Recruitment marketing is an innovative approach to recruiting that utilizes traditional marketing tactics to appeal to candidates with the goal of converting them into applicants, similar to how marketers work to convert prospects into leads. To accomplish this, talent acquisition professionals are beginning to find success in repurposing traditional marketing software into recruitment marketing tools to streamline the development of integrated recruiting campaigns and get them one step closer to their goals of generating demand and increasing engagement with their employer brand.

Recruit Like a Pro with the Right Recruitment Marketing Tools

From strategy and planning to targeted outreach and conversion optimization, recruitment marketing is not for the faint of heart and incorporating a specific set of recruitment marketing tools can give you a leg up against the competition. A big trend in marketing is the goal of working smarter, not harder and the same holds true for modern recruiting. Luckily, many of the tools designed to help marketers reach their goals can easily double as recruitment marketing tools and fit seamlessly into the foundation of any recruiting strategy.

Here are a few staples you should have in your recruitment marketing toolbox that can make the difference between a good campaign and a great one.

Increase Alignment with a Good Project Management Tool

In 2016, American business saw a waste of $122 million for every $1 billion invested due to poor pro.... As you begin to think about how to approach each new project, it’s important to set your team up to prevent such loss by making sure everyone involved is on the same page, with expectations and goals are clearly defined. For this reason, a project management tool should be a staple in any recruitment technology stack. These platforms make collaborating with your team members easier than ever by cutting out the inevitable confusion that comes with flipping through dozens of emails, spreadsheets or sticky notes.

Most built-in applicant tracking system (ATS) dashboards are typically pretty generic. The majority offer productivity tools that are more candidate-facing, like meeting schedulers or follow-up reminders, but rarely offer a full range of features to be used internally. A good project management tool will allow you to group tasks in a way that aligns best with you and your team and will empower you to meet your recruiting goals. You’ll also have the capability to assign specific tasks to specific people, encouraging ownership of different tasks and priorities and increasing productivity by giving the members of your team a clear picture of the tasks at hand. Having a designated tool that acts as a “home base” for your overall recruiting strategy and a repository for all project details, notes, assignments and progress will prevent anything from getting lost in translation.

Our suggestions: 

• Trello
• Asana 
• Basecamp

Widen Your Reach Across Candidate Databases  

For recruiting professionals, sourcing candidates is equivalent to the prospecting function of sales and marketing. Efficiently identifying your target candidates is key to a successful recruiting campaign, so if you have the option to use a more advanced recruiting tool as a way to make sourcing easier while getting better results, it ought to be a no-brainer.

It’s important to not put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to searching for talent. Diversifying the channels from which you source candidates will prevent you from churning through the same exact resumes time after time. Aside from the typical professional networking sites, consider association databases, trade publications and traditional social media.

It’s also important to make sure you’re using your sourcing tools to their full capacity so you can get a clear picture of your total talent universe. Look for tools with a diverse set of users, or at least one for each major bucket. For example, LinkedIn is a popular network for more corporate, white-collar professionals while candidates in more blue-collar professions are more often found on Careerbuilder. Once you have a good idea of the talent universe you’ll have access to, a tool with advanced filtering capabilities can help zone in a more precise type of candidate.

Our suggestions:

• Linkedin Recruiter 
• Careerbuilder Edge

Put Sourcing on Autopilot

Sourcing the right candidates is crucial, but doing so manually can be an extremely tedious and time-consuming process. There are several tools out there to help you put your sourcing on autopilot, allowing you find candidates at an unparalleled speed and scale. Most tools work in conjunction with LinkedIn, but creating your own scraping system can be just as effective for alternative candidate databases.

As a bonus, most of these tools also compile the email addresses associated with each LinkedIn account. While in-app messaging works for some, most candidates may not continuously engage with the site they originally posted their resume on, especially if they’re not actively searching for new opportunities, so having that extra bit of information can make getting in touch that much easier.

Our suggestions:

• Hunter 
• Dux Soup
• ParseHub

Automate Your Recruitment Marketing Outreach

The secret sauce to any successful recruitment marketing operation is an effective outreach campaign. On one hand, recruiting can largely be a numbers game when it comes to filling more entry-level roles, which means the more reach you have among candidates, the more options you’ll have to fill the role. Alternatively, for more specific searches like C-level executives, a more targeted approach can be more practical.

Manually emailing candidates can be extremely time consuming, and the more candidates you have on your list, the easier it is to mix them up. These initial, higher-level touchpoints are also typically focused on giving candidates a general overview of your opportunity, which is often a matter of copying and pasting. Automating email outreach eliminates room for human error by giving you the ability to create and save separate sequences for each set of candidates and enroll them automatically, at scale, with the click of a button.

Similarly, as society has become increasingly mobile it’s become easier to reach someone via text than an actual phone call. If you’re experiencing low open rates with your emails and have access to candidate phone numbers, it might benefit you to give SMS messaging a shot. In fact, text messaging is the preferred method of communication for candida....

Implementing a recruitment marketing tool for automating candidate outreach can be extremely efficient, saving you the time to focus on more high-impact conversations further down the funnel, like screening and interviewing.

Our suggestions:

• MailChimp (email) 
• Outreach (email)
• Front (SMS & email)

Drive Conversion with a Compelling Careers Page

Landing pages help marketers convey their message in a consumable format, and include important information needed to help visitors make a decision and travel further down the funnel. By directing candidates to a landing page, you’re essentially giving them a one-stop shop for all things “your company”. Not only can the overall design and messaging act as a window into your company’s employment brand, but aligning the information on the page with that in your initial outreach gives candidates a cohesive look at the opportunity. Incorporating extra information like benefits, company values, or some insight into who they might be working with on a daily basis can really help foster engagement and drive them to further explore the role.

Our suggestions:

• Unbounce 
  
• Instapage
• Leadpages

Lucky for you, Happie does it all. By combining the most important recruitment marketing tools into one, easy-to-use service, Happie identifies and engages the best candidates for your role, letting you step in and take over the conversation when it matters the most.

There’s no one size fits all when it comes to the ultimate recruitment marketing toolbox. While the technology you choose to use ultimately comes down to your organization’s specific strategy and talent acquisition goals, we can all agree that increasing the efficiency of your recruiting efforts by adding some new recruitment marketing tools into the mix can go a long way.

See the original post on the Happie blog!