Little-to-no budget, single-digit (or person) teams and big expectations from leaders. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone; Recruitment Marketing as a field continues to gain traction among employers but the support and resources available to many of us are still nowhere near where they need to be.
Guidance around what to focus on can be thrown onto this pile as well. Our latest Rally community survey revealed that 34% of recruitment marketers work for someone who knows nothing about Recruitment Marketing and employer branding; 56% are working for someone who is learning about RM/EB at the same time they are; and only 10% are learning about RM/EB from their manager.
If you’re the first Recruitment Marketing presence at your organization, or you’re simply starting anew and want to know where to focus your efforts for the best and quickest ROI, we’re here to help with the following recommendations.
Rally note: Want to dive deeper into budgeting and planning? Check out our download our free 2022 Recruitment Marketing Planning Guide and Template.
1. Mark your Territory: Establish a way to prove your Recruitment Marketing impact from day one
Before doing anything else, given the aforementioned lack of understanding around Recruitment Marketing at the leadership level, you need a way to measure and prove your impact. After all, you can’t be recognized for your work or get the support and resources you need to do your job well when your leaders don’t know how to measure your success.
For starters, many Recruitment Marketing teams don’t have dedicated social media channels; they have to cram their content in between all other content being posted by their organization’s marketing team. This makes it hard to prove the effectiveness of your efforts alone, especially if you can’t access engagement metrics for your shared channels. You’re essentially operating in the dark!
If getting your own social media account isn’t an option, you can use a tool like Rally Inside to tag, track and measure your Recruitment Marketing content specifically. This way, you can differentiate the engagement rates between your content and the content being posted by other teams.
You can then go to leadership and say “People are really engaging with our Recruitment Marketing content, but the lack of engagement on the other teams’ content is limiting our ability to reach people… We need our own channel to do our best work” or “Look! Here’s how our Recruitment Marketing content is doing compared to last month”.
Other than seeing how your Recruitment Marketing content is performing compared to other teams’ content, you can also use Rally Inside to see what topics within your Recruitment Marketing content are driving the most Likes, comments, shares and general engagement.
Rally note: For more help proving your effectiveness beyond just social media, download our new Recruitment Marketing Measurement Kit. Use it to guide you through the process of crafting your Recruitment Marketing plan, understand which metrics are important to gauge effectiveness, document how you’ll track and measure, and set up processes for analyzing and reporting on the results.
2. Job Descriptions: Attract the right talent to apply
Regardless of your size or resources, one thing that you can do right now is to update your job descriptions. Other than your employer brand messaging, such as your “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM) information, there are certain pieces of information that candidates want to see in your descriptions, including:
- Compensation
- Job details & qualifications
- Performance goals of the role
- Company culture
- Company mission
- Career growth
- Company details
This ad for an entry-level sales role from Bankers Life checks all the boxes above and provides the perfect WIIFM information for an ambitious person considering a career in sales, including salary potential, challenging and rewarding work, independence and flexibility, training and support and opportunities for advancement.
Beyond descriptions, be scrupulous about your hiring sources; double down on the sources producing hires, ditch the ones that aren’t and repeat. Instead of keeping track of this manually, consider a programmatic advertising platform to analyze performance and adjust spending automatically, freeing you and your team up to focus on other things.
Rally note: For more help optimizing your job ads, download Appcast’s 2022 Recruitment Marketing Benchmark Report.
3. Careers Page: Convert web visitors into informed candidates to increase applicant quality
Another budget-friendly area you can improve is your careers page. For starters, review and rewrite your content to promote your EVP and answer 2 specific questions: why should candidates want to work at your organization and what is it actually like to work for you from an employee’s perspective?
Rally note: Learn everything you need to know about building an effective careers page or site by watching our webinar on demand, Careers Site Upgrade in 6 Weeks.
With your content covered, the next box you want to check is a smooth job search process. This means making sure that it’s easy for candidates to find the positions they’re interested in and that candidates are provided with clear next steps after applying (i.e. “Thanks for applying! Check your email for what to expect next”).
Other than a standard search bar, Pinterest helps job seekers find suitable roles through a guided step-by-step process.
Other than proper job tagging, another easy way to make sure candidates don’t get lost in their job search is with dynamic landing pages. With dynamic pages, for example, you can make sure that a candidate coming to your site from an engineering job ad ends up on a page with information useful specifically to engineering, such as company tech stacks, life at the company in a tech role, other related open positions and so on.
4. Core Content Assets: Build your library of content to tell your story
If you’re not already creating content that tells your authentic employee experience, now’s the time! This means articles, videos, graphics; anything that can be posted and shared across your Recruitment Marketing channels.
But it’s important to note that this doesn’t mean just asking your CEO to pen a small blurb about the benefits of working at your organization. A more effective way to attract candidates to your organization is with content about your employees, by your employees that answers your candidates’ questions.
Knowing what questions to answer will require you to understand your specific candidate personas, but to start with, here are the topics currently producing the most engagement, according to data from Rally Inside:
- Jobs at the team or job function level (instead of individual jobs)
- People (e.g. employee stories and company culture)
- Company (e.g. news, awards and partnerships)
As you create your content, be sure to constantly update your employer profiles on job boards, review sites, social media and other channels to ensure employer brand consistency for candidates researching you.
Rally note: For help sourcing and creating employee generated content that answers candidates’ questions, read our How To Guide, The Ultimate Guide to Building an Employee Stories Content Library.
5. Employer Reviews: Boost your rating to influence candidates who are already considering you
Employer review sites often get neglected in the grand scheme of Recruitment Marketing channels. If you’re not monitoring your presence on sites like Glassdoor, responding to reviews (positive and negative) and posting regular company updates, you’re allowing your employer brand to be shaped by forces outside of your control.
Positive reviews can also be a great source of content. They can be added to job descriptions, careers pages and shared across your social media channels. To ensure a more constant flow of reviews, you can even formalize a process to invite employees, new hires and candidates interviewed to contribute their reviews. This could be something as simple as an automated email sent out to new hires a week after starting asking to give you a review.
An easy format to copy when sharing reviews about your organization.
6. Employee Advocacy: Expand your digital footprint to reach new talent through your employees
There’s a large opportunity on social media that often goes untapped by employers: the personal networks of your employees, each containing hundreds, if not thousands of people. Finding a way into these untapped networks means exponentially more reach, engagement and potential hires.
Getting your employees to willingly share your content is key here, and to do that you’re going to need an employee advocacy program. Basically, you want to make it as easy as possible for employees to pull existing content from your library and share it across their networks (think “sharing with the click of a button” easy) while being clear about your guidelines of what they should and shouldn’t say.
If that sounds complicated (it’s not, we promise!), ease yourself into expanding your social media footprint by creating a #Lifeat____ hashtag for your organization. This makes it easier for you to find and reshare content being posted about your organization, for candidates to find and learn from content about life at your organization and for people to share their employee and customer experience in general.
@neelu.beauty A day in the life at Amazon Corporate HQ#amazon #dayinmylife #dayinthelife#Vlog #seattle #fyp #worklife#lifeatamazon #foryou #aesthetic #viralvideo
An Amazon employee sharing a day in her life with her followers using the #lifeatamazon.
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Regardless of your team’s size or resources, these suggestions, which are based on what we’ve seen work in our own decades-long career in Recruitment Marketing, and for our community of over 35,000 practitioners, are a great place to start for fast results.
Stay tuned for future content offering similar advice for teams in the process of growing, established teams looking to innovate and more!
