Halloween weekend is coming up and let’s admit that everyone likes a good scare. Encountering the unexpected is both thrilling and frightening at the same time but it’s how you react to these encounters that determines how much you enjoy it. Laughing about your momentary lapse in composure is usually the best reaction because lets face it, no-one wants to be the crying child who is a buzz-kill to what should be fun time.

Recruiting is very similar and should be fun as well. As a Recruiter, you are continuously being paid to make someone’s day when you offer them a job at your company. However, even though you are continuously making candidates lives better, there are a few things that crop up in every company’s recruiting process that can put quite a scare into recruiters in that organization. Here are some of the scariest things I’ve see in the recruiting space currently:

Post & Pray - This shouldn’t be a concern for most companies but unfortunately this still exists. Never should you just post your job ads to a variety of recruiting channels and just be happy with getting some number of candidates back. You should always strive to get more candidates for each position and understand through metrics what channels work the best in bringing in qualified candidates so you can alter your future recruitment marketing strategy.

Lack of Marketing Metrics - Most employers employ an ATS and get some really good data about where their applicants are coming from. However, many companies are still in the dark for marketing metrics for their job advertisements. Every good marketer knows that you need to track every step in your marketing funnel and the same is true for your recruitment marketing funnel. From impressions of your ad to click-through rate, you need to track where potential contacts fall off during the process and how you can better decrease this fall-off. These types of recruiting metrics can provide you with insight into how effective your overall recruitment marketing process is and in what areas you can / need to improve. They are a great addition to the applicant metrics that you receive from your ATS.

Boring Messaging - To sell your company to high quality candidates, you need Job Ads that are fun and exciting. Don’t just put in requirements and tasks that a candidate would do in the position but focus on answering the one question that is most important to the candidate: Why should I work for your company? Talk about your company culture, employee benefits, cool projects you work on, exceptional employees that work at your company, etc. and get candidates excited at the possibility of working for your company. It’s a Job Advertisement not a job description.

Same old, same old - Some organizations use the same recruiting methods every year. While these methods may work well now, I always encourage employers to try some new things on top of what they already do and test the effectiveness. From mobile recruiting to email to resume sourcing to social recruiting there are a lot of interesting ways to reach and engage with candidates. Be inquisitive and create a plan that let’s you try new things every once in a while. You may find that the new channels work very well.

One-off job campaigns - Why whenever you have a new job to fill do you always start from scratch? Every job campaign you start is an opportunity to add qualified contacts to your Talent Network. Make sure to set up some sort of database solution that enables you to put all your sourcing and recruiting contacts (from your campaigns to job boards, etc.) into one centralized solution. Most importantly, have a solution that enables you to leverage these contacts in email and SMS send-out. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a collection of candidates that you could just send emails to in order to fill an open position?

Your organization may have some of these scary problems above or may have others that are entirely different and maybe more frightening. The question is how are you going to react to them and make them a little bit more fun and less scary?

Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.