In the past few years, HR industry has been going through some major changes. As a consequence, there new terms, strategies and technologies have emerged. Some HR professionals believe these just buzzwords, while others are true believers in the importance of following the latest trends in order to be able to attract and hire best talent. To have them all in one place, I decided to make a list of some of the most common buzzwords everyone is talking about.

1. Recruitment Marketing

Recruitment Marketing tactics are used to communicate organization's Employer Brand and Employee Value Proposition to attract top talent to apply to open positions.  

One of the biggest goals of every Recruitment Marketing strategy is to improve Candidate Experience and encourage Candidate Engagement.  

In order to attract candidates through Recruitment Marketing, companies use solutions offered by Recruitment Marketing platforms to better communicate their Employer Brand and Employee Value Proposition.  

2. Inbound Recruiting 

Inbound Recruiting is a method of creating targeted, branded content for candidates specifically for the purpose of increasing your employer brand recognition and candidate engagement with future hires. 

Inbound Recruiting follows the famous Inbound Marketing strategy; technique for drawing customers to products and services via recruiting content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization. 

The goal of Inbound Recruiting strategy is to engage qualified candidates and convert them into job applicants to expand talent pools. 

3. Candidate Relationship Management

Candidate relationship management (CRM) is a method for managing and improving relationships with current and future job candidates. Similarly as in marketing, CRM technology is used to automate and ease communication process with the job seekers.

In order to streamline and automate this process, many companies implement Recruitment Marketing strategies using Recruitment Marketing tools. These tools enable HR Professionals to manage relationships with candidates in an easier yet personalized way. 

For example, some Recruitment Marketing tools offer solutions for creating engaging email campaigns to provide highly relevant, educative and interesting content in order to build stronger relationships and expand their talent pools with highly-qualified job candidates.  

4. Employer Branding 

Employer Branding involves all the activities HR Professionals and Marketers use to communicate Employer Brand and Employee Value Proposition to job seekers. 

In today’s “War for Talent” Employer Branding strategies are considered very important when it comes to solving one of the biggest recruiting challenges – attracting high-quality applicants. 

Research by LinkedIn has proven that more than 75% of job seekers research about firm’s reputation and employer brand before they apply for an open position. Companies that have a bad reputation not only have problems in attracting candidates, but also retaining employees. 

5. Data-Driven Recruiting and HR Analytics 

Data-Driven Recruiting and HR Analytics are two expressions used to explain recruiting methods in which HR Professionals plan and make decisions based on data acquired through HR technology such as Applicants Tracking Systems and Recruitment Marketing Platforms. 

Data-driven recruiting has proven to improve some of the most important hiring metrics such as time to hire, cost to hire and quality of hire. 

Question

If you had data available that proves that referred candidates take shortest to hire, fastest to on-board, require least money and stay longest with your company, would you still waste your money on job boards and job promotions or would you improve your Employee Referral Program? 

So are these just buzzwords or actual recruiting trends?