There is no doubt that recruiting is becoming a more strategic function within the corporate world.  Companies are continually looking to improve their recruiting strategy to help them bring in more talented people in a more efficient way.  With this need for better recruiting strategy they are looking for their recruiting organizations to evolve and become more strategic.

When we look at the continued evolution of the recruiting function, we continually compare it to sales, marketing and PR roles.  Recruiters and companies that can develop and utilize discernible skills from these roles within their recruiting functions, will be able to compete and most importantly win in the war for talent.

But what skills can recruiting organizations grow to learn from marketing organizations?  Here are a few:

Measure everything:  Marketers measure every marketing campaign they run and provide key metrics for future marketing decisions.  For recruitment marketing campaigns, we need the same level of recruitment metrics.  No matter where you distribute your job ads, you need to measure and understand what channels work best for your recruiting campaigns.

Test & Evolve:  Marketers love to test messaging and different strategies to see what brings the best ROI.  Recruiters can do this as well.  Test two different job titles, call to actions, recruiting channels and see what works best.  Use this information to affect your campaigns going forward.

Focus on Messaging:  Marketers realize that messaging is important and many recruiters do to.   Job ads aren’t benign descriptions of responsibilities of a job but need to highlight the benefits and sell why the job is compelling.

Use Multiple Channels:  Marketers don’t use just print ads or online spend or their website but use a combination of the multiple channels to create an effective marketing strategy.  Recruiters should do the same using job boards, social networks, email, SMS, mobile recruiting and other channels to create the most effective recruiting strategy.

Collect Leads:  Every marketing campaign run has one goal: to collect leads which lead to sales.  Every recruiting campaign ultimately is judged on hires but collecting leads to build your Talent Network is an important secondary objective.  Whether through dual-purpose job ads or opt-in forms on one’s career sites, collecting candidate contact information within a Recruiting CRM can provide you with tremendous leads for future job campaigns.

The recruiting function can learn a lot from their marketing brethren with the 5 lessons above providing a start.  Try some of these tactics above in your recruitment marketing campaigns and see the results that come of it.