One of the biggest challenges business leaders face today is this, “We can’t attract quality people who fit our company culture to come and work for us.”
Employee recruitment marketing has changed drastically over the past several years. If employers are running help wanted ads on job boards, that’s just not going to cut it anymore.
Today, job seekers are in the driver’s seat. Depending on where you’re at in the country, the job market is very crowded - with more available openings than prospective hires, potential job applicants have more options than ever before.
Job seekers are actively researching employers through online resources such as company websites and social media, review sites such as Glassdoor, Google and Facebook, so they’re more selective with the knowledge they have of each competing company’s strengths and weaknesses.
At InnerAction Media (IAM), we believe it’s time for some disruption in the recruitment marketing process.
Through years of experience, we have determined that the most effective way to recruit is by leveraging the job seeker’s research process for your recruitment marketing campaign. IAM has developed the following model based on eight years in the digital and inbound marketing space (modeled from the Buyer’s Journey).
2. Beginning Your Recruitment Campaign
4. Step 2: Interest
ORCHESTRATING AN EFFECTIVE RECRUITMENT CAMPAIGN
When you begin thinking about your marketing campaign and what that means for your business, you should complete a couple of steps, including developing a blueprint for your campaign in the context of our eight-step journey process. A Marketing Blueprint is a plan that can be built out into three phases:
In the Discover Phase of your Marketing Blueprint, you will outline some essential items, including your goals and objectives, geographic targets and buyer personas. As a business owner, you understand the importance of knowing your financial goals. The same is true to your recruitment goals, which could include increasing quality recruits, decreasing churn rate and increasing positive employee engagement. The information you place in this phase, like your goals, will help you leverage any marketing collateral you have later.
In the Build Phase of your Marketing Blueprint, you will begin developing the assets you need like a logo, brand guidelines, a website, lead magnets and content and blogging strategy.
Lastly, in the Implement Phase of your Marketing Blueprint, you will leverage the information from the Discover Phase to develop your marketing plan, which includes building a target audience, content calendar, traditional media strategy and finally, analysis.
In this critical first phase, we’re helping the ideal job seeking candidates aware that they are facing a potential issue like wanting a job that provides them certain benefits or that their current situation isn’t as impressive as they thought. Awareness develops for both active and passive job seekers through print, digital and social media channels.
In this stage, you’ll want to leverage an advertisement that includes a video - this tactic proves to receive higher engagement than any other posts. We recommend the use of high-quality videos to tell the stories of your current employees who have found success, fulfillment and prosperity by working with your company.
InnerAction Media follows a specific formula for most of our videos, based on the Storybrand Process. It is a seven-step process that includes:
To tell this story for a video, we have a process at IAM that starts long before we begin rolling. That process is pretty simple, but it does take some time.
Once the script is approved, we move on to the production phase:
Two examples of recruitment films that IAM has produced include First United Bank and Trust and NextGen Federal Systems.
The first video is the one for First United Bank and Trust. First United was very passionate about their company culture and wanted to hire the right people who would not only fit in but thrive.
We interviewed several people and I believe we were successful in not only capturing the essence of the culture but showing the viewer what a gratifying career they could have.
Our next recruitment film was for NextGen Federal Systems. NextGen is an advanced software solutions company with locations in three states. NextGen has experienced rapid growth and wanted to find quality software engineers to fill positions.
So, although the subject matter was different - the process was the same:
When job seekers are aware of the issue they face, you need to tell them why they should take an interest in your company. They’re ready to learn about the company as an employer, and they understand what it would be like to work there. Through your advertisement, you can target the best candidate prospects by geography, demographics and psychographic profiling. All ads should be directing the job seeker to a specific website landing page.
Here is an excellent time to create information that a job seeker might download and “opt-in” to your recruitment marketing funnel by providing name and email address in return for the downloadable “New Hire Information Packet” ebook, for instance. These lists can be segmented into multiple lists so that you can continue the lead nurturing sequences and automated workflows.
In this phase of the recruitment marketing funnel, the job seeker is almost ready to take action and apply for a position. Companies need to provide detailed information about each open role so that job seekers can see if there is a position that would be a good fit for them.
We recommend beginning an automated working to continue lead nurturing. Again, use videos, blog articles and other content to help tell the story of why this could be a great fit. You can also leverage your social media and other traditional media content to educate potential candidates.
An important point to remember in the consideration phase is that passive job seekers may have a longer “buyer’s journey” in that they are not actively seeking a new opportunity. That doesn’t mean they are saying “no” to our efforts…it means they are saying “not yet.” Therefore, to optimize the investment we’ve already spent to get the job seeker’s attention, interest and consideration, we should continue to nurture that prospect via email, retargeted digital ads, etc., until they opt-out or join the team.
Every industry is different and the timing could be dependent on what you are looking for, so it’s essential to do your research. For example, from our research, we know:
Now, with that being said, it is understandable to begin a campaign if you are in an emergency.
The analytics you look at will be dependent on the goals you have outlined before executing your campaign; however, the top piece of information you should be keeping in mind are:
With just these three-piece of analytics, you could utilize a regression model to show how positive or negative the correlation is between the employees brought in during that particular timeframe and your marketing campaign.
If you like what you are hearing, and believe that we can help you, give us a call at 304-241-4959 or fill out the form below: