The growing business is at the same time an easy and challenging task these days. You have a lot of opportunities, but it is impossible to reach the maximum potential without an outstanding team. Great leaders may not be so great themselves, but they have a wonderful ability to hire the right people. Your employees have a huge impact on your overall success.
What does this mean for you? If you’re in need of new people, you can’t just post vacancies and wait. You need a recruitment marketing strategy to find the best possible candidates. On one hand, modern search engines, online platforms, and social media made the hiring process easier than ever. But there is a second hand that makes it all complicated. You don’t need a lot of people, you need particular people who will contribute to your business and help it to reach new heights.
Let us provide you with 8 steps to create a perfect recruitment marketing plan.
1. Define your goals
It goes without saying that you want to build an efficient team and make your company prosperous. But it is not the winning goal. You should use the SMART approach which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based goals. There is a list of options you may choose from:
- Get 100 job applicants;
- Interview 50 candidates per week;
- Increase the involvement of candidates by 2 times;
- Get 1000 more website visitors;
- Increase referral rates.
You may want to increase the offer-acceptance rate or to organize a successful career event. These goals sound much more real than just “I want to hire more people”. Develop a list of your own to understand your ambitions and develop a plan to implement them.
2. Imagine your candidate persona
You can’t think about the recruitment marketing global plan if you even don’t know what people exactly do you need.
The candidate persona is a document with features you’re looking for in candidates. Requirements may differ depending on the position and its level. You may discuss its creation with the marketing department because they have surely developed the customer’s portrait and can provide you with some actionable tips.
Think of people your team lacks, and write down all the insights. Should it be a single-player or a team-worker? Choleric or phlegmatic? Do you appreciate the working experience only or some personal traits also matter? When you understand who exactly you need, it would be easier to get rid of CVs that don’t suit your expectations.
3. Define your employer’s brand
You should always remember that you’re in the market. Not only your company chooses the candidates, but they choose you as well. Therefore, you should know why you are the best choice and what you can offer to attract more candidates with the qualification you expect.
Salaries are good, but they are definitely not the only motivational factor to change the job. Decent candidates can receive several offers with the money they need, but the final decision is always about something else.
It can be a nice office or a comfortable remote format. A friendly team of real enthusiasts. The inspirational boss, who is ready to provide useful feedback. Interesting events. Think about your benefits and make sure the candidates know about them. Your website should be hiring-friendly, and well as your social media.
4. Create recruitment content
This step can be a part of your employer’s brand. You need to consider a candidate’s journey which consists of the following stages:
- Awareness. Candidates learn about your company, mission, values, career opportunities.
- Consideration. They think: is there something for me?
- Interest. Candidates check your resources, check requirements with their CVs.
- Application. They send you a CV with a motivational letter.
- Selection. An interview stage.
- Hire. Candidates decide whether they’re ready to accept your offer.
Developing the marketing strategy for recruitment, you should consider all these stages and create content for each of them. Sometimes it is not necessary to start from scratch since you can analyze your current funnel and define whether your content is good enough.
For example, if you see that if you don’t have enough CVs, you should think about job vacancies and your website Career section. Are they informative enough? Do they show the benefits of your company? Are the requirements clear? Discuss the follow-ups emails with your marketers to keep the candidate interested after the interview.
5. Consider your social media
Modern social media is a very important platform to communicate with your audience. Almost all people these days use the Internet to communicate with each other. And you should build your strategy carefully, knowing exactly what you are doing.
The first thing you should understand is that there are several categories of social media platforms. Some people use them to communicate with friends and family. But there is the second, no less important meaning: B2B networking. It is important to set different goals. For example, if you need to find a talented developer, you can succeed with this task via LinkedIn, but it doesn’t mean you should ignore Facebook or Instagram. These platforms are good to increase brand awareness and develop your community. The same strategy applies to the type of content you post. You shouldn’t limit yourself to job vacancies. Show how your company lives, post some customer cases. However, you should be very careful about other types of content. Most companies prefer to ignore political, religious, social issues at their social platforms because they don’t want to sound offensive.
6. Build your talent pool inside the company
Many recruiters are used to thinking that they need to hire people from different fields and companies to strengthen their team. It may be a breath of fresh air but first think about your colleagues, people who are already here.
You already know them because you work with them every day. You can also get feedback from other colleagues and objectively evaluate the results of the work.
Good companies offer employees not only decent wages and comfortable working conditions but also opportunities for development. Think of how you can improve the talent pool. You may organize some events, workshops, conferences. It would be a great idea to conduct meetings where people can discuss their job roles, issues, and solutions. Ask your colleagues about how they see their future careers. Maybe they’re already thinking about changing the position, but they don’t know where to start.
7. Measure recruitment marketing results
We have already mentioned that your goals should be measurable. It means that you can’t just set them and forget about them. It is important to control the whole process.
When you have several goals, try to divide each of them into small milestones and set a particular deadline. Once it comes, analyze the results and decide whether your work was successful. If yes, what helped you? What were your strengths? How can you use them to make the grade in the future? If not, analyze the reasons as well. You shouldn’t proceed with this goal if you don’t have any intermediate results. Otherwise, you will find yourself in a year with wasted time, budget, and effort, but without a decent team. Each of your decisions should be supported by something.
8. Ask for feedback
When drawing conclusions about someone's behavior and actions, people are often guided by their assumptions. You can guess why candidates are not interested in your vacancy or even refuse an attractive job offer. But these are only guesses until you have some more specific information. And you need it to analyze your work and change your strategy. How do you get this data?
Of course, you need feedback. This does not mean that your candidates must explain their decisions. But you may ask them and benefit from their answers. Design a cute follow-up letter that you will send to all applicants. Ask them to provide you with some information anonymously. They may write what they like about your company, what they don’t, what exactly you can make better, etc.
You shouldn’t also ignore independent platforms where employees and candidates write testimonials about different companies. Read them, analyze, and react if necessary. Your reaction is also a part of your brand, especially when it goes about negative comments.
Wrapping up
Hiring is really a challenge, but we sure that you can accept it. Actually, there is only one rule to follow: you should be constantly developing. Analyze your results, and if you don’t like them, change something. The best companies such as Google and Facebook are famous employers since they aren't afraid of changes. They know their target audience, and they work with it successfully.
Our 8 steps will help you to hire better, and to develop your own recruitment marketing plan with a bang!
