your company progress to other roles within their first year of employment, therefore it’s important to hire for potential. And finally, the campaign must attract candidates who are a culture fit and who align with the organization’s core values, diverse team and inclusive culture.
In our Recruitment Marketing Campaign Template (free download), we recommend synthesizing the top 4 business needs on one slide, followed by a numbers-based slide that states the quantifiable goals. Showing business needs aligned to campaign goals in this way communicates to your key stakeholders that you understand their talent acquisition objective, which ultimately is to fill jobs. But at the same time, you’re also conveying that your Recruitment Marketing efforts will benefit the company in other ways that should receive credit, so that the full return on investment (ROI) of your campaign can be measured.
Agreeing on a Recruitment Marketing Strategy and Budget
There are so many digital marketing strategies and tactics now available in recruiting. There’s a good chance that many of the strategies you’ll be proposing are new to how your company recruits. Heck, you may be trying out a new marketing tactic or recruiting channel! Getting buy-in from key stakeholders to use a strategy that’s unfamiliar to them isn’t easy, especially when you’re asking for budget. So when you present your campaign strategy, take the opportunity to educate talent leaders and hiring managers on the rationale for your proposal.
For example, if your company is staffing up a customer service unit and the roles will be remote for the foreseeable future, your strategy may be to attract and recruit talent from the new Work Anywhere Workforce (WAWF) while leveraging your prior investments to build social followers and a talent network. Here’s how you might present your strategy in a way that both explains the “what” and the “why”:
Campaign Strategy: A multi-channel Recruitment Marketing campaign to attract new talent using programmatic job advertising, and to convert existing talent from our social media followers and talent network.
- The customer service unit will operate virtually. Therefore, we can attract and recruit our target candidate persona from across the U.S. and Canada. This will open up the pool of qualified talent and enable us to take advantage of the new Work Anywhere Workforce trend. We will use programmatic job advertising to leverage AI technology to put our jobs in front of the right talent, at the lowest cost.
- We will leverage previous investments to build awareness of our employer brand by using sponsored social media posts to target our current followers, presenting them with relevant job ads that drive them to apply.
- We will host a virtual career event on Facebook and use targeted emails and text messaging to invite previous applicants in our ATS talent network to the event. This nearly zero-cost strategy will leverage the ongoing candidate nurture efforts we’ve been using to keep our employer brand top of mind with silver medalists.
As you take your stakeholders through the rationale of your strategy and get their input and feedback, it’s also a good idea to present recruiting KPIs (key performance indicators) for the role that you’re hiring for. For example, you should present the typical cost per click, cost per apply, cost per qualified applicant and cost per hire for advertising this role. This will help provide a reference for your budget request.
As you present the budget, show a slide that breaks out the main components of your campaign. In our example, the main tactics used will be programmatic job advertising, sponsored social media posts and a virtual event for your talent network. But don’t forget to show that a portion of the budget will be spent on creative, such as copywriting and graphics. Even more compelling is if you can show the creative that you plan to use (even if a mock-up) and what messaging you believe will resonate with your candidate personas and how this compares to what your talent competitors are doing.
Demonstrating Results and Business Outcomes
Once you’ve executed your campaign, it’s time to present your final results, key learnings and recommendations to talent leadership and hiring managers. This is an important step that is often overlooked! Remember that a powerful way to build credibility (and gain support for future campaigns) is to tell your stakeholders what you’re going to do and when, to make it happen on time and on budget, and then to show them the results that you delivered for them.
This is where you can demonstrate to your stakeholders that you’re in control of your budget and that you’re data-driven! In our Recruitment Marketing Campaign Template, the results of each strategy are presented side by side using donut charts for each key metric, so that stakeholders can easily see if that tactic met or exceeded expectations, or if the tactic under-performed.
We recommend re-using your campaign goals slide (which will be familiar to them from your initial presentation) and show the final numbers with up/down arrows to reflect the percentage difference of target versus actual results. Follow up the numbers with the narrative by explaining the key learnings from your campaign, what worked and what didn’t and your recommendations to talent leaders and to the business unit for future hiring initiatives and how you can support them going forward. Remember, not every tactic will work or will work exactly how you expected. This is the nature of good marketing — we should always be testing and optimizing and getting smarter and better!
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Congratulations for executing on your Recruitment Marketing campaign and for presenting your plan and results in a professional, data-driven way to your key stakeholders. Spending a bit of time to focus on how you’ll present your ideas will go a long way to gaining the confidence from talent leaders and hiring managers to support your next big idea and invest in new Recruitment Marketing strategies in 2021. #yougotthis
