Blurred Lines: 5 Marketing Tactics for Recruiters

Automation. Branding. Target. Messaging. Nurturing. Social.

Do all these words sound familiar? If you’re a recruiter they probably do, but until pretty recently, these words were more familiar to the folks over in your marketing department. In fact, over the last few years, recruiters have increasingly been encouraged to take up the marketing mantle and use it within their own strategies.

The problem is, marketing is also shifting and changing, so much so that even marketers are overwhelmed. Research shows that this is because of three main reasons:

• Lack of expertise and training.
• Misaligned structures and processes.
• Ingrained legacy practices.

As the need for tech talent continues to grow, recruiters are facing the same issues, except without the basic foundation of marketing expertise, which makes the insistence from vendors, consultants and branding experts that recruiting and marketing team up, all the harder. Here are three easy ways to start shifting your team in the right direction:

Metrics as Research:

Finally, we start with something that recruiters can relate to! You may already be familiar with things like time to hire, quality of hire, candidate to hire ratio, but marketers use different metrics: time on site, optimal time of day to share messaging, length of messaging, click rate, open rate, etc. Get familiar with these terms and use them to evaluate the way in which you are communicating with candidates. For example, try using your website metrics to see how your career portal is doing (and where it might be ineffective). Using free or inexpensive tools to build landing pages for campaigns can help you alter your careers portal without having to call IT (try Strikingly and Instapage).

Employee Records as Target Profiles:

Hopefully, you know your ATS pretty well. Countless sourcing gurus have advocated sourcing from your database but there are other revolutionary secrets hiding in there. Discovering who is likely to stay and be a success within your organization can not only help with source of hire, it can assist with type of hire. Creating a target profile based on this information is an old marketing trope, and it makes perfect sense for recruiting. Not only can you search through data, you can ask your successful team members just what helped them make the switch to your company. Smart recruiters are using tools like SurveyMonkey and micropulse tools to round out target profiles by identifying employee and candidate trends and sentiment, not to mention commonalities toward which to recruit.

Job Descriptions and Messaging as Marketing Copy:

This one should be a touch familiar. Job descriptions are one of the most overlooked ways to attract people, which is a shame because it’s one of the simplest things for recruiters to change – changing your job site takes assistance from IT, starting a social recruiting program can take buy-in from marketing and legal – but changing job descriptions is usually something that recruiting can do all on its own. When talent acquisition pros start taking the time to shift their thinking from job requirements to recruitment messaging, it affects all facets of the way the open positions are promoted, online and offline. One idea: Use blog post generators, email writing workshops and headline writing tips to create more attractive and dynamic messaging.

Social Recruiting as Social Selling:

Any good marketer will tell you that the reason for social is conversation and engagement, but if your social efforts never result in a sale, you are doing it wrong. The same holds true for recruitment, if you can’t tie actual closed candidates to the medium, then it’s maybe not where you should be spending your time. Unfortunately, when recruiters started using social, it was way more difficult to track exactly which avenue was bringing candidates into the pipeline.

Candidate Experience as Marketing Automation:

Marketing automation systems have made it easier for marketers to nurture sales and business development. As technology becomes more abundant, less expensive and increasingly drag-and-drop, nurturing has become simpler and more accessible for even smaller companies. This accessibility can work in recruiters’ favor as well, allowing even the busiest recruiter to set up nurturing campaigns for candidates, track interested applicants and use simple CRM techniques to stay in touch with jobseekers on a tight schedule. For instance, tools like SharpSring, Hubspot and HatchBuck will allow you to sort applicants, set up simple or complex campaigns, and create targeted social messaging.