Have no doubt in your mind, there is positively a new type of job seeker emerging on the worldwide talent spectrum today. It is true, gone are the days when you can place a job posting and be 100% guaranteed a bucket of awesome resumes from the best and brightest candidates.
Today, candidates research jobs online, in the same manner, they research where to go out to eat or which hotel to stay in.
Sophisticated job seekers want an inside look at your organization. They want to engage with your employer brand before even applying for a job at your company. Transparency is key. Companies must now be transparent about who they are and seek implementing clever recruitment marketing strategies to woo talent away from competitors.
Now is the time to brand or be branded. If your company is not bothering to improve the recruiting practices for high-tech job seekers, it may be that you are communicating with one or more of the following unfavorable messages.
- This is a mundane and very dreary place to work.
- Our technical savoir-faire is not state-of-the-art and even lack the abilities to get us there.
- Our lack of transparency means we are not open and honest.
So, start taking control of voicing your powerful brand messages to transform a nonexistent or poor reputation and begin winning the war for talent.
But where do you begin? There are recruitment marketing tools and agencies that can help you build a marketing plan; develop a budget and calendar; employ inbound marketing and social recruiting strategies; go mobile and take advantage of talent analytics to recruit and hire the right candidates for your organization.
Do not neglect local marketing for candidates. Ponder sharing job vacancies with the local news networks, which sometimes announce local businesses that are hiring. For marketing ideas, billboards and road signs are also not out of bounds – get creative with the way you advertise that you’re hiring.
Now is the time to market your employer brand the same way you do your company’s products and services. Recruitment marketing is an unending action that should be running 24/7 during the year. You have to always be attracting, engaging and nurturing. You can certainly join forces with marketing but they ought not to own it. Talent acquisition should own and manage it.
It is time to stop thinking like an HR person and start thinking like a marketer. Get to know your audience and start driving more interested candidates into your pipeline.
So dive in and become a recruitment marketing superstar and draw in the chic top-level job seeker. Happy recruiting and don’t forget to ask for help from the marketing team and the company employees.
_____