Is Recruitment Marketing a new HR discipline?

A friend of mine was recently head hunted for a data science role, for a large retail chain in the United States. While she knew that her job prospects after her Masters with a specialized data science major were reasonably good, this call from a recruiter made her feel special.

The recruiter spoke with a lot of gravitas, knew of her credentials and even some references and eventually got her to fly 1000 miles to give a job interview.  The rest as they say, is history.

Later, she told me, that she remembered seeing job advertisements, really cool updates on the company campus on her student email, and many such chance encounters with the company and its events close by.  All she had done, was leaving her email address at the company’s career site years ago, while looking for internships.

Isn’t it all Marketing?

What the company that contacted my friend did, was not new. It is Recruitment Marketing. It nurtured candidates that visited it’s career site, at various stages to keep them interested in the company and eventually got them to apply for jobs posted, and not to mention join the company!

What the company also subtly did, was to incorporate powerful employer branding techniques into its mailers to make the prospective candidates aware of its culture and values, while they were served marketing material. Selling, but not really saying so.

Even though recruitment marketing feels like marketing, it is just recruiting strategy done right.

Which is getting right candidates to apply at the right time, doing what it takes to ensure you get the perfect message about your company out and ensuring that the process of becoming an employee from a candidate is meaningful.

How do we get Recruitment Marketing done?

Imagine a talent acquisition team trying to reach out to candidates, at different points of their candidate journey on a career website? Not quite a fun picture, especially with the pace at which competitors and recruitment agencies reach out to candidates.

To achieve that kind of pace and scale, recruitment marketing could involve:

• Social recruiting that involves use of candidates from multiple channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media
• Candidate CRM tools that use candidate data to send targeted emailers, messages or even videos based on what stage the candidate has been slotted into
• Employer Branding page that has been specially created for candidates, different from the career site, that enables candidates to see company updates, just like employees
• Personalized recommendations on upcoming events, jobs and even resources that have been published on the company’s websites and other channels
• Providing the recruitment marketing team with tools to measure success – a data driven way to know what channels actually work for specific type of candidates, industry and profiles.
• Provide free training on trending issues pertaining to the candidate – for e.g. diversity training, technical topics, employee benefits or even webinars run on campus. The possibilities carry immense potential

And, did we forget to use important words like – talent pipeline, source of hire, source of influence, candidate persona, candidate pool, candidate nurturing, attractive job descriptions and conversion rate?

They all are as important, but eventually they all point in one direction, which is – recruitment marketing cannot be ignored anymore, and it needs to take a pivotal place in your hiring strategy. Plus, a major bulk of the recruitment marketing happens through software and intelligent pieces of technology that automate every step of that strategy.

That way, technology thrown in along with recruitment marketing, takes not only the load off recruiters, but also provides a tremendous impact on the way recruitment works in an organization.

We have helped multiple organizations build effective recruitment marketing tools and products, which have helped them in multiple ways. Write to us here, if you feel you think recruitment marketing and related technology can take your organization to the next level!