5 Marketing Best Practices Your Recruitment Team Should Steal

Recruitment and marketing have never been more closely intertwined. With 83% of US businesses struggling to find workers with the right skills, the recruitment market is intensely competitive.

In order to attract top talent and position your brand as a great place to work, consider taking a marketing approach. Here are five marketing best practices for recruiters to capitalize on.

Creative Ideation

As competition for top talent increases, recruiters need to think creatively to ensure their vacancies stand out. Candidates with in-demand skills receive numerous LinkedIn messages from recruiters every month — how is your team going to differentiate itself from the crowd?

Creative ideation is a common process for marketers. There’s no hard and fast rule as to how to run these sessions because everyone thinks in different ways. However, the Board of Innovation does offer four golden rules for ideation:

• There are no bad ideas
• Capture everything
• Use hybrid brainstorming — a combination of individual and group ideation
• Quantity over quality — getting bogged down in the quality or feasibility of ideas is a surefire way to stop the creative juices flowing

Segmentation

Audience segmentation is king in marketing. This involves collecting audience data and using it to segment your database into smaller groups — by age, job title, or interests, for example — in order to better connect with and build trust among consumers.

Each audience segment is then targeted with content relevant to them, reducing bounce rate and increasing click-throughs and conversions. And it works — eMarketer research found that 39% of email marketers that practice list segmentation have better open rates, and 24% reported better sales leads.

Segmentation could also be a valuable tool when it comes to recruiting. While the overall employer brand is designed to attract candidates who would be a good culture fit, it’s unlikely that a business would require staff who all have the same skills or level of experience. When building pipelines, recruiters are essentially segmenting candidates by potential role.

Why not take this further and segment by age or seniority level? You can then tweak your tone of voice when writing or speaking to each group and send them relevant content. This is particularly useful for nurturing pipelines and keeping top talent engaged.

Branding

Millennials and Gen Z-ers are notoriously picky about the companies they work for. It’s no longer enough to offer great compensation and benefits — younger employees are keen to work for organizations whose values are aligned with their own. Research found that 75% of millennials would take a smaller salary to join a company more in line with their values.

Branding is the tool that companies use to communicate who they are to the world — an employer brand looking to attract new hires needs to build trust amongst the top tier of talent. It must clearly state its mission statement and values, and demonstrate how it lives up to these values.

Furthermore, it must embody its company culture so potential applicants can decide whether they’d be a good cultural fit. In order to build trust, branding must be consistent across all websites and social channels.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a powerful strategic tool beloved by marketers. It compiles a business’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats into an organized list.

From a marketing perspective, a SWOT Analysis helps businesses to understand where they stand in the market. On the recruiting side of things, it can be used to see how an organization measures up to others when it comes to attracting top talent, and what’s stopping it from winning over the best of the best.

Once you’ve analyzed each of the four sections of the SWOT analysis, create a bullet journal style list for each section. You can segment each section into daily, monthly and future tasks and strategies that will help you accomplish the goals identified in the analysis.

Set Goals, Measure KPIs, Analyze, and Adapt

All good marketers know to track the impact of their marketing activities — otherwise, how can they possibly expect to gain insights into what’s working and what’s not? This process is achieved by setting goals at the beginning of a campaign and deciding which KPIs to measure and how.

The relevant data is then collected throughout the campaign, before being collated and analyzed at the end to measure performance. Conclusions are drawn from the analysis and recommendations are applied to the next campaign.

There are numerous recruitment metrics that recruiters can use to track and improve their performance. Want to measure whether your recruitment process is working? Look at “quality of hire” and “time to hire”. Need to slash recruitment spend? Focus on “cost per hire” and “first-year attrition”.

While measurement can be time-consuming, knowing how well a recruitment operation is running is vital for business. At ChamberofCommerce.com, I use reporting tools like Datapine to leverage data from multiple sources within our organization to quickly identify how we can improve our employee recruitment processes and overall employee performance. For example, I may want to create reports that pull the total cost of a new salesperson hire from an HR tool like BambooHR and compare it to their sales performance over the first six month from a CRM like Salesforce to identify how long it takes to recoup our initial investment in the hire.

In order to keep attracting and retaining top talent in the modern economy, it’s key for recruiters to start thinking like marketers. With these 5 tips in mind, you’ll be well on your way to seeing the results you want.

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Matt Shealy is the President of ChamberofCommerce.com. Chamber specializes in helping small businesses grow their business on the web while facilitating the connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide.