Are you dreaming of a recruitment pipeline brimming with competent candidates, but you are struggling to turn that dream into reality? 💭 You can solve this by, quite literally, thinking out of the box. Pop out of the recruitment box, and into the marketing one for a change. 📦 A new perspective can do wonders for refining your recruitment strategy.
The customer is always right. 👑 This is clearly visible in the retail sector: large retail chains are giving it their all to offer their customers THE customer experience. Getting pampered or nearly worshipped has become something that customers expect when they walk into a store. Do you not treat them like royals? Be prepared for a bad review on social media.
This increasingly applies to applicants as well. New candidates expect a first-class customer experience and are no longer prepared to put up with impractical application procedures. This means no endless questionnaires, cover letters with too many criteria, or applications via email.
On top of that, only 20% of potential candidates are actively looking for a new job, leading to intense competition within a relatively small target audience. The other 80% consists of the elusive passive candidates. These people already have a job and don’t spend their time scouring job websites, but that doesn’t mean that they’d say no to a new and exciting offer…
The passive candidates may be the larger group, but if you don’t offer exceptional customer experience, you may be shrinking that group faster than it can grow. It’s not that difficult for candidate-applicants to find out everything about your organisation through social media, websites, or news articles.
The online presence of your organisation is incredibly influential in this day and age, and the candidates are well aware of that. To get a grip on this, you should consider every medium or channel that connects them to your organisation a touchpoint. These touchpoints play a crucial role in the customer experience.
Recruitment marketing combines recruitment with marketing techniques in the big search for new talent. 🕵🏼♀️ Simply put, we’re using both traditional recruitment techniques and several best practices from the marketing world to convince potential candidates.
Broadly speaking, recruitment marketing focuses on:
The search for potential candidates
Generating interest and engagement
Convincing competent candidates to submit an application
The ‘candidate journey’ plays a crucial role in all of this. Sorry, the what?
A candidate journey visualises all the touchpoints between you and the candidate during the entire application process. From the first moment the candidate hears something about your organisation to the final decision to hire or reject.
Recruitment marketing allows you to define each touchpoint in the candidate journey perfectly, so you can respond with the right communication at the right time. A ‘new’ candidate who clicks through to your vacancy page is showing interest in the position, so information about your organisation and culture are likely very welcome at that point. However, a candidate who recently applied and is revisiting your vacancy page probably prefers more information about the next stage of the application process.
A top-notch customer experience is all about offering the right message at the right time. It makes sense to approach a candidate in the first phase of the marketing funnel differently than a candidate in the third phase. So let’s take a closer look at the different phases.
Discover:
The candidate connects to your organisation for the first time in this phase. Maybe they come across your organisation on social media, television, or via the trusty word of mouth. The candidate will be especially curious to learn more about your organisation. As a result, the next touchpoints will likely be your social media channels, tv ads, and radio ads…
Engage:
After a few touchpoints in the first phase, your candidate has gained interest in your organisation. The next step is to visit your website and the available vacancies on it, prompting the candidate to think about applying. Here’s a tip: do you have an easy and attractive quiz to help the candidate figure out what position suits them? This will instantly increase engagement as well.
Attract:
This is the very last thinking phase before heading into the actual application, and the candidate is genuinely interested in your vacancy at this point. They will be eager to gather more information about the position and may want to get in touch to ask questions about the vacancy, your team, or your organisation. The vacancy page is the crucial touchpoint here: it should be crystal clear and provide an opportunity to contact the recruitment team. The way you answer emails will also influence the candidate’s decision to carry on or not.
Application:
This phase revolves around the application. Does the candidate simply send a cv? Do you require a cover letter? Or do you prefer a questionnaire? Will the candidate receive a confirmation email? These questions are worth considering because the way you communicate will make or break your organisation’s reputation. Pay attention to everything you say and write!
Selection process:
You will decide which candidates will be invited to an interview, and which will receive a rejection email in this phase. Your reputation is an important factor here: the explanation in the rejection emails will play a key role in the candidate experience. Will you provide detailed feedback or not? The touchpoints are the phone calls to invite candidates for an interview and the emails to reject unsuccessful candidates.
Hire:
The last step in the funnel is to hire or reject the final selection of candidates, making the phone call or email with your decision the final touchpoint. Your transparency throughout the application process will pay off here, and will prove to have been essential to the candidate experience.
It’s quite a task, we know. 😅 But if you monitor every phase and refine all your organisation’s touchpoints, you will undoubtedly reap the benefits in the future.
You need the right software and tools to gain full control over the touchpoints in the funnel. By using a mix of different digital tools and technologies (for example, Facebook Analytics combined with Google Analytics), you can track each candidate’s journey through the process. This allows you to provide the candidate with the appropriate information to improve their candidate experience through the different phases, resulting in a more pleasant and organised recruitment for everyone.