This is a guest post from Ben Slater of Beamery.
In theory, the recruiting model is relatively simple. Post ad on job board, wait for the flood of CVs, filter applicants, hire candidate or make a placement.
This system used to work really well. People respond to adverts, they did what they were meant to!
Now though, we have a problem. The best talent isn’t applying. Job boards might work for entry level, high volume hiring, but they’re not a good fit for high value roles.
There are too many distractions out there, and the right candidates aren’t finding you anymore.
Mirroring marketing
It isn’t just recruiting that’s suffering from this problem. The entire marketing industry is in a state of flux for the same reason!
Marketing used to rely on the same, simple cycle. Pump money into advertising (primarily print or television), and sit back and reap the benefits.
This model worked fantastically well… right up until it didn’t. Competition made the number of marketing messages that each consumer had to deal with completely untenable. The noise increased to the level that it became pretty hard to get your product ‘found’ by the right people.
This is why we’ve seen the growth of inbound marketing over the last decade and why companies now try and ‘earn’ consumer attention instead of relying on adverts.
What’s the solution?
Treat candidates like customers. It’s pretty likely that you’ve heard this over the past few years. It has cemented it’s status as an official industry buzzword!
There’s a good reason to buy into the hype though, engaging candidates in a similar fashion to marketers’ approach to consumers pays off big time.
Why is this?
Ads are only attractive to the candidates that are active and “ready to apply”. This is only a small portion of the available talent pool that you’re targeting.
By contrast, passive candidates respond far better to engagement. Instead of trying to get them to apply directly, you should treat them like leads. Your focus should be on relationship building, and on slowly transforming leads who come into contact with your employer brand into enthusiastic applicants.
Every recruiter has a few tools in their armoury when it comes to candidate engagement:
– Email marketing
– Hiring events
– Blogs, ebooks and whitepapers
– Videos
– Social media
It can take as many as 8 brand touchpoints to influence their decision, so using a mixture of the tactics above to market your brand to leads tends to be the best approach.
Lead management and recruitment marketing isn’t something that an ATS thrives on, so it’s no surprise we’ve seen a number of new platforms rise up to fill this void – Clinch and Beamery are a couple of front runners here (full disclosure, I run Growth at the latter).
Whether you use a dedicated tool or not though, it’s important that you at least start thinking about candidate leads and your engagement strategy seriously (I can guarantee your competitors are!)
Bio: Ben Slater is VP Growth at Beamery, Beautiful Recruiting Software Powered by Artificial Intelligence (Check out a demo).
There is o n e answer to this and one that require nothing other than wait for it….. mind-set and thought. Good recruitment is actually fairly simple, does not require a whole range of bells and whistles and fancy tools and solutions, just good honest straight forward and proper s e r v i c e and doing what you promise to do. The last couple of years coupled with more supply than demand, and that the recruitment agency (and the in-house world not that far behind) never truly understood or cared about what matters, the candidates. This is something that can (and should) be fixed, but it takes someone with the mind-set and thought to sit down and think the whole structure and journey from requisition to placement through. That is something that still here in 2015 very few have actually spent much time, effort and interest in doing, and that is why we are finding the Internet awash with consultants and other people teaching us things we already know, that have simply been forgotten or on the altar of new and shiny tools making all sorts of promises decided not relevant.
It is all about service and managing expectations of both the candidate and employer in a consistent manner. Engaging candidates through different methods also helps build reputation and positioning of the recruitment agency to help stand out in a crowded market place.