Utilizing creative content marketing can make the process of hiring the best candidates easier. Here are some ideas you can adopt in your recruitment strategy.

The hiring process can be challenging. There’s a well-documented shortage of skilled workers, which makes the hiring landscape very competitive. How do you rise above the noise to attract the best candidates? You have to adopt a creative content marketing strategy.

Recruiters must use a variety of methods and platforms to effectively reach candidates, and social media channels are arenas that should be capitalized on in the hiring process. They offer a potential wealth of information about job seekers, which can be used to create specific personas of ideal candidates. Having a targeted audience will add precision and effectiveness to your recruitment marketing efforts and ensure that your audience will be receptive to your messaging.

Once you have your audience in mind, you can start to brainstorm some ideas for your recruiting material. Below we’ve listed five great content marketing ideas that are guaranteed to bolster your hiring efforts.

1. Blog Posts

Digital advertising still has a large part to play in the recruitment process, but internet users are now more wary of ads than they used to be. If you want to reach your candidate pool, you need to try something different. Leverage the power of the internet and users’ need for education and entertainment (or edutainment) by hosting a blog on your website.

Blogs are a great tool for putting a spotlight on what goes on behind the scenes at your company, sharing industry information, and announcing events. And it’s a powerful platform for establishing yourself as an expert in your field and developing a strong employer brand.

Posts can be authored by various stakeholders in your business, from the CEO to designers, software engineers, and more. Anyone in the company with an interest in writing can contribute to your blog. If done well, the end result will be a forum with a diverse cross-section of perspectives and insights.

Pro tip: be sure to use multimedia visuals when creating posts to make your brand personality come alive.

2. Brochures

Though print media has lost a lot of traction in the hiring process, brochures continue to be a great resource to attract job seekers. Brochures can accommodate a wealth of marketing content within a self-contained space. 

All the salient points about your company—your mission, values, and the specifics of the roles you are hiring for—can be included in brochures. They are the perfect non-digital accompaniment to any company’s blog.

If you don’t have access to a graphic designer, it can be difficult to make one from scratch. Fortunately, online tools with brochure templates make it easier to create high quality brochures quickly and efficiently, like the example below.

And the great thing about the digital sphere is that you no longer need to print brochures to distribute. You can include a downloadable PDF on your website or with job postings that your applicants can easily access.

3. Infographics

Infographics are incredibly useful resources for recruitment marketing—they combine the power of words, data, and visuals. Infographics make it easier to share relevant information in an easily digestible and attractive manner. Additionally, like brochures, infographics can easily be created using online templates. 

As a visual asset, they’re also versatile. They can be used on your company’s career site, blog, social media channels, in email newsletters, and digital advertisements.

4. Podcasts

According to the 2019 Infinite Dial Study by Edison Research and Triton Digital, among the U.S. population ages 12 and older, the total number of people who have ever listened to a podcast recently passed 50% for the first time. 

Podcasts have become an excellent way to share company news and views with a large audience. They make brands appear more personable and give them a voice that job seekers can relate to. You can feature a wide array of employees on the podcast to discuss their roles, organizational goals, and company culture.

There are tons of online resources to help businesses get started with podcasting. You’ll just need to set aside some time to learn the basics, a small amount of money for equipment, and before long you’ll be evangelizing your brand to a whole new audience.

5. Videos

Data from Cisco shows that by 2022, video traffic will account for 82% of all global IP traffic. Videos are essential to any content marketing mix and, therefore, should be prioritized by recruiters and talent acquisition professionals. 

There are a few great options when it comes to video. Behind-the-scenes videos of your company are always a good choice because they offer candidates a sneak peak into your company culture and can easily be posted across all of your social channels.

If you don’t have the resources to invest in video production, you can also host live video sessions on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube with nearly any smartphone camera. Many live streaming services on these platforms allow for viewers to engage the hosts, thus creating the perfect opportunity for job seekers to become better acquainted with your organization. 

Conclusion

There are a host of content marketing ideas for recruiters to tap into to strengthen the hiring process. And, as mentioned, many of them can be easily be created using free online resources. The most important thing to remember is that the outcome of your efforts should be authentic, true to brand, and an accurate portrayal of your company.

Ahead of Sourcing Success 19 on April 9th, experts from Recruitics, SmartDreamers, SmartRecruiters, and VONQ share strategies to win over today’s candidates.

Sourcing is defined as the early stage of the recruiting process in which recruiters – or specific ‘sourcers’ on larger teams – discover and reach out to candidates. Think of it like cooking, the better your ingredients, the better the meal at the end (controlling for skill, of course). Recruiting is much the same, you can save time and money while boosting the quality of hire if your team is sourcing the right candidates from the get-go.

Yet, sourcing the right candidates is a little more complicated than a trip to Whole Foods. As harrowing as the lunch rush can be,  –sourcers must define candidate personas, create campaigns, and nurture talent pools in a marketplace where attention is scarce and innovation is a must. Maybe one day your candidates are all on SnapChat, but that won’t be the case forever; sourcers are always on the lookout for the next channel or medium to capture their audience.

That’s where the experts come in! We talk to four Talent Acquisition leaders about their top hacks – all of which can be implemented today!

For more inside sourcing tips, be sure to register for our free online conference Sourcing Success 19, happening Tuesday, April 9, 2019 – 8 am PT | 5 pm CET

1. Make Sure Your Sourcing Fits Into the Overall Recruiting Strategy

Recruitics – Emily Tanner, VP Marketing

“One thing that will improve your overall sourcing initiatives is to ensure that sourcing is aligned with a larger recruitment marketing strategy and not just a standalone effort. Sourcing is just one piece (a critical piece) of a much larger picture that includes employers branding and candidate experience among other things. This is the best way to reach all types of talent (active, passive, and open job seekers) in order to attract and hire the best candidates.”

2. Run Remarketing Campaigns on Facebook and Instagram

SmartDreamers – Adrian Cernat, CEO & Founder

“Both Facebook and Instagram have an impressive set of options for advertisers, and savvy recruitment marketers are already integrating this functionality into their overall strategies. In particular, we recommend using “remarketing” campaigns, which let you show your ads only to users who have already interacted with your brand online. By doing so, you can make sure that you’re reaching the right audience with content targeted specifically to those users who already have some awareness of your employer brand. Since you know that these candidates have already reached the awareness stage in the candidate’s journey, you can confidently show them conversion-stage content and be certain that you’re not wasting your impressions. These users might be more overt in their interest in your business, and could be more receptive to a call-to-action encouraging them to apply to a specific job.”

3. Embed UTM Parameters in Your Landing Pages

SmartDreamers continued…

“Step one: pick the pages on your site that signify a conversion, typically the “thank you” page that follows a successfully submitted job application or otherwise entered your applicant funnel. Next, insert UTM [Urchin tracking module] parameters into the source code for those pages to enable tracking. With these codes in place, you can begin visualizing the journey that each candidate takes through your application process. This means that you can pinpoint each application to a specific campaign or CTA [call to action], while learning whether the applicant reached your site through email, social media, organic search, etc.

“Then, you can use this data to establish a baseline average for how well a typical piece of content should convert leads, and track the variations across different platforms. In doing so, you might, for example, find that your email subscribers are more likely than average to click on CTAs, but less likely to follow through to the actual application. Thus, you can take steps to optimize your email content to better direct users towards applying. “

4. Define What an Active Talent Community is for You

SmartRecruiters – Sarah Wilson, Head of People

“Without strategic campaigns, a talent community is just a dusty email list. Make sure you are nurturing candidates consistently with relevant information (a CRM really helps with this). Have your team define what an active talent pool would look like to them with deliverable KPIs attached, like decreased time to hire or increased number of qualified candidates.”

5. Create an Analytics Dashboard

VONQ – Marlies Smeenk, Head of Marketing

“Want to know how many people visit your career page, click on specific vacancies, or leave your page before filling out the application form? Do you also want to see where your candidates come from? The answer should be yes!

“Then make sure you track their complete candidate journey (from career page to vacancy text, from application form to the thank you page) you need to track the whole recruitment process – all the different steps. To see all these insights on your recruitment analytics dashboard, add tracking codes to your links. This way, you take the guesswork out of your recruitment marketing process and steer your own success. “

With a precise concept of the target demographic, recruiters can source with laser precision – here’s how!

It’s no secret that in the past five years, recruiting has espoused marketing tactics to attract passive and highly sought-after talent in this time of skill shortages, especially in technical fields. Email campaigns, creative advertising, and meetups showcasing the company culture and values are all popular means by which Talent Acquisition (TA) practitioners try to attract top applicants.  And they can be highly effective provided one thing, the team has designed these programs with their candidate persona in mind.

So what is a candidate persona exactly?

It’s very similar to the buyer persona used in marketing and sales, which Hubspot defines as “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

Replace customer with candidate/employees and you’ve pretty much got it.

A candidate persona is “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal [candidate] based on market research and real data about your existing [employees].”

Why bother creating a candidate persona?

Consider your candidate persona as the framework guiding your team’s creative efforts.

The truth is, defining your candidate persona prior to the launch of marketing and recruiting efforts will save you and your team a lot of time in the long run by ensuring those campaigns are well tailored to the people you want to attract.

The key here is research! But with so much information available in our digital world, it can be hard to know where to start. The following is a four-step guide to honing in on your target audience so you can start sourcing the best talent for your company.

1. Create a questionnaire

Below are some example questions, and largely they are similar to questions sales and marketing use to define their buyer persona, but there are some important differences. The questions your team use to define the candidate persona should not encourage bias, meaning protected classes such as age, marital status, religion, gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, should not be factors. For example, you wouldn’t want to say ‘my candidate personae is a 40-year-old married man who goes to church every Sunday.’ Even some non-protected classes like ‘level of education’ should be left out if the role could be filled by someone with equivalent experience.

• What social network does your candidate use?
• What types of music and podcasts does my candidate listen to?
• Where is your candidate in their career (Jr, Management, Sr. Etc)?
• What’s the biggest project my candidate has ever taken on?
• What are your candidate’s professional goals?
• What benefits does your candidate care about?
• What does your candidate do for fun?
• What are your candidate’s strengths and weaknesses?

2. Find Successes

Current and past employees know firsthand what the company has to offer, and what is missing. The goal is to be as precise as possible to create a better marketing and recruitment strategy, so it’s best to offer anonymity to ensure honest answers.

Look for people within the company (or outside if it’s a new position) who are successful in the role already. Talk to them to understand what motivated them to join the company, what career level they were at when they were hired, and if they know of any professional groups on or offline that you could approach to learn more.

3. Use your CV database

When using your CV database to surface applicants make sure to test your assumptions. Let’s say you are searching keywords to surface candidates, add in the resumes of people who were hired into that role previously to see if they appear in your search, if not then that search may be irrelevant.

4. Get online

Analyze the online behavior of some top candidates, including the type of content they share and with whom, their activities, their groups, etc. can provide insight into their motivations and interests.

If you engage in an online forum as a researcher, be sure to be respectful of the space and opt for the ‘quiet observer’ role. If you start spamming the feed, you will be removed and recruiters in the future won’t be allowed in.

What now?

Once you have your questionnaire completed and you feel like you know your candidate persona inside and out, it’s time to start engaging. Use what you have learned (not assumed, this only works if you get real information) to message your candidates effectively both in content and channel.

This can mean finding the right job board (check out Jobboard Finder) or even creating a ‘coding playlist’ on Spotify. Maybe your candidate persona loves a certain type of podcast so you want to advertise there, or they can’t get enough artisanal treats so you set up a booth at your local farmers market. Get creative, the sky’s the limit!

From her unique perch in TA marketing, this CEO has an unparalleled view of the industry that you’ll want to see!

HR tech marketing is a pretty small niche to land on but for Maren Hogan, CEO and Founder of Red Branch Media, it just made sense. This “dyed in the wool” marketer was introduced to the burgeoning world of talent acquisition (TA) through her spouse, who was starting a recruiting agency back in 2008. Though that year turned out to be a most inauspicious time to start a company – need we recall the Financial Crisis of 2008 – the adventure did set Maren on her path towards becoming one of the leading experts in the HR and Recruiting Tech industry.

She laughs while reminiscing how Red Branch Media was intended to be a small-scale operation that would allow her to tweet from the couch. However, demand proved otherwise, and eight years later Red Branch has become a full fledged agency with 50 employees and presence at most major TA events.

Now, Maren brings her expertise to Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco both a judge for the Recruiting Startup Awards and as the host of her own session, The Innovation Quadrant: How to Align You with Your Company. We talk with her today about what she has in store for us at the conference, and the role of brand in sourcing.

Can you give us a preview of your session?

My session, The Innovation Quadrant: How to Align You with Your Company, comes from my deep interest in what drives innovation within companies. I began looking at different types of innovation and building a quadrant for companies and individuals to map themselves based on the Global Innovation Index.

In our 30 minutes together, I’m going to give a simplified version of the innovation questionnaire I’ve developed, and attendees will grade themselves on a scale of A-to-D in each of the four quadrants: management, leadership, inspiration, and individual contributor.

You’ve said recruiters need to sell a job brand – not just employer brand. Could you explain the difference between the two?

Anyone who has worked at a large company knows the culture will vary in different departments, branches, or teams within the company and that’s why it’s important to get specific.

On a super high level, employer brand is the company’s value proposition and culture. I think of it as the promise a company makes towards all levels of its employees from VP to janitor. On the other hand, the job brand will speak to the unique culture of a group within the company, and the responsibilities of the role. It’s something that you have to work more closely with the hiring manager to figure out, including understanding what type of person does well in that role.

Why is it so important to get so specific when it comes to brand?

Maybe it’s my Omaha sensibility, or just my marketing standpoint, but it doesn’t make sense to me that a company would make a commitment to hiring someone without being sure they were the right person for the job. The average salary in the US is about 62k. That’s the cost of a house here in Omaha. I wouldn’t make that investment without being sure.

Talk to me a little bit about some new sourcing channels.

Obviously, sourcing channels are always evolving, the ones that were new and innovative a couple of years ago are no longer as relevant today. When I try to discover new sourcing channels, I put myself in the candidate’s shoes. Who am I? Where do I hang out, in person or online?

When people think sourcing, they generally think ‘online’, but sometimes it works to go super old school. I had one client sourcing college students and what worked there was posting signs in bar bathroom stalls.  

Another sourcer I know just kept a pile of candy on her desk and gave out a piece to anyone who delivered a name and number. It honestly worked more effectively than any $100 referral bonus program I’ve ever seen… I guess because of the immediacy?

It just depends on who you’re looking for aka your ‘candidate personae’ and where that personae will be.

You talk a lot about candidate personae, is creating candidate personaes something that is becoming more popular now?

Anecdotally I would say yes. I’ve been talking about candidate personaes for over five years now. It used to be when I asked a group who had candidate personaes for their job no one raised their hand, now almost everybody does.

Hear more from Maren Hogan on why she’s coming to Hiring Success 19 – Americas in her video below!

From employee highlights to engaging content, your LinkedIn page should be working overtime to attract the best employees.

While most businesses understand the power of social media from a branding and marketing perspective, many of their LinkedIn pages end up as little more than a glorified “About Us.”

LinkedIn may not be as colorful as Instagram, or as ubiquitous as Facebook, but it is a dynamic platform with plenty of options for building media-rich and informative pages that make an impact on visitors’ views of your company.

If your goal is to attract top-level talent, impress potential customers, and drive conversations important to your business—a compelling LinkedIn company page is a must-have. The question is, how do businesses create better LinkedIn pages?

Here are seven ways to improve your company’s Linkedin presence:

1. Cover the page basics

Before you go too far, make sure your page has all the basic information in place to make it a valuable marketing channel for your company. That means including the:

• Company name and URL
• External website link
• Company details including industry, company size, company type
• Logo (300×300 pixels is recommended) and tagline
• Company description (250-2,000 characters), utilizing industry keywords.

A LinkedIn page without this information will feel incomplete—and according to HootSuite, completed Company Pages receive twice the number of visitors of those with incomplete pages. These pages are better optimized for search as well.

2. Populate your updates with branded imagery

You’ve spent time and money creating a visual brand for your business—show it off. Consistent use of your logo and colors within your updates gives your page a professional look and helps you stand out among the 30 million other pages on LinkedIn.

3. Use Showcase pages to highlight recent work

Whatever new projects, products, or campaigns your business is working on, use Showcase Pages to provide them their own voice. This not only gives your LinkedIn a larger digital footprint, but it ensures that each initiative has a dedicated page that you can use to target specific audiences—particularly helpful when recruiting talent for a particular role or team.

You can promote and optimize these pages with keywords, just as you do with your main page.

4. Use Career pages to appeal to great talent

LinkedIn as a whole can be used for a number of purposes—but Career Pages are now specifically where businesses can promote their company culture and newly opened roles. Use Career Pages to share the story of your company through videos, photos, and employee-created content. Pages like these will help potential hires understand who your business has already hired, and why.

5. Decide on a branding strategy for your page

If the content for your LinkedIn is all over the place and you can’t seem to get consistent engagement, first settle on a branding strategy. The strategy for establishing thought leadership—sharing perspectives on industry news and trends, product how-to’s, articles that reflect your mission—is different than the strategy for lead generation—sharing upper funnel and lower funnel content like tip sheets and case studies.

You can always change your strategy over time as your objectives shift, but don’t try to do everything at once.  

6. Write short and “spicy” updates

LinkedIn recommends you keep your updates “short, sweet, and spicy.” That means text that is 150 characters or less, with an eye-catching point of view or statistic, with relevant hashtags.

Other aspects of a quality update include: using a call-to-action, adding a quality image (in the range of 1200×627 pixels) that is branded and matches the messaging, with a vanity URL that you can use to track traffic.

Speaking of URLs: Links are important, and posts with links get 45% higher engagement than those without. That said, the occasional post without a link—meant to simply pass along a message, not send readers to your website or other landing page—can also have a big impact.   

7. Follow best practices for content engagement

It can be difficult to garner engagement for your posts—and engagement is how to expand your network to reach influencers, thought leaders, and talent. Best practices for increasing engagement on LinkedIn include:

• Share effective, oft-shared content such as eBooks, SlideShares, infographics, case studies, how-to content, vivid visuals, and themed posts.
• Create targeted updates. You can alter your target audience by variables like geography, job function, seniority level, and more—and then post content that appeals to this narrower scope.
• Create your own, non-stock images, with stats and text embedded directly in them.
• Use free visual tools like Haiku Deck (creates excellent presentations for web sharing) and Piktochart (builds beautiful charts, graphs, banners, and other visual content).

An enticing LinkedIn page will make tapping into other people’s networks and finding great talent easy. Start thinking of your LinkedIn as an extension of your company brand, and you’ll no doubt find other ways to impress your peers, competitors, and future employees.

Here’s what will define Talent Acquisition (TA) in the coming year, and how your team can win in the 365 days ahead.

2018 was defined by deep, recruiting-AI integrations, including the first AI native to an applicant tracking system (ATS) in the form of SmartRecruiters’ SmartAssistant, and a data security revolution heralded by the general data privacy regulations (GDPR) in Europe, as well as similar legislation around the world.

No story ever ended neatly at the stroke of midnight on December 31st. We will continue to see AI take root, and data security will remain top of mind. Yet, as a new year begins, one can’t help but look back at the last journey around the sun to identify the lessons that will prepare TA for the next 365 days.

To understand better the trends and challenges of 2019, we sat down with CEO and founder of SmartRecruiters, Jerome Ternynck, to learn how a new ‘marketing’ outlook shaped by a laser-focus on candidate experience, and a mastery of tech, will get TA into the boardroom this year.

Five Predictions for Talent Acquisition in 2019

3 min 26 sec video

1) Recruitment marketing or bust…

“Source candidates like an outbound marketer. End-to-end recruitment marketing, branding, and candidate relationship management systems (CRM) with consumer-class candidate experience throughout — Recruiters need to leverage the whole gamut by proactively sourcing, building talent pools, and nurturing relationships in order to compete for top talent in today’s candidate-driven market.”

2) Diversity and inclusion are ‘non-negotiables’…

“If you don’t have a strong D&I strategy (there are many ways for it to be simple but effective), you’re losing the long-term talent game.”

3) TA is boardroom-ready…

“We’ve always known that hiring success = business success, now it’s time to show the world. This is how we’re going to do it: Today’s leading TA Suites provide you with all the data and insights you need to drive hiring success and, by extension, business outcomes. A simple hiring success dashboard with net hiring score, velocity, and budget metrics is easy for a boardroom to grasp. It’s no longer about faster and cheaper — it’s all about the value created! We tried it, our customers adopted, and it works.”

4) Think ‘global’, act ‘local’…

“With more and more companies evolving towards distributed workforce models, often spanning across 3-5 offices/countries, your TA strategy needs to be global, yet your tools and processes need to be local. Think detailed configurability within an overarching collaborative platform as the staple ingredients for a successful recruiting strategy.”

5) Digital savvy is the ultimate differentiator…

“Tech, tech, and more tech. From AI and blockchain to chatbots and scheduling, it’s all happening online. These digital solutions have made it possible for recruiting to deliver results to the boardroom. Growth strategy will increasingly depend on tech stacks, and the partnership between vendors and customers will be key to driving business growth.

Necessity breeds invention, and that’s what we’ve seen with TA over the last decade. As the talent economy becomes more competitive, tech rises to the challenge to support recruiters and bring hiring to the next level.”

Your team is ready to select a CRM, but are you really? Here are four points to discuss to get the most out of your tech investment.

To begin, a candidate relationship management system (CRM)  is all about creating a great relationship between your company and candidates – even before they know they’re candidates. It’s not as creepy as it sounds! As part of a Recruitment Marketing strategy, a CRM allows your recruiting function to create talent communities and deliver targeted messaging that builds and nurtures relationships with passive candidates.

So, when it comes time to fill an open position, you already have a pool of vetted talent waiting to apply.

However, much like a treadmill, a CRM only works if you use it correctly. Everyone has seen how a mighty exercise device can quickly become a clothing rack in the garage… it may still have a purpose, but it’s a degraded one. And, if a laundry place is truly what you needed, then you could have spent $5, instead of $300.

Unfortunately, without the right strategy, a similar fate often befalls business-tech solutions. An organization makes a big investment in a new tool, and expects it to solve everything, and, when results are lagging, people get frustrated and use the system at a diminished capacity or not at all.  

But “strategy” is an intimidating word, and we often think of it in the wrong way. So, before we get started, let me tell you three things it doesn’t mean:

• Strategy doesn’t mean magically predicting the future.
• Strategy doesn’t mean making every decision right now and you can never change.
• Strategy doesn’t mean finding the one right way.

Don’t get overwhelmed by the buzzword and get back to the basics of strategy, define why you want this tech, what you want to get out of it, who will do what, and when will take time to assess/adjust.

Why CRM?

Talent is key to business growth, but it’s also scarce.

In a 2017 survey from GlassDoor, 76 percent of hiring managers found it difficult to attract the attention of qualified candidates. Given there has been a predicted labor shortage since the early 2000s, the only reason we are experiencing its effects so late is a consequence of the 2009 financial crises, which caused both a hiring slump and forced many baby boomers to delay retirement.  

And it’s not just a deficiency of skilled-workers, there just aren’t enough people in general. Even industries like hospitality and manufacturing are feeling the squeeze. Thomas Lee, head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, a private equity firm in New York, foresees the US to fall short by  8.2 million workers from 2017-2027.

All this means that employers have to work extra hard to be an employer of choice. The candidate is the new customer, and every touch-point has to be positive as well as purposeful so that your business can grow at pace with your goals.

 What do you want your CRM to do?

The desired capabilities and outcomes of implementing a CRM will be very personal to your team/organization. Once you’ve defined the need, this is a great time to bring your team together to ideate about wishes and goals. Here are a few common ones:

• Boost communication: Information flow is going both ways, you are sending candidates updates about the company, as well as collecting refreshed data about them.
• Activate talent communities: Without strategic campaigns, a talent community is just a dusty email list. Make sure you are nurturing candidates consistently with relevant information and check-ins. Have your team define what an active talent pool would look like to them with deliverable KPIs attached, like decreased time to hire or increased number of qualified candidates.
• Track team efficacy: Once you have defined what success is, then you can start measuring your success. Pinpoint effective messaging and notice trends in your communities to make each campaign better than the last.

Who will do what?

Teams tend to break down CRM in two distinct ways, either sourcers manage the CRM and recruiters the ATS or sourcers build the talent pools and hand them over to recruiters to manage. There are pros and cons to both. Solution one works because recruiters tend to be more motivated by recs that are open now, and may find it hard to divert their attention to the groundwork of talent pool maintenance, which doesn’t have an immediate payoff. And solution two functions well because it asks the sourcers to do what they are best at, which is to scrape info and build talent pools, and doesn’t assume they are also marketers. Your solution will depend on the skills of your team, and remember, you can always adjust!

Learn more about native vs non-native CRM here!

When will you assess and how will you adjust?

Even if everything is going great, it’s still important to assess your progress with your team and give everyone a chance to say if they’re happy, and if they aren’t – why?

Don’t be afraid to experiment, but start small and get bigger. Now, that doesn’t mean small in terms of risk, it means small in terms of buy-in. If you are rolling out a new 10-page strategy every quarter, other departments, and even your team will start to ignore everything. So, if you want to change it up, find a few key stakeholders to run the test first and if it is successful, expand. That way you aren’t fatiguing the goodwill of your coworkers.

The final takeaway of these points is that you are investing in a tool for your arsenal, not a genie. So the best way to make sure CRM is effective is by getting your team to buy-in. Remember, these are the people who will use it every day so they have valuable insight into their needs and pain points, make sure to listen!

Nowhere are the stakes higher for recruiters than in the military. Find out how these TA pros hit 70 thousand hires in a year, and why your team should start practicing drills.

Though they may not be actively engaged in combat, Army recruiters have one of the toughest jobs in the military. In 2018, US Army recruiters were tasked with enlisting 70k new recruits by the end of the fiscal year. With the Pentagon working to boost the number of active service personnel to 500k by 2024—a five percent increase over current numbers—these quotas are will only increase in the coming years.

With unemployment at record lows, the US Army has revamped many of its traditional recruiting practices in order to hit these ambitious goals. Many of these same strategies can also be useful to recruiters hiring in the private sector, as the current talent shortage affecting industries from tech to healthcare present similar challenges. Here are four Army recruiting strategies that civilian recruiters can learn from.

1. Proactively Recruit through Community Engagement

Sergeant First Class Duggan Myron has a saying: “First contact, first contract.” It’s no secret that high schools are one of the top sourcing-channels for military recruiters, but Myron takes a more proactive approach to finding potential recruits. He contacts faculty, teachers, and guidance counselors ahead of the school year to build rapport, creating channels of communication so that students who have questions about joining the service, or perhaps need career advice, are directed to recruiters for more information.

An effective method for recruiters—military or otherwise—to reach the people they want to hire is by being actively involved in their communities. For Army recruiters, this means participating in community events, sports games, and school functions to demonstrate they aren’t simply robots looking to fill quotas. Perhaps your company would consider sponsoring a youth sports team, or throwing a block party.

Communities aren’t always geographical; it’s about identifying the places where your ideal hires come together—online forums or networks, colleges, professional groups—and nurturing them. CRM solutions top the list of 2019’s best recruiting tools for enhancing sourcing so that recruiters can attract and hire great talent ahead of demand.

2. Sell Your Organization’s Purpose

After the US Army switched over to a volunteer model in the wake of the Project VOLAR during the 1970s, they began promoting careers within the military. They currently offer 150 different career paths in fields like engineering, law, and medical, as well as unique roles like band officer or culinary specialist. For many, enlisting in the Army is a way to learn vocational skills, travel, and earn a steady income not available elsewhere.

When talking with potential recruits, Army recruiters spend time figuring out what motivates them, and how to tailor their message to best suit that. “You can’t just tell a recruit everything he or she wants to hear,” said Myron. “You’re more of a life coach.”

According to research from CECP, a coalition that promotes greater corporate social responsibility, organizations that care about social good retain employees 23 percent more than organizations who don’t. Greater employee retention means happier, more engaged, and more productive employees, with fewer open positions.

Get to know your candidates and find out what they want in their career path in order to best sell your organization’s benefits and purpose.

3. Be Honest and Upfront

“The best message to get through to somebody is harsh reality,” said Sergeant First Class Joshua Morrison, and with thousands of US troops currently deployed in conflict areas like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the Army doesn’t want disillusioned soldiers or early washouts to find out after they enlist that this isn’t the right career path for them.

Managing expectations is a daily routine for recruiters, and is hugely important when speaking to candidates. Today’s workers have fewer qualms about leaving a job if they feel the responsibilities or culture was misrepresented. In fact, 17 percent of employees quit within their first three months of starting a new job, eating up company time, resources, and creating a poor company image.

4. Focus on Recruitment Marketing that Truly Resonates

Gone are the days of patriotic Army posters featuring a sincere Uncle Sam pointing at the reader. At the time, the call to serve one’s country in times of war were enough to drive new enlistment, but that strategy doesn’t work with today’s recruits.

In 2015, the Army Marketing and Research Group partnered with McCann Worldgroup to roll out “the Army team” campaign. These 60-second, black-and-white commercials focused on the many aspects of service and sacrifice, while highlighting the virtues of enlisting. No longer focused on the individual, the language used in these ads is more inclusive and pluralistic, and has since established a major presence on social media through hashtag and veteran outreach efforts.

“Research has shown that Gen Z is all about making a difference,” said James Ortiz, director of marketing at the Army Marketing and Research Group, “a difference for family, for community, for their country, for the world.”

Today, the US Army is heavily invested in employer branding, and its efforts to reach recruits goes beyond simply pointing a finger. Modern companies who want to attract and hire the best talent need to find ways of presenting compelling messaging accompanied by a candidate-facing brand that showcases why their organization is where today’s candidates want to work.

LinkedIn’s march across Europe has hit a bulwark in local-focus career-site, Xing. Whether the Hamburg firm can hold its ground is a notion the American juggernaut is keen to challenge.

“Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”

In 2015, the infamous auto-greeting took the hallowed mantle of being bland enough to caption nearly every New Yorker cartoon, ever. (The third phrase to hold the distinction, actually). Twitter piled on, appropriately and as expected.

@frank_chimero pic.twitter.com/brbcUjSpyY

— (@williamPriceIII) September 22, 2015

Then, in 2016, LinkedIn was acquired, by Bill Gates’ brain trust at Microsoft.

In fratty, frenemy-laden Silicon Valley, Microsoft hadn’t so much lost its swagger, but in the age of the App – or the age of Apple – failed to amass any such virtue. LinkedIn’s image wouldn’t be getting any rub-off cred. But when fresh CEO, Satya Nadella, bought LinkedIn for a ballsy, some said misguided, $26 billion, all report cards since have been passes, and “Microsoft hasn’t intervened that much, considering the vast scope and price tag of this integration,” said eMarketer analyst Jillian Ryan. Far from curling up in a Mountain View garage, the site has since thrived, becoming the largest online business network in the world.

One anecdotal cause for LinkedIn’s uptick was scandal-ridden Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, pulling back on actual news in the FB newsfeed. For LinkedIn boss Jeff Weiner’s platform, a feed more business-focused and cat-video-free was an easy vacuum fill for an arguably more serious user base.

But LinkedIn’s news feed is the only notable upgrade to an interface. Microsoft’s true intentions in buying up and then being all hands-off were not to give LinkedIn a new UX. Your LinkedIn profile is your ever-searchable CV, and with 546 million global users in over 200 countries and counting, that’s some seriously valuable data. This is not a run-down fixer-upper, this is a massive data mine. Although with all eyes watching personal-data flow thanks to Cambridge Analytica and GDPR, better to play it like Jimmy Conway after the Lufthansa heist in GoodFellas. “Didn’t I tell you not to buy anything big, not to draw attention to yourself?”

(Pic Credit: Forward Press)

Aside from nefarious motives to remain outwardly shabby, LinkedIn’s always functioned as a backdoor recruiting and referral portal, both for passive candidates or unsatisfied employees. Now, with paid premium features for jobseekers, and new integration into Microsoft products like Office 365 and Word, it’s a far more effective one, bringing in almost $1B in revenue for Microsoft in their last reported quarter. Staffing and Recruiting is Number One on the platform’s top-five most-connected industries list, and Human Resources is the most-connected job function.

And those stats are increasingly global: India now has the second-largest number of users after the US, doors have opened at EMEA HQ in Dublin, and Amsterdam has become the platform’s second-most connected city, the Netherlands the second-most connected country. Rolling into Holland’s much larger, more linguistically immovable neighbor, however, is another matter. In Western Europe’s unflappable, industrious heartland of Germany, LinkedIn has a kaiser to unseat.

Also founded in 2003, Hamburg’s Xing remains the number-one business-based social network in Europe’s German speaking countries (Germany, Switzerland, and Austria: “DACH” in Germacronym), with 14.3M users, 994,000 subscribers, and €187.8M ($220.1M) in annual revenues.

Felix Altmann, Xing’s Senior Manager of Corporate Communications, lays it out: “We are not only the biggest, but also the fastest growing professional network in the region. In 2017 we grew by two million members. Of course there is competition, but our market position is very good.”

Xing remains the market leader in Germany, but LinkedIn, with 11M members in the DACH region, has already pulled ahead in Austria, and doubles Xing’s reach in Switzerland.

“LinkedIn has been growing by approximately a million members every six months since February 2015,” says Christian Byza, Senior Product Manager for LinkedIn Germany, “and we continue to grow, with more than two new registrations per second.”

Byza sees the company’s 11M users as a strong step towards a potential 25M, and opening a second German office in Berlin – after the first in Munich – for 15 to 20 employees later this year, he says, “shows the high importance of the DACH region for LinkedIn.”

Almost all 30 blue-chip German companies on the DAX exchange, as well as leading medium-sized companies such as Carl Zeiss, Hager Group and Sixt now use LinkedIn solutions for recruitment, marketing and sales, and yet, at least in public, Xing remains nonplussed. Xing knows their German-speaking base, and they know it intimately. LinkedIn’s global approach doesn’t matter to a firm looking to hire a bunch of secretaries in Bremen, the thinking goes. A successful car-parts manufacturer in Stuttgart would have no use for a French or English speaker, let alone need to hire outside of DACH. 

Marius Luther, founder and managing director of German job-matching app, Heyjobs, is unconcerned. “The majority of the German workforce is German-speaking only, without international contacts. For them, there is zero reason to use LinkedIn.”

But compare the two companies’ strategies in one area, and you can start to see where ground may start to shift. It’s not about UI, UX, or even language. It’s all about that backend: the Applicant Tracking System.

Last year, Xing shelled out €17M for Prescreen, a cloud-based ATS that will support the hiring process from job ads to candidate placements. “Xing is already a leading provider when it comes to modern e-recruiting,” says Xing CEO Thomas Vollmoeller. “Our acquisition of Prescreen will enable us to further consolidate this position.” As Altmann confirms, “Prescreen has been in the enterprise market before being acquired, and we have further plans to grow in that field.”

Sounds like one good ATS partner to have, alright. Though “LinkedIn currently has ten,” says Byza, “and more than a dozen others who have committed to enabling at least one of our core integrations, including Recruiter System Connect and Easy Apply. Our ATS integrations are driven by our partner ecosystem, and we will continue to work closely with them.”

The local stalwart, confident and assured, ignores the interloper. Not a stand without precedent, but a dangerous one.

Consider what LinkedIn did to its competition in France, or more, consider the case of StudiVZ. You haven’t heard of the now-irrelevant platform, but it was, to German students in the Noughties, what Facebook once was to American Ivy Leaguers. When Facebook made its foray into Germany in 2006, it offered four percent of its stocks to take over the VZ networks, but the Germans said no, and today, VZ is floating around the fringes of the web trading stories of what could have been with Tom from Myspace.

Many in the recruiting game consider this attitude a slow suicide. As Daniel Wüstenberg wrote in Stern, the exodus to Facebook was “sometimes creeping, sometimes abrupt, but it was clear: StudiVZ was no longer cool. Cool was now Facebook, it had more features, it was more international.”

Berlin-based Anna Ott brings two decades of experience in TA, recruiting, and HR tech to her current role heading Unleash’s startup ecosystem, and ”stopped using my Xing account years ago. I needed something more international,” but “eighty percent of the Germans I meet at talks or conferences use Xing as their base,” she says.  

Ott, who says she’d be lost without her LinkedIn account,  entertains the idea that “LinkedIn will take over in DACH,” but estimates, at least for now, there is value in both platforms, however, “everyone in the TA game is hunting and hiring people globally. Xing’s problem is that in the digital age, talent is scarce and we have to look outside our usual zones.”

(pic credit: Sprout Social)

Along with the Prescreen ATS, Xing acquired Internations, “the biggest network of expats worldwide,” says Altmann. So while Xing isn’t exactly battening down its regional hatches, it’s hard to see how Internations, essentially an expat meetup group, could compete with LinkedIn’s inherent “globalness”.

HeyJobs’ Luther doesn’t even see the issue in these terms: “The job market is differentiated and dispersed. Xing and LinkedIn are databases that recruiters use to find candidates, but it’s not the best place to hire at scale.”

Given that LinkedIn and Xing’s products cross the line of competition with Heyjobs, Luther would say that, but his views point to a larger issue: that the XinkedIn solution is not necessarily the final one.

“If I were the Xing CEO,” says Ott, “I wouldn’t be afraid of Linkedin. He still has a comfortable zone and reason to exist in Germany. I would be afraid of who will disrupt Linkedin. Whoever kills LinkedIn will also vaporize Xing.”

And who would have the power, the panache, the deep pockets to pull off something like that? The world’s number-one search engine, of course.

“If you’re searching for jobs that can be posted, by Google, in a Google ad,” explains Luther, “that’s how the company will enter the job board market, which will wipe out smaller job boards, and then you’re looking at a new Indeed.”

“If you’re actively searching for jobs – which is a decreasing part of the market – then Google can show you jobs within their own Google Jobs product at the top of the search results page,” explains Luther. “That’s how the company will enter the job board market, which will wipe out smaller competitors, and then you’re looking at a new Indeed.”

And while Xing and LinkedIn monetize their corporate users with the metric of “the more you pay the more your job ad will be seen,” says Ott, “Google Jobs’ UI is designed for employees, not employers, so smaller companies that Xing or LinkedIn wouldn’t chase will become more viable.”

And who knows, if that works, maybe it’d be time to resurrect and implement the stalled social network, Google Plus. And if that were to catch on? It may not be long before we live in a digital monopoly, and start receiving new sets of automated invitations, ones that would read something like, “Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on Google Jobs.”

Both concepts are candidate-facing, but your company won’t reach top talent unless you integrate them with your overall TA strategy.

Today’s job seekers have more employment options that ever before, empowering them to choose the right company based on fit. In response, businesses are moving away from traditional methods of candidate attraction (public job boards, cold outreach) in favor of more employer brand-focused efforts that target talent before they apply. With this shift, two key elements—employer branding and recruitment marketing—work to achieve a common goal: attract and hire the best possible candidates.

Companies that don’t understand the difference between employer branding and recruitment marketing risk misrepresentation and brand inconsistency, which in turn creates a poor candidate experience. Creating a positive, candidate-facing company image means your company is primed to attract the 75 percent of job seekers who consider an employer’s brand before even applying for a job.

What is Employer Branding?

More than just a marketing tool, employer branding is the external image that attracts active candidates and converts passive candidates, as well as the internal image that retains employees. Employer branding also encompasses your company’s impact on customers, employees, and society at large.

To define your company’s employer branding, you need to look at the core elements of the company’s mission, values, and vision. From there, you can define other important factors such as your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and candidate personas, which are essential to answering the question of what makes your company a great employer.

The best employer brands are consistent across all communication channels—social media, word of mouth, company pages, and job descriptions. These brands find ways to take the internal narrative of satisfied employees and turn it into the external narrative that attracts candidates. With 52 percent of today’s job seekers combing through company websites and social media pages to find out more about an employer, a positive and clearly defined employer brand is your company’s “first impression”.

For companies, a strong employer brand has a positive, bottom-line impact on three major recruiting metrics: time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and quality-of-hire. According to LinkedIn, companies with great employer branding see 50 percent more qualified applicants, hire at a rate of 1–2x faster, and reduce cost per hire by 50 percent.

It’s important to note that employer branding serves as the foundation upon which an effective recruitment marketing strategy can be built.

What is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment marketing is employer branding in action, most commonly via social media campaigns and intelligent advertising spending. These methods are specific and targeted promotion designed to get your company message in front of the right candidate at the right time.

Being proactive in the pre-application phase of the recruitment process allows recruiters and hiring managers to build an inbound pipeline of qualified applicants, rather than the “spray and pray” method used with conventional job board postings.

Much like employer branding, great communication is essential to a recruitment marketing strategy. It’s important to think about how a candidate interacts with your brand—through paid media (job advertising); SEO traffic and company reviews (Glassdoor); and internal channels (company career sites, blog posts, live events, social media). A strong talent acquisition suite gives companies access to post on a variety of job boards, and allows recruiters to make data-driven decisions about where ad spend yields the highest ROI.

Another recruitment marketing strategy that goes largely underused is employee referrals. Compared to previous years, hires resulting from employee referrals is declining, thanks in part to the rise of recruiter marketing, but that doesn’t mean organizations should abandon their referral strategies, which still account for 27 percent of all company hires.

For most companies, their own employees are their biggest advocates, and tapping into your existing employee’s social networks to make and track referrals expands your sourcing efforts without any additional work. A robust talent acquisition suite leverages your company’s internal network to discover talent within your organization that may be the right fit for an open role.

Know the Difference and How to Use Both When Recruiting

As we’ve seen, competition among organizations to attract and hire top talent is fierce, and maintaining an edge over competitors means taking a proactive and forward-thinking approach to recruiting. Establishing employer brand across all channels should be your company’s first priority, as your company’s reputation as an employer should remain consistent over time while the tactics and methods of recruiter marketing should be adapted in response to industry trends. While both employer branding and recruiter marketing rely on each other to work optimally, recruitment marketing cannot work without an established employer brand. Once your organization has a strong understanding of what makes each of these concepts different, you can use them to ensure the right talent discovers your company before discovering your competitors.