The Top 7 Benefits of Recruitment Marketing
It’s safe to say that recruitment marketing is not a fad.
Not only are businesses across the globe getting huge benefits from successful recruitment marketing, but it’s contributed to significant improvements for candidates, specifically around their experience engaging with your company.
We have outlined the main reasons why recruitment marketing is such a hot topic, but here we are digging into some of the main benefits that your company can expect if you embark on a recruitment marketing strategy.
1. Strategic Alignment
Recruitment marketing helps you play the long game. There’s a big strategic component — you’re searching for candidates that could make a ‘10x’ impact on your organization, not just the ones that are immediately available. There’s an increased focus on passive candidates and success relies on carefully building personas of the kinds of people that would be a good fit for your company.
These candidates could end up being hired in the future, but equally, they might not. Either way, they should be of a sufficiently high quality that your company will benefit from building relationships with them regardless.
2. Acceleration
Talent Acquisition teams are often evaluated by a few key metrics including the most common recruiting KPI, time to hire. So it’s important to be able to fill roles fast.
Once recruitment marketing programs are set up and running efficiently, and you’ve started to build a pipeline of candidates that are a good fit for your company, you should expect to see accelerated hiring processes across the board.
For example, once you have a talent pipeline (and a process to continue adding new talent to the pipeline), your team will never have to start new searches from scratch — there will always be a pool of engaged candidates that they can contact regarding new opportunities, as a result of your recruitment marketing efforts.
3. Better Candidate Experience
The relationship between your company and a candidate doesn’t start when they apply — it begins the very first time they encounter or interact with your business. At this ‘pre-applicant’ stage, the candidate experience is incredibly important. This is the time when people are evaluating your company and this first impression will likely help them decide whether to apply or not.
Recruitment marketing gives you the ability to personalize the content and communication that people receive at this stage of the process. Every touchpoint can be customized based on who the candidate is, their level of engagement and their relationship with your organization. For companies concerned about the candidate experience, recruitment marketing is a no-brainer.
4. Stronger Employer Branding
“I’m surprised how few companies have a really good message that captures the essence of the company’s mission and why working there and being a part of that is exciting.” – Todd Raphael, Editor-in-Chief at ERE
People don’t apply to companies, people apply to brands. They’re looking for a commonality — some idea or sense of mission that they share with your organization. The way that you project and market your brand is critically important. You need to publish the right content on your careers site, the right nurture campaigns, and the right kind of messaging about your EVP (employer value proposition) to be successful. To do this at scale, and do it in a way that is measurable, you need a well thought out recruitment marketing strategy.
5. Reduced Hiring Costs
How much of the money that you currently spend on talent attraction is wasted? We’re not just talking about how much you spend on job boards or agencies — think about events, graduate programs, your careers site, anything you’ve had a designer create to help build brand awareness and generate applications.
The truth is, it’s pretty difficult to track. In fact, it’s reminiscent of the old adage about advertising from John Wanamaker, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half!”
Not only will the right recruitment marketing platform help you track the effectiveness of different campaigns on generating talent pipeline, it will help you prioritize the best investments of your time and resources.
We also shouldn’t forget that merely having a pipeline or a pool of talent that you can dip into will alleviate many costs — if you can find relevant candidates in your database, you don’t need agencies or ads.
6. Improved Candidate Quality
When it comes to talent acquisition (just like many other things), you should go for quality over quantity.
The problem that many organizations are currently facing though, is that the high quality candidates who actually visit their website and browse their jobs don’t end up applying. These people aren’t necessarily ready to jump through the hoops of an application process — they might be willing to learn more about your company, but they’re not ‘ready to apply.’
Setting up a Talent Network to convert some of these candidates into leads can be a huge win for your organization. It shouldn’t be overestimated how difficult it is to get people to come to your website. There’s no guarantee that they’ll be back, so you need to do everything you can to convert them while they’re there.
For this strategy to really work though, you have to think carefully about what happens next. How do you nurture these candidates and move them through your funnel to an application? If you can crack this code, then you’ll see some pretty impressive results.
7. Increased Diversity
There’s a lot of data out there to support the fact that diverse teams are more effective and produce higher quality work. McKinsey research indicates that gender diverse teams are 25% more likely to outperform, while ethnically diverse teams are 36% more effective.
The challenge that companies face is attracting people that meet their diversity requirements. Recruitment marketing helps organizations become a lot more proactive about the candidate personas that they’re going after. Whether it’s through events, content or talent networks, recruiters have the tools they need to engage the right candidates more effectively with recruitment marketing.
Anyone looking for an example should check out the great community that Lockheed Martin has created for military veterans.
In today’s talent market, it’s never been more important to attract and retain the right talent for your company. Having a well thought out recruitment marketing strategy and program is a huge part of that, and so is having the right tools to manage your entire talent lifecycle.