Recruitment Marketing Success comes when you think like a Marketer!

Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.

It is becoming abundantly clear that the recruiting landscape is increasingly changing. Companies are becoming more competitive and creative in the ways that they attract top talent. It's no longer viable to just write a generic job description, post it to a few job boards and cross your fingers and hope for some great candidates. Companies that want to be more competitive in recruiting need their recruiting professionals to see their roles less as an administrative function and more of specialized marketing role.

Recruiting is marketing in the clearest sense where you are trying to sell your product (your company & the position) to the best potential customers (candidates). All in all, the Best recruiting companies are the ones that have the best recruiting marketers. So how can you think more like a marketer in your recruitment marketing process. Here's a few areas you can focus on:

Messaging: Great marketers provide clear, concise messaging that accurately presents their overall value proposition. What are top 3 compelling reasons your company is a great employer? Identify these and make sure to highlight them in all your job ad and career site messaging. Lead with your best to make sure qualified candidates understand what you bring to the table. (I won't touch the job description vs. job advertisement issue here but understand that you need to treat your job postings as advertisements and not lists of qualifications.)

Broadcast: Having great concise messaging is great but it's worthless if nobody hears it. Utilize a variety of channels to broadcast your recruiting messaging from social networks to blogs to your internal employee email lists. Once you have your great messaging, let it run wild and spread.

Metrics: Any marketer worth their weight has built metrics to measure the success of their marketing efforts and recruiters should do the same. Set up and collect internal metrics that show you your recruitment marketing funnel is doing. A good internal metrics system can tell you a lot about your recruiting from potential bottlenecks in your funnel to under-performing recruiting channels to a broken apply process. Recruitment metrics can give you the pulse of your recruiting strategy.

You need to be able to change your mindset to recruit competitively. You have to not look at it as doing a candidate a favor for providing them with a job but as if they are potential customer (the best customer) looking to buy your product.

Think like a marketer and recruit better talent!

About the Author: Chris is the Marketing Analyst for SmashFly Technologies. SmashFly is the provider of the first recruitment marketing platform called WildFire that enables companies and staffing firms to easily distribute and more importantly measure the performance of their recruiting efforts online.

The WildFire recruitment marketing platform offers every tool you need for your recruitment marketing needs all in one centralized solution including Real-Time Recruitment Metrics, Job Ad Distribution (job boards, social networks, SEM, email & SMS campaigns), Recruitment Opt-In Database, Recruitment CRM, Web Commercials / Micro-sites and Resume Sourcing services.

Comment by Kristin Kalscheur on July 1, 2010 at 12:31pm: Great post Chris! Focusing on these 3 areas is the key to producing measurable results for your company and being perceived as a business partner and trusted advisor in your organization. I'm presenting on the topic of "How to Source Like a Marketer" at SourceCon and am excited to cover this topic. I'll be focusing more on segmenting candidates into target groups and coming up with unique strategies to attract and engage each group to convert prospects to leads and funnel them into the interview process or the pipeline for future roles. When recruiting is done right, it is done with a long-term goal of creating and cultivating a talent pool rather than just filling a job. Glad to see I am not the only one thinking this way. ;)

Comment by Chris Brablc on July 1, 2010 at 12:40pm: Thanks for the comment, Kristin!

And I agree I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking this way! Also totally agree that when recruiting is done right, the main goal needs to be creating and cultivating (& interacting with) your talent pool. One of the concepts we've been talking a lot about is the concept of a Talent Network. You don't want just to have a talent pool that you can pick from but a talent network that connects you with not only your candidate contacts but all of their contacts as well.

I look forward to hearing more about your presentation. Will you be recording it for viewing after SoruceCon?

Comment by Kristin Kalscheur on July 1, 2010 at 12:46pm: Agreed - pool vs. network is an important distinction. When you are recruiting the right way, your candidates will become your employment brand ambassadors and you'll become connected within their circles by default.

I'm pretty sure the conference will be streaming live on ERE and be recorded but can't promise.