Recruiting is not just a quality game but it’s a numbers game as well. For any large to medium size organization recruiting is a continuous cycle of engaging and trying to find that right candidate for an open position.

Unless you have a dedicated sourcing team that proactively goes to find candidates that fit your organization, you are most likely relying on a recruitment advertising strategy of trying to reach the right candidates. With these initiatives, you are really employing a strategy where you are trying to present the right candidate with the right opportunity at the right time.

When a candidate decides to move from one position to another, it’s done in a variety of ways. They may be proactively looking for a new position to move soon, passively looking for a new position and will only move for what they deem the right position or potentially not looking at all but open to new opportunities that are career advancements. Every candidate has a different time horizon for moving to a new job.

Due to this reason, you need to focus on reaching these candidates at the time and place that it makes sense for them to consider your company and opportunities. If now is not the right time, then you need to find ways to keep connected with them for when you have an opportunity that meets their specific situation.

Where do the best candidates live?

This really gets to the heart of what you should be tracking in your recruitment marketing strategy. Everyone wants to know where they can find quality candidates in their recruitment process.

So to start you need to look at the recruitment sources are you using today and begin tracking how many quality candidates each is bringing back. This is not just hires (although they are the ultimate conversion) but also all the qualified candidates that were up for the position but did not receive it.

As you build out your tracking capabilities, it’s important to capture recruitment metricsbased on recruitment sources you use. This includes job boards, niche sites, social networks, your Career Site and proactive sourcing efforts. Everything you do from a recruitment sourcing strategy should be tracked and analyzed as you continuously try to improve your process and understand the activities that provide the most value in terms of quality candidates.

The places that provide the best results are ones that the candidates you are targeting frequent the most. It is in these places you want to increase your presence on in your job distributioncampaigns and engage on more often.

Where does a Talent Network fit into this?

First here’s how I define a Talent Network. A Talent Network is a database where candidates can opt-in to future communications and content from an organization. This network can help organizations build targeted talent pipelines which they can easily communicate with in order to drive applicant flow for future job campaigns.

Ultimately, the Talent Network is a place for candidates that could be fits for your organization but are just currently not at the point where they ready to apply. They are interested in your organization but just haven’t found that position that fits their skills, interests, experience and/or time horizon.

The ultimate goal of a Talent Network is to drive qualified applicant flow, however, in order to do that you need to provide value to the candidates. This can come in many forms. From important industry news to targeted job opportunities, it’s important to create and share content that is helpful to each targeted talent pipeline. This is where you become viewed as a valuable source of information instead of being put in the spam folder.

In short, the Talent Network is a device to keep your company top of mind with a candidate so that when they are ready to make their next move you are one of their top options to consider.

Helping Candidates Find the Right Opportunities

If you are a fan of Google Analytics, then you know the way people find your website can often times be bizarre. For your Career Site, this is no less the case. Many times the candidate will come in on something that doesn’t quite fit what they are looking for. It is in these instances, that you need to help them find content that fits their interest.

It is our job to ensure that those who visit the site can easily find information that fits their needs. From a Career Site perspective, this means a few things. First, we need to do a better job of matching candidates with jobs that fit their experience and skills. This includes not only better search but also better recommendations when candidates come to a job landing page. Second, messaging needs to be more targeted toward individual disciplines and specific candidate populations. The more you can create content and messaging that is unique to these groups the more successful you’ll be at converting candidates into applicants.

Most importantly, you need to measure everything about your Career Site from what keywords / sources candidates are coming in from to what content they view during their site visit.

With the information you gather on a candidate, the more we will be able to improve the overall experience they have and direct them to the right content and jobs.

Getting your timing right

The goal of any recruiting organization needs to be around finding the right opportunity for the right candidate and delivering it to them at the right time. It’s not the easiest thing to do but there are a number of things you can do in your process to make sure it happens more frequently. From understanding where you best results come from to remaining top of mind with candidates through your Talent Network, your organization can find the correct balance to improve your timing with the right candidates.

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