In today’s tight talent market, effective recruiting requires smarter strategy than ever before. Through the right tool, you can level up your Recruitment Marketing to attract talent in creative ways, increase your careers site conversion rate and better engage candidates in your talent database. With a Recruitment Marketing Platform added to your tech stack, it can help you better attract and recruit talent and allow you to measure more effectively what’s working.
To learn proven approaches to using marketing technology to attract talent, we turned to the winners of Best Use of Recruitment Marketing Technology from the 2021 Rally Awards: Lockheed Martin, Mercy and Syneos Health. In hearing their stories, we hope you can draw inspiration for how to use Recruitment Marketing technology to increase employer brand awareness, build your talent pipeline and improve hiring at your own organization.
Meet the winners
Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin Corporation is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 110,000 people worldwide and is engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services.
As the winner of the Best Use of Recruitment Marketing Technology, Lockheed Martin (LM) leveraged their talent management platform to reinvent the engagement and recruitment of transitioning military veterans, creating the Handshake 2 Hire (H2H) campaign.
Mercy
Mercy is one of the largest Catholic health systems in the U.S. with more than 40 acute care and specialty (heart, children’s, orthopedic and rehab) hospitals, 900 physician practices and outpatient facilities, 45,000 co-workers and 2,400 Mercy Clinic physicians in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma.
Taking second place in the Best Use of Recruitment Marketing Technology category at this year’s Rally Awards, Mercy’s TA team took full advantage of their existing HR tech to overcome a sustained nursing shortage, hire for hard-to-fill positions and create a more qualified talent pipeline, increase applicant conversions and improve their candidate experience.
Syneos Health
Syneos Health is a biopharmaceutical organization with over 26,000 clinical and commercial employees supporting customers in over 110 countries.
Sharing second place with Mercy, Syneos used personalized landing pages, text-based outreach, passive candidate nurturing and constant measurement and optimization to achieve the most daily applications in the company’s history.
How Lockheed Martin increased their offer acceptance rate by 90%
The goal
Finding work in the civilian world isn’t always easy for veterans. Given that they employ a lot of military and ex-military employees, Lockheed Martin set out to make a “military skills translator” process to help veterans quickly and easily find work after transitioning out of the military.
More specifically, the purpose of this process, which they eventually named “Handshake 2 Hire” (H2H), was twofold: they wanted to provide resources to military candidates to help them successfully transition into a new career outside of the military while simultaneously enhancing the company’s hiring conversion rate.
How the goal was achieved through technology
The success of H2H was largely made possible by talent management platform Avature, which provided Lockheed Martin with timestamped candidate data that they could use to run their military candidates through a hyper-personalized, content-driven driven engagement campaign.
To enter into this campaign, candidates were driven to an Avature hosted signup page where they then provided data Lockheed Martin could use for personalization down the road. Getting candidates to this signup page was done through QR codes at career events and military transition offices pre-COVID, and shared links in online chats, webinars, social media and targeted email campaigns during COVID. Universal link tracking was used throughout to help Lockheed understand where candidates were coming from.
The landing page for H2H candidates.
Once candidates were in the campaign, they were sent personalized content suiting their unique needs, skills and availability. For example, a candidate planning to transition out of the military in a year might receive a resume writing guide, as a job post for an immediate position wouldn’t be nearly as helpful. Knowing when candidates were planning to transition also supported talent availability planning to align with demand planning.
This level of personalization even extended into the hiring managers that candidates were matched with. Compatibility was established by having managers complete a needs survey of their own through Avature, which was then cross-referenced with data provided by candidates to see which candidates suited which hiring managers.
The survey filled out by hiring managers to better establish candidate-to-role compatibility.
With supporting military candidates as one of their main focuses, Lockheed also leveraged the full content customization capabilities of Avature to create an email campaign in celebration of the famous Army vs. Navy football game that takes place every year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. All those who selected Army as their branch of service received an email with the subject line “Go Army Beat Navy” and all those who selected Navy received an email with the subject line “Go Navy Beat Army.”
The results
From both veteran support and hiring perspectives, H2H has so far proved to be a major success. Since it was launched last year, the campaign has resulted in the following:
- 77% increase in unique military candidate annual engagements (3,450 up from 1,950)
- 90% increase in offers accepted by military candidates (529 offers accepted up from 279)
- 1.96 to 1 interview-to-hire ratio (compared to the national U.S. national average of 4.8-1)
How Mercy scaled their existing tech stack to convert 69% of job seekers into applicants
The goal
Fewer fields experienced a greater need for hiring than the medical field during the pandemic. As one of the largest Catholic health systems in the U.S., Mercy experienced this firsthand and needed a way to fill their healthcare and nursing shortages as quickly as possible.
Even more than this, within the general goal of filling healthcare and nursing shortages, Mercy had the challenge of navigating multiple recruitment pain points at the same time. They were struggling with filling hard-to-fill positions, a lack of qualified talent in their pipeline, a low applicant conversion rate and an inability to communicate in real-time with candidates.
Considering the speed and efficiency they needed, relying on only their human workforce alone wasn’t an option. They also didn’t have time to research new tech, leaving them with one option: maximize the abilities of their current HR tech stack.
How the goal was achieved through technology
Through Phenom TXM, Mercy began tracking where candidates were in the application process, sharing profiles with recruiters, sending targeted email blasts to segmented populations and tracking who’s opening and clicking on specific campaigns. They also closely tracked analytics to understand the best day and time to send emails and what subject lines to use for the best possible open rates.
Being able to view where candidates were on their talent journey — and adjust content and channels accordingly — proved instrumental in driving more traffic to Mercy’s refreshed career site.
Additionally, through their Phenom University Recruiting tool, Mercy streamlined both their virtual and on-site recruiting events. They’d relied previously on collecting information from candidates manually at these events, but this was too disorganized and inefficient (and, in many places during the pandemic, no longer possible). Switching to a digital process allowed their talent scouts to conveniently access everything they needed to register and capture candidate information instantly from an app on their phones.
Plus, by tagging students from virtual or on-site career fairs in the CRM and nurturing them with targeted content, Mercy was able to actively recruit them for open positions as they approached graduation, leading to an increase in recent graduate nursing hires.
Mercy’s TA team also leveraged SMS features in their tech stack for both nurturing and promotion. For example, they sent out a text blast promoting an upcoming career fair for a hard-to-fill location. Setting up the SMS campaign took less than 5 minutes, yet it reached over 600 people and resulted in 7 new nursing hires.
The results
By digging deep into their existing HR stack, Mercy increased recruiter efficiency and proactively engaged candidates to successfully fill their healthcare and nursing shortages.
Since implementing TXM, Mercy has increased their career site traffic by 500%, garnered over 3 million job views and ran more than 160 targeted campaigns—with its top performer converting 69% of job seekers into applicants.
More than a case study for successful Recruitment Marketing tech use, Mercy serves as a greater role model for other companies looking to automate certain recruiting tasks to meet talent deficits, while also providing an exceptional candidate experience for job seekers.
How Syneos Health achieved a 10x increase in daily application rates
The goal
As a biopharmaceutical organization supporting customers in over 110 countries around the world, Syneos Health operates in an incredibly competitive hiring landscape, especially in light of the pandemic’s heightened demand for healthcare workers.
Needing to keep up with this heightened demand while maintaining a personalized candidate experience for their many different talent audiences, Syneos turned to their long-standing relationship with Recruitment Marketing tech to see what could be optimized.
How the goal was achieved through technology
Given the diversity and size of their candidate pool — with over 1.4 million candidates currently in their CRM and 40,000 added each year — Syneos knew they couldn’t simply send all applicants to the same landing page. So to create a more personalized experience, they used their Talemetry Recruitment Marketing Suite by Jobvite to segment their candidate pool into multiple personas and send them via email to landing pages catered to each one.
These pages featured employee stories and changed depending on who was visiting the site, which allowed Syneos to better support international candidates in multiple languages.
An example of the kind of employee-driven content Syneos shares on their landing pages.
Email was the main way they drove people to these personalized landing pages, but they also used text messaging as well. Knowing that candidates may not always be in front of their computer, especially Gen Z and Millennials, communicating via text allowed Syneos to get in front of candidates where they were more likely to see the messages they were sending — on their phones.
And similar to Mercy’s experience, another huge benefit to text-based hiring campaigns is how easy they are to set up. For example, through Jovite’s Intelligent Messaging feature, you can create text-based hiring campaigns as easily as email campaigns. These campaigns offer all of the same functionality, such as mass outreach and conversion tracking, as well as unique features of their own, like being able to spin-off responses into one-on-one, candidate-recruiter conversations.
Finally, to nurture their passive candidates, Syneos relied heavily on their talent network. Through the segmentation and outreach methods described above, they sent passive candidates within their talent network all kinds of helpful content from their Recruitment Marketing team. This included culture-driven content, job notifications, event notifications and links to over 50 content pages, which covered topics ranging from employee testimonials to interview preparation.
To guide all of these Recruitment Marketing efforts, as well as optimize every aspect of their recruiter ad spend — from the job sites they use to the agencies they work with to the specific messaging they use in their job descriptions — Syneos also uses data from their Recruitment Marketing suite’s built-in analytics and candidate experience surveys.
The results
Aside from helping them achieve a 10-fold increase in daily applications, technology also played a major role in improving their employer brand. Syneos won The Talent Board’s Global Candidate Experience Award multiple years running, including 2020, and was featured in Forbes 2020 List of World’s Best Employers.
Rally note: To learn more about Syneos’ use of Recruitment Marketing tech, be sure to read our full article, How Syneos Health Achieved a 10x Increase in Daily Application Rates.
The takeaway
The jury is in — regardless of your company, size, hiring needs or anything else, the right Recruitment Marketing technology can help support your recruiters, provide a better candidate experience and attract better talent as a result.
Hopefully, you can take inspiration from the award-winning examples above to start thinking about what parts of your hiring process can be improved by the right tech— and even leveraging your existing tech stack!
To learn more about why technology is the top priority for Recruitment Marketing in 2021 and beyond, be sure to read our article The #1 Priority for Recruitment Marketing in 2021.
