Yesterday we spent quite a bit of time related to setting up your recruitment marketing metrics to determine your overall strategy. Today we are going to focus on drilling down into those metrics to create a Diversity recruitment strategy. This article
will address preparing for your Diversity strategy, building and measuring your
efforts.

Preparing for your Strategy

Simple: Who are you trying to target? Why? What is the problem you are trying to solve? What is the availability of talent?

Once you answer this question, here are the next steps:

1. Review how you have recruited these individuals or groups before? What has been
successful what has not? What has been
the cost of attracting and marketing to this population? Is it a group you must
build brand recognition in addition to transactional recruitment marketing
strategies and why?

2. Engage stakeholders such as:

A. Diversity
Officer: There are a couple of things to address:

mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin"">1. How does the office of diversity provide outreach, thought leadership and support
to these groups?

mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin"">2. Is there any organizational recognition or awards that focus on this targeted
sector?

B. HR
Metrics / Strategy: What are the attrition rates of this targeted
population? Is the hole in the bucket bigger at the bottom than it is on top?
If Yes – STOP – and determine how
the attrition has impacted the application rate of this population? If it has, than there may be a dependency /
risk that will impact your recruitment marketing effectiveness.

C. HR /
Executive Leadership: Provide executive sponsorship and help mitigate
issues. For example if the hole in the bottom is bigger on top, that HR leader
may engage another work effort to address the downstream impacts. Executive leaders within the business impacted
– to drive communications and HR strategies that may come from this exercise.

D. Corporate
Marketing or Multi-Cultural Marketing SME’s:This group can offer a different
perspective, benchmarking and data on how to market products and services to a
target group. They may have tools at
hand such as Google analytics, creative consultants, researchers and market
tracking technology to support your initiative.

E. Recruitment
/ Procurement Leadership: In some cases, a diverse population may
come in through a contingent labor – temp to perm strategy. Having the folks
responsible for this group is a good set of people to get involved and have be
part of your overall marketing effort.

3. RESEARCH/ FOCUS GROUPS/ VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER: Once all of the stakeholder input has been captured, the next step is to
create a quick Voice of the Customer.
This survey can be as simple as conducting a few small focus groups or
spending a couple of weeks conducting
1:1 sessions. The key focus is
WHY DID THIS PERSON COME TO YOUR COMPANY AND WHY DO THEY STAY? The other focus is DID THEY APPLY ONLINE,
WHAT DID THEY LIKE, DISLIKE? Finally
ask: If you were in my shoes, how would
you go about attracting and retaining a target population? LISTEN.

4. COMPILE THIS INFORMATION:The insights you have captured along with leveraging multiple stakeholders in the process, can drive the creation of the best solution. Your outcome may be more than
a Recruitment Marketing effort, so be prepared.
The reality is if there are other challenges, you still may have to do
something, just know – now you will want to measure COST and EFFECTIVENESS
trends over time and associate it with attrition or employee satisfaction.

RECRUITMENT MARKETING PROGRAM

While I cannot be prescriptive about a program, I can speak to the areas of potential impact or that may need to be address:

1. Career site: Messaging, interactive video’s, success stories and awards, integrated marketing

in company publications and other web properties.

2. Advertising / Creative: Messaging and creative.

3. Corporate Communications: Message architecture and a cross matrix communications plan

4. Brand: A series of messages that are not aspirational, but align to the employee experience
or the direction you
wish to move it in.

5. Outreach: Participation in programs, events, etc. Create corporate ambassadors.

6. Social Media – With Google Analytics: A targeted strategy with landing pages that can be
supported by google
analytics to measure prospects to lead ratio’s.
As well as SOURCE of
prospect for more targeted
efforts.

7. Employee Experience: Integrate recruitment into diversity and employee experience
activities.

8: Recruitment Strategy:This moves away from marketing – but looking at a contingent
workforce strategy that
focuses on temp to perm with a marketing program that focuses on
improving conversion
rates.

MEASURE

What you will measure will depend upon the outcome of your upfront analysis. The metrics that may focus on the HIRE, the Brand (followers you create) and/ or hiring statistics
with a correlation to attrition and turnover.

Again, there is a cost to attract, hire and retain talent. The upfront recruiting process gets hit the hardest because it is the most visible. So good data will always
assist a business case!

For more information about building a recruitment strategy contact: Tfriend@brightfieldstrategies.com