What is our Recruitment Marketing strategy...to blend in or to stand out?

The competition for talent has heated up! And even with inflation, a recession looming, and banks collapsing, there is still massive competition for the talent that is out there for firms just like yours because there is a massive talent shortage. There are way more job openings than there are job seekers…

Recruiting all begins with your ability to attract a consistent flow of qualified applicants. 

This matters because most firms have seen a drop of 50% or more in their applicants per job over the last few years (post-COVID life…).  We didn't return back to normal, we returned to worse than normal. The quality is worse, engagement is low, and ghosting is high. 

 

And when your flow is low it leads to a slow time to hire, it leads to low-quality hires, and it creates a downward spiral within your organization. Your managers lose confidence because they don't believe people are going to be hired. Your team loses confidence when you promise them that they only have to work extra hard for a short time because you're going to hire somebody new soon. 

 

It starts to create a negative feeling around your organization.

So what can we do about this competition for talent?

If you want to win this competition, the first thing you need to do is change the way you think about recruiting. The fact is, recruiting has become more like marketing than HR, but most employers are acting like recruiting is an HR function. 

 

Nothing against HR, but their role is about managing process control and compliance, and adherence to the status quo. That is what most HR processes are designed for…not recruiting.

 

But the problem is recruiting these days requires, and is more about, creativity and strategy.  It’s about coming up with new ways to do things, not with compliance and the default standard ways to do things. 

 

The question we need to ask ourselves is…if recruiting is like marketing, then what is the overarching theme of our recruitment marketing strategy?  Do we even have one? 

What is the theme of your strategy?

Most organizations haven't proactively chosen the theme of their strategy, they've simply gone with the default of blending in. Their ads are all the same as their competitors because they figure, “Hey, if it’s working for them, it’ll work for us too.”  But how do they know it’s actually working for them? 

 

Their employer brand is weak, if not non-existent, out there on the job boards and out in the minds of the job seekers. They're relying on job boards as their sole or primary source of applicants, where their ads become lost in a sea of sameness. 

 

This leads job seekers to start comparing and contrasting jobs. This leads to them picking which ones to apply for purely based on pay and nothing else…since everything about those jobs sounds the same. 

But there is a different option… 

You can choose to stand out instead of blending in, focus on being different, and to focus on sticking out in the mind of the job seeker and on the job boards. This is quite simple, but it does take proactive work and it takes approaching recruiting like marketing, not HR. 

 

How can firms do this?

 

-Number one: You have to pick a clear niche of job seekers to target. You can't be targeting everybody. You have to actually break it into segments and pick one or two segments to target for your job.

 

-Number two:  You have to write ads that are engaging to that target audience. Ads that aren't cluttered with negativity and overstated requirements in an attempt to scare off bad applicants. You have to write ads that sound different than your competitors.

 

-Number three: You need to distribute those ads via keyword-targeted job ads for job boards and sharing on social media. And most importantly, you need to have your employees sharing those jobs out in the marketplace. Your employees have networks full of people just like them, and those are the people you want to hire. 

 

-Number four: You have to actually make it easy to apply. If you make it difficult to apply, you will get fewer applicants. So it stands to reason if you make it easier, you will get more applicants. Short 2 stage applications are usually the best way to do this!

 

-And then finally:  Use your job questions to filter out unqualified candidates instead of trying to use your job ad to scare them away. It doesn't work scaring them away anyway. Instead, use job questions! This approach has been proven time and again to increase applicant flow by 50 to 300% without any extra spending on job boards.

 

It's turning recruiting into a competitive advantage by treating it like it’s marketing instead of like it's an HR function. 

 

If you'd like to learn more about this, click the button below to set up a time to chat with one of our hiring experts.

 

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