Today I have some big news to share, and I won’t keep you in suspense any longer: We’ve launched a new analytics & benchmarking tool for the Rally Recruitment Marketing community! The tool is called Rally® Inside™ and it provides you with a new way to measure and show your impact on attracting talent to your company.
Rally Inside has been 4 years in the making, and YOU have been the inspiration! It’s almost 4 years to the day when I launched the Rally Recruitment Marketing community in September 2017. Thanks to you, Rally has grown into a thriving community of 30,000 practitioners(!) and the #1 provider of educational resources and events to learn Recruitment Marketing and employer branding strategies and skills.
In this blog post, I’m excited to tell you all about Rally Inside and how it will help you attract more of the right talent right now, and be more effective in recruiting candidates in today’s social and digital world.
At the end of this blog post, I’ll also tell you how you can join our waitlist for Rally Inside access and get an exclusive sneak peek of the tool at our upcoming webinar on Sept. 16.
But first, let me share why I believe we need a new way to measure Recruitment Marketing.
Analytics are personal
Now, if you’ve been in our community for more than a minute, you can’t help but notice that I send out lots of surveys and polls. That’s because I always want to know how we can support you to implement new strategies, develop your skills and overcome challenges.
Literally thousands of you have responded over the years, and one thing I can say about the Rally community is that you’re not shy about sharing your challenges! Now, can you guess the #1 challenge across our community?
If you said Analytics, you’re right! If you said lack of Resources and Support to do your job, you’re right too! Because they’re absolutely related.
Whether you have a full-time role in Recruitment Marketing and employer branding, or RM/EB is just one of your many responsibilities, time and again you say it’s a struggle to get the support you need to do your job and show the impact of the work you do.
In fact, in the survey we’re running right now — our 2021 Recruitment Marketing Job & Salary Survey (there’s still time to take it here) — we ask:
On a scale of 1 to 10, tell us how well you are able to measure the effectiveness of your Recruitment Marketing.
2021 answer: 6.0.
2019 answer: 5.9.
Two years later and barely any progress. It feels like groundhog day.
The reality is that we can’t grow as a community unless we can know our effectiveness and demonstrate it to others.
So the question I’ve been researching is, what analytics do we need to produce, so that we can show our leadership and our stakeholders that our work matters and is moving the needle?
After dozens and dozens of in-depth conversations, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need a different way to frame our value.
Reframing the value of Recruitment Marketing
There is a fundamental difference between traditional recruiting and Recruitment Marketing:
Traditional recruiting attracts talent to a job.
Recruitment Marketing attracts talent to an employer. This of course includes jobs, but as we know today, virtually no one is going to take a job at a company they know nothing about.
When we’re marketing our company’s jobs, our effectiveness is measured by how many people we can drive to apply. Some of you can even measure how many people go on to get hired. That’s thanks to the increasing maturity of recruiting systems like recruitment marketing platforms, candidate relationship management platforms, programmatic job advertising platforms and applicant tracking systems.
But when we’re marketing our company as an employer, promoting our culture and values through storytelling, measurement gets fuzzy. We need to attract both job seekers and passive talent. Especially today, when just about everyone that a company wants to hire is already employed or not actively seeking employment, so they’re not hanging out on job boards or paying attention to job ads.
Therefore, if the currency of traditional recruiting is a job description, then the currency of Recruitment Marketing is content. Lots of content. A never-ending amount of content. Through lots of social and digital channels.
And that’s why we must be recognized for our unique role in reaching and influencing talent at the top of the recruiting funnel.
Rally Inside: See your data, know your effectiveness and show your impact
Rally Inside shows you what works best to attract talent to your employer brand by analyzing candidate engagement with your Recruitment Marketing content.
The tool has a super-easy-to-use dashboard that complements your existing recruiting and marketing tools to help you track, measure, report and benchmark your strategy across all your social media and digital channels.
Where other tools focus on measuring the effectiveness of promoting job ads, Rally Inside focuses on measuring the effectiveness of promoting Recruitment Marketing content, because:
1) Content is what you’re using to attract talent to your employer brand, and
2) Engagement is the critical KPI (key performance indicator) to tell you if your content is effective.
In all of our surveys of the Rally community (see, lots of surveys!), the number one thing you’ve said that you want to learn is how to create compelling recruiting content, and number two is how to grow your social media presence.
We all know that today’s candidates are searching for information, more than simply searching for a job. And to satisfy candidates’ quest for information, everyone involved in recruiting is becoming a content creator who can tell their company’s employer brand story and attract a following.
Seriously, I mean everyone — recruiters, HR professionals, talent acquisition leaders, and of course Recruitment Marketing and employer branding practitioners.
So Rally Inside is designed to tell you if the content and messaging that you’re using to attract candidates to your employer brand is actually resonating. You’ll instantly know which content topics and EVP themes are attracting your target candidate personas across all your recruiting channels, so that you can stop wasting your valuable time and effort on content that may be falling flat, and so that you can have the insights to know if your employer brand is actually attractive.
Plus, you can benchmark your results against other employers in your industry, to inform your strategy and gain an edge. Yes, I just said benchmarks, specially for Recruitment Marketing!
Ultimately, Rally Inside enables you to demonstrate that you’re moving the needle to attract talent to your company and to your jobs by showing that you’re getting your employer brand in front of more talent who resonate with your company’s values and culture, and that you’re generating more interest in your company as a great place to work by keeping your talent audience engaged.
More interested candidates. Who else but you can make this kind of impact?
Let’s move the needle, together
I started Rally Recruitment Marketing 4 years ago because I saw that this exciting field of Recruitment Marketing was growing and I wanted to provide a platform for practitioners to share their strategies, challenges and results, while also providing you with top-notch educational resources to help you succeed. Rally began as a way to create community, and that will always be the core of who we are as an organization. Thank you all for making this community what it’s become!
Over the past 4 years, Recruitment Marketing as a strategy and a discipline has evolved. Yes, it’s tied to recruiting. And yes, it’s tied to marketing. That’s what makes your role unique! Being measured only by traditional recruiting KPIs will never tell the full picture of the value you bring in attracting and influencing people to want to work for your company. Now, let’s take the next step to reframe how we measure ourselves and show our impact as practitioners.
Here’s how you can get involved:
1) Join me for a live webinar and discussion on Sept. 16 at 2pm ET // 11am PT to learn about the new way to measure Recruitment Marketing and show your impact. Plus, I’ll be showing you a sneak peek of Rally Inside that you won’t want to miss. Register today >
2) Sign up for the Rally Inside waitlist to get first access to unlock these insights and discover your own data story that tells your leadership and your stakeholders the value that you’re building in your company. You’ll receive extended access to our Premium plan for 30 days so that you can take full advantage of all of the features that the tool has to offer. At the end of 30 days, you can decide to subscribe (pricing starts at $300 per month), or if not, you’ll be automatically switched to the Free plan which has great features like link tracking, analytics and benchmarking. Don’t worry, all of your links will work forever even on the Free plan.
I can’t wait to show Rally Inside to you!
P.S. A BIG thanks to the many practitioners who have collaborated with me over the past year to shape Rally Inside’s features and to test the tool and get it ready for the rest of you. I’m forever grateful!