Reducing Time-to-Hire for a British Charity with a Bespoke RPO Solution
A higher education charity partnered with PeopleScout for a bespoke RPO solution, reducing time-to-hire for professional and academic roles, with a challenging four-week timeframe.
82%offer acceptance rate
extended partnership beyond initial project
44days from brief to offer acceptance
Situation
Our client, a charity, works with higher education institutions across the world to improve higher education for staff, students and global communities. The charity organisation needed to fill 30 roles across a range of job families and levels, including professional and academic positions.
They had a challenging timescale of just four weeks to go-live. Plus, they were facing several challenges, including an ambitious growth strategy to support their multi-year plan for which filling these roles was critical.
They engaged PeopleScout to augment their small in-house team, increasing capacity and boosting speed, through project RPO.
Solution
Our skilled senior recruiters acted as brand ambassadors and became an extension of the in-house team, optimising and managing our client’s recruitment process from attraction to offer for a four-month bespoke RPO solution. PeopleScout managed each role in its entirety, from briefing through to verbal offer acceptance, including creating a sourcing and attraction plan for each role.
As the client was a first-generation RPO client, we were able to quickly identify the need to make proactive recommendations based on labour market analysis and recruitment best practices, working collaboratively with the hiring managers. As part of the project, we utilised Avature to enable better data analysis. This helped the client to make better data driven decisions, monitoring their EDI agenda and improving the candidate journey.
Throughout the project, we gathered market feedback and tracked hiring metrics, presenting it through bespoke dashboards to guide hiring decisions. The organisation received weekly reports and regular analysis of market insights, salary benchmarks and candidate feedback.
We also leveraged the expertise of a dedicated PeopleScout recruitment marketer to create engaging copy and advise on the best supplementary media options to target our talent audiences. Our recruitment marketing strategy included a social media attraction campaign to further increase brand awareness in the market. Plus, we built a custom landing page, which showcased the charity’s employer value proposition (EVP), which help to attract high quality talent.
On top of these attraction efforts, our recruiters directly sourced passive candidates to further raise our client’s profile in the market.
Results
Our consultative approach to hiring and our tailored strategies for each role resulted in:
An 82% offer acceptance rate.
An enhanced candidate and hiring manager experience, which led to the charity extending the partnership.
An increase in diversity within the roles filled.
A reduction in average time from briefing to offer acceptance, which dropped to just 44 days
AT A GLANCE
COMPANY UK-Based Higher Education Charity
PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Talent Advisory
Award program champions the very best in recruitment marketing and communications
LONDON – April 25, 2023– PeopleScout won Best Use of Single Film in the 33rd annual RAD Awards, for their recruitment marketing campaign for Westminster County Council.
Considered by some as the “Oscars of the industry,” the RADs celebrate great creative work produced by ad agencies in partnership with their clients, as well as in-house teams. Entries are rewarded for innovative and effective solutions in the employer branding, talent acquisition and retention space.
PeopleScout’s winning entry was the film “All Kinds of Extraordinary,” the story of an employee named Shofa who, inspired by the memory of her deceased brother, creates and runs initiatives in London to help young and often underprivileged citizens achieve their potential.
“We are delighted to receive this recognition for our creative use of film to drive candidate engagement,” said PeopleScout’s UK Managing Director, Jonathan Porter. “This is testament not only to our team’s expertise and innovation, but also the open-mindedness of our client and the trust we’ve built as their talent partners.”
RAD Award winners are selected as part of a rigorous, two month judging process with both online and in-person sessions. This year’s RAD Awards winners were celebrated by hundreds of creative experts from across the recruitment advertising industry at a ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London. RAD Awards winners were chosen out of 21 categories.
PeopleScout’s UK-based talent advisory practice provides world-class expertise in employer branding, recruitment marketing, assessment, DE&I consulting, talent market insights and more. Their passionate team of problem solvers—from psychologists and creatives to strategists and technologists—offer a depth and breadth of experience gained over 30 years of creating award-winning strategies for clients across the globe in every sector.
By Simon Wright, Global Head of Talent Advisory Consulting
Your career site is a one-stop shop where candidates can learn about your organisation, evaluate your employer value proposition (EVP), and find opportunities. It’s not enough to simply list your job openings. Candidates are savvier than ever and want to be informed about your organisation before they apply.
Your career site is a crucial resource for candidates as they research your organisation and roles, playing a pivotal role in the candidate experience. For our recent research report, Inside the Candidate Experience, we audited the candidate journey—including the career sites—of 217 organisations across sectors. When we compared the findings with candidate survey data, we found that many career sites were lacking when it comes to providing the experience candidates expected.
In our Talent Advisory work with companies around the world, we often find that organisations seem to be under the impression that candidates visit the career site just once—to submit an application. In reality, we see candidates come back again and again throughout the recruitment process—usually before an interview and again when they receive an offer. Modern candidates, who are used to social media and e-commerce experiences, think of your career site as a content hub rather than a brochure—and you should too.
Here are five career site must-haves to create a positive candidate experience:
1. Intuitive Career Site Search Functionality
The first rule of career sites is to ensure that job openings are easy to find. That means ensuring your job descriptions can be found via Google and that your career site is easy to access from your corporate website. But it goes further—are your job openings searchable on your career site? Can your job listings be accessed from everywhere on your career site?
Candidate expectations are increasingly fueled by consumer experiences. So, employers should take a page from the e-commerce book and streamline career site experiences by offering relevant job searches. This means candidates can navigate quickly and easily to the types of roles that interest them. We’ve helped our clients up-level their job postings by featuring relevant content for certain jobs, including employee spotlights for someone who’s currently in the role and even recommending similar positions that the candidate may be interested in.
Search doesn’t just apply to your job openings. Does your site have a universal search accessible from every page? To satisfy today’s informed candidates, you must make it as easy as possible for candidates to find the content that matters to them—whether it’s information on your benefits, your sustainability statement, or your DE&I efforts.
2. Information About Your Organisations’ Mission and Purpose
Historically, candidates have given rewards and benefits priority when it comes to their career decisions. However, our study confirms a change in candidate expectations following the pandemic, with more value placed on flexibility and organisational philosophy.
The top things candidates look for when evaluating a company are:
Flexible working and work/life balance
Mission/purpose
Rewards and benefits
Career development and mobility
Company values
Half (50%) of candidates say an organisation’s mission and purpose are key influences on their decision to apply. This is true across generations not, just for Gen Z.
With mission/purpose in the top five considerations for job seekers, it’s concerning how few organisations have this information on their career websites. We found an organisation’s mission and purpose less than half (48%) of the time on the sites we evaluated. This means that half of employers are missing an opportunity to make an emotional connection with their talent audiences and help candidates understand how the role they have applied for fits into that mission. If candidates can’t find your mission on your careers site, they won’t even look at the roles you’ve got.
You might be thinking, we’ve got that on our corporate website. Can’t we just link to it there? As soon as you send a candidate away from your career site, they’re less likely to come back to apply. Streamline the candidate experience by giving candidates the information they want in the same place where they can submit an application.
3. Content Featuring Real Employees
During our diagnostic, we evaluated career sites to see if a diverse group of real employees was represented. We found that 35% of organisations don’t feature real employees on their career site. In addition, 60% of career sites don’t contain any video content in which employees share their personal journeys and stories.
Yet, when asked how hearing from actual employees would affect their job search, 86% of respondents said they value hearing employee stories. This is especially important to Baby Boomers with 92% saying it would influence their decision to join an organisation. Plus, one in three women also believe it’s critical.
Videos that show a diverse range of employees in their real work environment help candidates see themselves in the role and at your organisation. The number one obstacle for candidates when it comes to applying is not knowing what it’s like to work at an organisation. So, brands that can show candidates what their day-to-day tasks will look like in a role will see more applications and higher-quality candidates.
4. Information on the Recruitment Process
Setting expectations and giving advice on the recruitment process after you’ve piqued a candidate’s interest is an often-overlooked way of improving the number and quality of applications you receive. If candidates are unsure of what they’re getting themselves into from the start, they will likely pass over your position entirely.
In our candidate experience diagnostic, we found that information about the recruitment process was lacking. Only 13% of employers offer candidates the opportunity to speak to a recruiter or current employee before applying. Just a third of career sites (34%) featured frequently asked questions (FAQs) or advice to support candidates throughout the process (31%).
Less than a third (28%) of the career sites we assessed gave an overview of the key stages of the recruiting process. This information can help set realistic expectations for candidates, reduce their anxiety during the recruitment process and reduce drop-off. Plus, outlining the steps of the candidate journey has the added benefit of making your recruitment process more accessible to hard-to-reach talent groups, supporting your brand’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.
5. An Opportunity to Join Your Talent Community
As consumers, we’re accustomed to subscribing to offers and news from our favorite brands. Sharing tailored content via marketing automation tools is a simple, yet effective way companies build engagement with prospective customers until they’re ready to buy. Talent acquisition leaders can use a similar approach in their recruitment efforts.
Concerningly, only half of organisations (53%) give candidates an opportunity to register their interest or to sign up for job alerts. Even fewer (39%) encouraged candidates to join a talent community. So, you could be unknowingly turning away talented candidates if you don’t provide a channel for staying in contact with your company. When new roles come up, your talent pool of qualified candidates should be your first port of call.
Candidates wait an average of nine months between joining a talent community and applying for a job. So, maintaining talent pools and communicating with them regularly allows you to demonstrate to candidates what they are missing by keeping them warm until the right job becomes available. These communications should go beyond the standard job updates in order to showcase the value of your employer brand and what they’ll gain by joining your team. Organisations that can successfully implement this strategy will outperform the competition in securing top talent.
By David Macfarlane, Head of Employer Brand and Insight
Candidates have never had higher expectations. They are more well informed than ever, and today’s candidate-led market means they’re less tolerant of poor experiences. With 83% of candidates sharing their poor experiences with friends and family, and 54% taking to social media to voice their discontent, organisations who create a positive candidate experience will achieve better recruitment outcomes.
Yet, in our recent research report, Inside the Candidate Experience, we found that the gap between what candidates want and what they get still remains wide—but it can be made smaller. While there is no such thing as a perfect recruitment process, improving the candidate experience will improve your organisation’s ability to attract and hire great talent.
Through our work with some of the world’s largest brands, we’ve distilled the candidate experience into these five essential elements.
Your candidate experience should set you apart from other employers at every stage of the candidate journey. In addition to being a crucial component of the hiring process, the candidate experience serves as a sales tool that persuades top talent to join your organisation.
Your candidate experience should be unique to your brand and help you stand apart from other employers hiring for similar roles or skills. For example, does your situational judgement test put the candidate in the work environment they’re applying to join? For candidates, the pre-employment experience is a test drive for what it’s like to work at your organisation, so make sure you’re bringing what makes your culture exceptional to your candidate experience.
2. Elevates the Employer Brand
Your candidate experience should be distinct from your consumer experience by reflecting your employer brand—the perception and lived experience of what it’s like to work for your organisation. That means all of your candidate communications should be branded—not just with your logo and brand colours, but it should be written in a way that reflects your culture.
Your tone of voice, your career site, your photography and design should all reflect what it’s like to work at your organisation. For example, for our client, The AA, we created AAbot, a chatbot with expressive animations and cheeky banter that brings The AA’s playful personality to life. By seeing your employer brand reflected consistently across each interaction with your organisation, candidates gain confidence in your employer value proposition.
3. Is Informative, Clear and Direct
Candidates want to know upfront what to expect during the application and recruitment process before they apply. Yet, our research found that only a third of organisations (34%) had career sites that featured frequently asked questions (FAQs) or advice to support candidates throughout the candidate journey (31%). Less than a third (28%) gave an overview of the key stages of the recruiting process.
This is about delivering the right message at the right time in the right way to help them understand where they stand and what happens next. Plus, you should express this information in plain language. Make sure you’re using verbiage that your candidate would use rather than your internal terminology. A candidate looking for a hotel job is more likely to search for “housekeeper” than “environmental services engineer.”
4. Embraces Technology
Increasingly, employers are taking a page from the consumer experiences created by e-commerce brands. Many organisations are embracing social media tools (like the one-click apply option on LinkedIn) to increase the simplicity and convenience of applications.
At the very minimum your application should be mobile optimised. But really, with over 90% of candidates using a mobile device in their job search, your candidate experience should be designed for mobile first.
A mobile-first application means the candidate doesn’t have to fill in information contained in their CV. This may seem basic, but we found that nearly 40% of organisations ask candidates to duplicate information that was already contained in their résumé or CV.
In our modern world, a great candidate experience means a candidate can submit an application while standing in a queue—with one hand, via their mobile phone—before they’ve reached the front. Can your current tech stack do this?
5. Puts Candidates in the Driver’s Seat
Something that many talent acquisition teams don’t appreciate is that candidates don’t perceive the recruitment process as a funnel. They’re the main character in their own story, and they want to be treated that way.
Candidates want to engage in their job search on their own terms. So, anytime they encounter a roadblock to getting the information they want, especially if they don’t know what to expect in the next stage, means they’re more likely to drop out of your process. By creating transparency within your recruitment stages, you empower candidates to opt in or out from recruitment process—ultimately improving your hiring outcomes.
When it comes to applying for and accepting new jobs, candidates have more options than ever before. Companies with poor candidate experiences will lose out on the top talent as employers battle for the best prospects.
So, how does the average candidate experience stack up against candidate expectations?
According to PeopleScout’s most recent research, less than two in 10 candidates rate their experience as excellent.
For the Inside the Candidate Experience 2023 Report, we used our proprietary Candidate Experience Diagnostic to audit the candidate journeys of over 215 organisations worldwide. Then we compared this to data gathered via a global survey of over 2,400 job seekers.
The findings reveal a significant gap between candidate expectations and the reality they face while looking for jobs, gathering information to support their decision, and applying.
Here are three surprises from our research:
1. Less than half of employers show information about the organisation’s mission, purpose or values on the career site
Yet, they’re in the top considerations for applicants when deciding to apply.
Your takeaway:
Candidates want fulfilling employment and a company that upholds their values—especially Gen Z and Millennial workers. In fact, one in five Millennials state that an organisation’s goals and mission are their top priority when considering a job. By not featuring this information on your career site, you’re passing up an opportunity to create an emotional connection with your candidates.
2. Just half (53%) of organisations provide an opportunity for candidates to register their interest or to sign up for job alerts
Even fewer (39%) prompted candidates to join a talent community.
Your takeaway:
Modern job seekers are more sophisticated than ever and are looking to grow a career, not just apply for jobs transactionally. In fact, on average nine months goes by between a candidate engaging with an employer and applying for a job. Maintaining a talent pipeline lets you build a relationship with your talent audience and ensures you get the best talent, not just those who are looking at the time a vacancy arises.
3. 44% of organisations did not provide an opportunity for candidates to give feedback on their experience
Plus, men are more likely than women to be aware of opportunities to provide and receive feedback during the recruitment process.
Your takeaway:
This is a major oversight for many organisations. If you’re not leveraging surveys to gather feedback from all of your candidates, you are passing up valuable insights that might help you enhance your employer brand, lower attrition and shorten your hiring cycle.
The candidate experience is a hot topic, and most talent leaders I speak with appear to recognise the value of improving the candidate journey. However, this research demonstrates that organisations still have work to do to live up to the standards of today’s job seekers. My hope is that our recent findings will mobilise talent acquisition teams to put real action behind their words and make bold moves to improve their candidate experience and speed up the pace of progress.
Targeted Recruitment Marketing Campaign Delivers Talent for Global Theme Park Brand
During a unique time in the market with remote and flexible work options becoming the norm, this multinational chain of family theme parks required help hiring for critical in-person roles including customer service, performers and lifeguards across two of its major U.S. theme parks. PeopleScout helped hire over 1,500 workers using recruitment marketing campaigns and our talent advisory expertise.
1,500+hires made in just six months across two locations
reduced drop-off by streamlining the application process
30,000clicks from recruitment marketing ads across social media and online display networks
Situation
This multinational chain of family theme parks required help hiring a variety of roles across its California and New York resorts including customer service roles, performers and lifeguards.
Solution
PeopleScout conducted in-depth market research to determine the biggest challenges the client faced when recruiting for their theme parks and resorts. We identified remote work, “candidate is king” and higher pay as the three main challenges facing the client. Here’s how we solved each:
Challenge #1 — Remote Work:
More people want flexibility. Front-line and hourly positions are less attractive to candidates after the growth in remote work during the pandemic.
Our Solution: We leveraged the client’s “play” branding to emphasise the fun and rewarding aspects of working on-site at one of the theme parks. This was fed through into recruitment marketing creative and copy.
Challenge #2 — “Candidate is King”:
With open positions outnumbering candidates for much of recent memory, today’s candidates know their worth, and the Great Resignation is proof that people are less willing than ever to settle.
Our Solution: By testing alternative job titles, improving job copy, and reaching out on different channels, we were able to widen our reach and pool of candidates. We strategically targeted candidates most likely to apply for the roles, such as those looking for seasonal or part-time jobs.
Challenge #3 — Higher Pay:
When faced with increased living costs, candidates are demanding higher pay.
Our Solution: The client was not in a position to raise wages for these roles. So, we got creative by restructuring job copy to better position the client’s competitive benefits. By quantifying these benefits and putting them front and centre on job postings and recruitment marketing materials, we were able to generate interest without raising wages.
Results
In the first six months, we were able to fulfil our goal of 1,336 hires in California & 190 in New York.
The client’s previous application had up to 22 sections where the candidate had to input information. PeopleScout optimised and shortened this candidate journey by employing a variety of channels including Indeed One-Click, Indeed Hiring Events and Talent.com. This reduced the application abandonment rate.
PeopleScout restructured job descriptions to create job advertisements. In other words, we rewrote the copy to focus on the value the client and the role have to offer their employees rather than what the client wanted from candidates.
PeopleScout performed A/B tests to determine which job titles would help reach a wider pool of candidates. For example, we found that “Waterpark Attendant” received almost 300 applications in the first week, while “Lifeguard” received only 15.
Social outreach using Facebook, Instagram and Google Display Network resulted in 4.1 million impressions and 30,000 clicks across the California and New York audiences.
Global Banking School: Increasing Offer Conversion to 87% for a Suite of Hard-to-Fill Roles
Global Banking School (GBS), a higher education provider offering a range of sector-relevant courses, turned to PeopleScout for Project RPO to fill 35 professional and academic roles across eight campuses in London, Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds.
Roles filled through strong collaboration
87%Offer acceptance rate across all roles
Increased diversity within roles filled through targeted messaging and sourcing
Enhanced candidate and hiring manager experience
Situation
GBS needed to fill 35 roles across a range of job families and levels, including professional and academic positions. They had a challenging timescale of just four weeks to go-live.
GBS was facing several challenges:
Some of the roles had been out to market several times, in some cases for up to a year, with little traction.
As an educational institution, face-to-face teaching is a vital part of the student experience, and therefore essential for the client. GBS needed this to apply to staff availability as well and wanted to avoid a two-tiered approach for academic and non-academic roles. This meant the client was unable to offer remote or hybrid working models. In a market where candidates have more choice around how and where they work, this resulted in a low interest from candidates.
Sourcing from other higher education institutions and universities meant the audience was hard to engage.
Hiring managers were disengaged due to high workloads. Plus, the previous recruitment processes were transactional and didn’t keep candidates engaged.
The hiring managers also had competing priorities, which meant the overwhelmed internal recruitment team were struggling to obtain the required information to fill the roles.
Solution
Our dedicated and skilled recruiters became an extension of the in-house team, optimising and managing GBS’s recruitment process from attraction to offer for a four-month Project RPO solution. PeopleScout managed each position in its entirety, from briefing through to verbal offer acceptance, including creating a sourcing and attraction plan for each role.
Our team seamlessly integrated into the organisation’s culture, mapping the end-to-end candidate journey in collaboration with hiring managers. PeopleScout very quickly became trusted colleagues with the in-house recruitment team, and through our consultative approach we offered recommendations based on our labour market research and feedback.
A dedicated PeopleScout recruitment marketer was brought in to reimagine the organisation’s messaging, job descriptions and attraction channels. GBS received a suite of copy, both bespoke to individual roles and templates which they could use into the future. Our recruitment marketing strategy included a social media attraction campaign featuring a one-click application.
On top of these attraction efforts, we directly sourced passive candidates to raise GBS’s profile in the market. Throughout the project, we gathered market feedback and tracked hiring metrics, presenting it through bespoke dashboards to guide hiring decisions. GBS received weekly analysis of market insights, salary benchmarks and candidate feedback.
Result
Our consultative approach to hiring and tailored strategies for each role resulted in:
An 87% offer acceptance rate.
An enhanced candidate and hiring manager experience.
Increased diversity within roles filled.
AT A GLANCE
COMPANY Global Business School
PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Talent Advisory
ABOUT GBS Global Banking School (GBS) is a higher education provider with campuses across the United Kingdom. GBS offers a range of courses in banking, management and healthcare designed to enhance students’ career prospects in the financial services industry.
Competition for talent is steep, with high demand from contact centres, hospitality, retail, security, travel, logistics, healthcare and even government entities. In fact, 65% of companies have high-volume recruitment needs. Organisations across sectors are struggling to stand out in today’s competitive talent landscape, but for those talent leaders trying to meet their high-volume recruitment goals it feels like an impossible mission with soaring attrition rates, labour shortages and record job vacancies.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the top challenges you’re probably experiencing with high-volume recruitment and offer some ideas to address them.
What is High-Volume Recruitment?
High-volume recruitment involves sourcing, screening, interviewing and hiring large numbers of applicants for similar openings or job types. It requires a tricky balance of keeping substantial quantities of job applicants moving through the recruitment process at speed. Plus, throughout the year it requires talent acquisition teams to scale up quickly to meet seasonal demand, like for holiday shopping periods or during peak travel times.
ebook
9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges
COVID-19 was a mixed bag for high-volume recruitment. Retail and logistics workers were less severely impacted by furloughs and layoffs due to the “front line” status of grocery stores and the growth in online shopping. However, other industries, including the travel and hospitality sectors, were hit hard as lockdown came into force.
The following trends are shaping the high-volume recruitment landscape:
Increased Competition: Job openings have grown by a third since 2019, yet job seekers per opening have fallen by half. Plus, employees who were let go during the pandemic may feel resentful of their former employers and may have moved on to other roles in other sectors.
Attrition is Skyrocketing: A massive 41% of the global workforce is considering quitting their jobs and only 20% report feeling engaged at work. In a recent survey, 55% of hiring managers cited retention and turnover as the number-one issue impacting their ability to hire—and their company’s ability to thrive.
Candidate Expectations Have Changed: Modern candidates have modern expectations which are more aligned with today’s consumer experience. They want digital-first experiences—on their mobile phone—and fast responses. In fact, they expect acknowledgement of their application immediately upon submission, first contact from a recruiter within 24 hours and regular updates on the hiring process in a timely manner.
High-Volume Recruitment Challenges and Solutions
In this challenging landscape, how can employers stand out from the competition and attract a large number of candidates quickly without sacrificing quality?
We’ll tackle three of the top challenges below and offer strategies you can use to get ahead.
Challenge: Ghosting and Candidate Drop Off are Rampant
Many organisations are not prepared to support the current pace of hiring. Candidates are much less tolerant of long recruitment processes and pauses in communication from employers, so organisations who can move the fastest are more likely to have their offers accepted. Plus, those doing high-volume recruitment are seeing an increase in candidates dropping out of the funnel even in the application phase. If applying for a position is too complicated or too long, candidates won’t complete it. Online applications with 45 or more questions have an abandonment rate of nearly 90%.
Solution:
An RPO partner can help you evaluate your recruitment processes and identify opportunities for efficiency. They may suggest steps you could eliminate or combine and introduce tactics to help reduce the time between steps to help you keep pace with candidate expectations and reduce ghosting. They can also take over time-consuming steps like reference verification and background checks, leaving your team to focus on moving candidates through he funnel faster.
RPO providers also have access to the latest talent acquisition technology which can automate parts of your process. Leveraging CRM technology enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI), your RPO partner can nurture candidates through automated recruitment emails and even SMS messages. Texting is also a great way to screen candidates and automate interview scheduling, eliminating manual steps and accelerating your hiring timeline. By automating some of your candidate communications, you keep candidate engaged and reduce funnel drop off without increasing the workload for your recruiters and hiring managers.
Challenge: Desperation to Fill Vacancies Results in Reduced Quality-of-Hire
Increased attrition from the Great Resignation is leading to productivity loss. Many businesses have been forced to close stores due to lack of staff or because they don’t have enough staff to assist customers in a timely manner—in-store, in-branch or in the call centre. The customer experience suffers which results in decreased sales and revenue loss, leading to some talent acquisition teams and hiring managers making bad hires out of desperation to fill vacancies.
With tight competition, time-to-offer has become a competitive differentiator. Often hiring managers may skip some interview or assessments steps in order to speed up their processes and keep talent in the funnel, leading them to compromise on quality-of-hire. Candidate without the right skills can also impact your customer experience.
Solution:
Challenge your assumptions or your hiring managers’ assumptions about the type of skills and background that are really needed for your roles. This will help you understand what experience is necessary for talent to have coming into the role and what can be learned on the job. We did this for one of our high-volume RPO clients that was struggling to hire for customer service roles. By interviewing their most successful customer-facing employees, we helped the brand realise that past customer service experience was not a predictor of future success, but rather employees stressed the amount of problem solving they had to do in their daily tasks. Not only did this expand their pool of talent, but it also helped to increase the quality of their hires and reduce attrition.
To support this, you should also rethink your candidate assessment so that it evaluates not just hard skills, like the ability to use a point-of-sale system, but also soft skills like empathy, attitude and work ethic, which are increasingly important for high-volume hiring. At PeopleScout, we’ve developed our whole person assessment model specifically for high-volume hiring. Through this we’ve helped many organisations create an assessment process that can identify and excite great candidates without extending their recruitment timeline.
Challenge: Leaning on Hiring Managers to Recruit is Leading to Burnout
A high-volume RPO solution helps augment your resources by acting as an extension of your in-house team. An RPO provider can handle everything at scale from sourcing and pipelining, screening, interviews, assessments, reference checks, offer management and more—whatever you need to free up your in-house recruiters and hiring managers to focus on more high-value tasks. Plus, RPO partners have particular focus on keeping hiring managers informed—whether it be ensuring they’re prepared for interviews or delivering feedback from candidates afterwards.
One of the biggest value-adds that RPO brings is experience with the latest talent technology innovations. An RPO partner can help you assess talent acquisition software to address all aspects of your recruiting process, from sourcing talent to creating a more efficient candidate experience. Your provider can show you how emerging technologies like AI, machine learning and predictive analytics can boost your speed and hire quality. Your hiring managers will love not having to spend so much time on administrative tasks.
Conclusion
The current talent market can’t be conquered with your old talent acquisition strategies. A high-volume RPO solution offers a range of approaches to help organisations attract, process and hire a large number of candidates. Whether you need to revamp your employer brand or to augment your in-house recruitment team, an RPO partner can help crank up your high-volume recruitment program.
Recruitment marketing is now an essential stratagy as the talent acquisition landscape is more competitive today than it has been at any point in history. Specifically, the global talent shortage stands at 40 million workers and is forecasted to reach more than 85 million by 2030, costing employers around the world more than $8 trillion in lost revenue. This means that, to stay ahead, employers need to implement new strategies and reimagine what talent acquisition can be; talent leaders need to be able to draw in candidates in the same way that brands draw in consumers.
To make that process even more difficult, the types of offerings that job-seekers want from a potential employer has shifted dramatically in the past few years: According to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends Report, since 2019, there’s been sharp growth in members posting about the following topics:
The data is clear: Candidates are seeking employers that can provide flexibility and a greater work/life balance. As a result, organisations that excel at highlighting a company culture that’s compatible with current talent market trends will remain competitive in the hunt for talent.
As a talent professional, you may not think about marketing as a recruitment function. However, a large part of ensuring that your talent pipeline is stocked with the best talent involves making sure that your organisation is an attractive place to work for candidates. Thus, recruitment and marketing need to work together. The job of a talent acquisition team is more than just hiring great talent; it also includes attracting talent and enticing them to commit. In this four-part section, we’ll cover how employers can leverage modern marketing techniques to recruit and better engage candidates at each stage of the recruitment marketing funnel.
Recruitment Marketing and Hiring Strategies Part One: The Case for Implementing Modern Digital Marketing Strategies
Typically, consumers require engagement across multiple touchpoints before deciding on a purchase—and it’s up to an organisation’s marketing team to facilitate engagement at each stage of the sales funnel. Job-seekers are no different and often need multiple interactions with an organisation’s employer brand before applying for a role; in this case, it’s the job of the talent acquisition team to facilitate these interactions throughout the recruitment funnel.
Granted, the stages of the talent acquisition funnel depend on an organisation’s hiring practices, but we can make some generalisations. For the purposes of this article, we’ll cover three vital functions in the recruitment marketing process: 1) attracting active and passive candidates, 2) converting candidates and 3) closing candidates. During each of these functions, talent teams need to properly engage and nurture job-seekers with the right recruitment marketing strategies. Below, we outline smart recruitment marketing strategies for sourcing passive candidate and active candidate engagement.
Talent Attraction: Sourcing Passive Candidates
According to LinkedIn, 70% of the global workforce are passive candidates, with the remaining 30% of talent actively seeking jobs. With that in mind, the first—and arguably most important—function in recruitment marketing for talent acquisition teams is to determine a strategy to attract candidates. Of course, candidates may already have some idea of your organisation as a consumer brand, so the main objective of this stage is to introduce your organisation’s employer brand to job-seekers for the first time to improve recruiting passive candidates.
At this stage, your engagement with candidates should be designed to gain and retain their interests, with the hope of converting them later in the recruitment marketing funnel. As such, building employer brand awareness and providing positive candidate experiences is key. For instance, consider how candidates will perceive your organisation through the channels listed below. Will they have a positive view of what it’s like to work for your organisation? Do they get an accurate picture of your company culture?
Converting Passive Candidates
The main marketing priority for talent acquisition teams during the passive candidate conversion stage should be to steer candidate interest into action, thereby converting them from job-seekers into active prospects in the talent pipeline. This step occurs when candidates gain a positive impression from the touchpoints they encounter in the attraction stage.
Fortunately, there are various methods for converting candidates. For example, they can sign up for a newsletter, register for an event or request job posting updates via your career page. And, while they may not have applied to any of your open positions yet, they’re interested enough in your organisation to provide their contact information. Similarly, employers can also leverage talent communities to convert candidates looking to connect with other professionals in their industry. Remember, to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), just make sure to collect two types of consent when collecting personal data (such as email, phone, address, name, etc.) from applicants.
Additionally, at this stage, keep in mind that you’re asking candidates to provide your organisation with two of their valuable resources: Time and personal information. Next, at the conversion stage, you’re asking for contact information, but only a small amount of time. Then, to get to the next stage, candidates will have to give your organisation even more of both. Therefore, in the touchpoints listed below, consider what the experience is like for candidates; is it positive and easy enough to get someone to a closing stage?
Closing Candidates
During the closing function in recruitment marketing, talent teams are managing a flow of vetted and engaged candidates with a goal to turn these candidates into applicants. This means that candidates are willing to take the time to complete your application and provide you with a significant amount of personal information. Notably, the candidate is also making an emotional investment in your organisation; they’re excited for this role. As such, they could be setting themselves up for disappointment if they don’t make it through the process. For this reason, it’s important to consider what you’re asking of candidates to help get them through the closing process.
Furthermore, while closing prospects, your recruitment marketing materials should aid the candidate’s decision-making process by informing them of open positions, inviting them to recruiting events, or even proposing a virtual meet-and-greet where the candidate can casually meet with members of your team. Think about the touchpoints listed below and how candidates will experience them. Likewise, communicate about your interviewing and hiring process upfront for a more seamless experience for both candidates and hiring managers.
Closing Candidates
In parts two and three, we’ll go into greater detail on how talent acquisition teams can leverage modern marketing techniques to intelligently engage candidates at each stage of the recruitment marketing funnel.
Recruitment Marketing and Hiring Strategies Part Two: Creating Talent Acquisition Content That Engages Candidates
Content marketing has fast become a go-to channel for marketing teams looking to generate interest in products; gain leads; drive organic traffic; and build a library of informative and in-depth content for clients and prospects.
However, attracting both active and passive candidates with content isn’t limited to just marketing to potential customers; rather, recruitment departments can also harness the power of well-crafted content to convert job-seekers into applicants. In fact, content marketing can help talent teams engage top candidates in a number of thoughtful and meaningful ways that intersect with a job-seeker’s interests.
Effective content for recruitment marketing can also make a difference in moving the candidate along to the next stage. In particular, content marketing as a talent acquisition strategy should focus on engaging job-seekers with relevant articles, white papers relevant to their career interests, webinars, videos, or podcasts to help a candidate navigate through an employer’s recruitment funnel. When brainstorming recruitment content, look at industry publications and professional groups on LinkedIn to identify current topics of interest for candidates in your industry.
In Part Two of this section, we’ll discuss how to create relevant content and ensure candidates are able to find it.
Recruitment Digital Marketing: Considering Different Types of Talent Acquisition Content
An effective content marketing strategy includes a variety of content types to fill various channels and appeal to different types of candidates. That’s because some candidates may prefer to watch a video, whereas others would rather read an article. Likewise, some may like to learn in bite-sized pieces, while other appreciate an in-depth article. With that in mind, below are a few types of content to consider adding to your mix.
Recruitment Marketing Ideas: Leverage Your Career Blog
Your organisation may already have a blog where the marketing team regularly posts content for your potential customers. In the same vein, consider a blog on your careers site to better educate and engage candidates about what it’s like to work for your organisation.
Interviewing employees across all roles and asking them to describe how they got to where they are today
Sharing news about exciting projects
Featuring hiring managers to discuss the hiring process and post updates on upcoming events
Similarly, if you have strong writers on your team, ask them to write short blogs about their experiences.
Video Content
Video is a great format for recruitment content that often boosts candidate engagement. Take the booming popularity of video-based social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram as evidence that this is a particularly influential type of content for young workers. Video is particularly powerful on social channels, so consider amplifying your efforts by encouraging colleagues to act as employee brand ambassadors for your organisation on their social channels. Besides, job-seekers trust an organisation’s employees three times more than the company itself to provide credible information on what it’s like to work there.
If you’re just getting started in video, don’t worry about high production quality. Due to the popularity of tools like Zoom during the pandemic, as well as the proliferation of video on social media, candidates are used to watching basic videos. In fact, the authentic feel of these types of videos can often yield even higher engagement than professionally produced content.
Micro & Social Media Recruitment Content
Talent teams are stretched thin, so consistently creating long-form content may be challenging. So, if your team lacks the bandwidth to create long-form content, consider shorter, “micro content.” This might include sharing small bits of entertaining or informative news or industry updates with candidates on social media or micro-content platforms.
Social media, in particular, is perfect for micro content, with 94% of content marketers using social media platforms to distribute content. This content could include fun moments from the workplace, employee testimonials, or short videos of the company participating at a career fair or a conference. Essentially, content marketing is an opportunity to explore as many different ways to connect with your audience as possible; just remember to stay on brand and keep a consistent theme with language and design. This way, prospects will enjoy a more uniform and cohesive candidate experience.
SEO & Recruitment Marketing: Leveraging Search to Source Talent
If you take the time to create content for candidates, it’s important to make sure that they can find it easily. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of optimising a website to rank higher in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing—and doing so can help drive job-seekers to your careers page organically. In particular, well-optimised pages rely on homing in on and deploying the right set of keywords, as well as tailoring metadata for search and making sure the pages load quickly.
When done right—and in conjunction with high-quality content—SEO can lead to a great deal of traffic and conversions on a career site. Plus, leveraging SEO as a talent acquisition strategy makes sense, as 226 million job-seekers use Google each month to begin their job search. What’s more, 51% of all content consumption comes from organic traffic. Accordingly, with employers across the globe struggling not only to source and recruit talent, but also to increase retention, a smart SEO strategy is an integral component in the recruitment marketing arsenal.
Metadata
Meta titles and meta descriptions are the two fields that show up on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This is the page you see after typing something into a search engine like Google. Metadata makes it easier for Google to spot and index your careers page content on relevant search results pages. For this reason, your meta title should be clear so job-seekers immediately know the title and location of the job opening when they visit your page. The meta description is the caption beneath the title that describes the web page’s content in more detail. A tailored meta description helps Google and job-seekers quickly identify and interact with your content in the way that you intend.
When creating a meta description, try to stick to the following guidelines:
Limit it to no more than 155 characters.
Keep it clear and concise, with a call to action for job-seekers.
Reference the language of the page you’re working on to really nail your metadata.
Keyword Research
Although it can be time-consuming, researching and choosing the right keywords can also help you obtain greater visibility from qualified job-seekers, as well as increase organic search traffic to your site.
Begin by understanding which short- and long-tail keywords job-seekers use to search for jobs relevant to your company. You can also research which keywords your competitors are using in their job postings, as well as more comprehensive content, to inform and expand your keyword list. Notably, this may require job titles and descriptions to be altered. While you’re at it, pay close attention to keyword intent—the reason for a job-seeker’s search. Ensuring that this is part of your SEO recruitment strategy guarantees that keywords are aligned to your broader business goals. Additionally, if you’re a brick-and-mortar business, utilise locally focused keywords in your content to better reach quality candidates in close proximity to you.
Content marketing can also fuel other parts of the recruitment marketing mix, and email is the perfect channel to start expanding your content marketing programme. What’s more, content and email marketing campaigns can complement each other by increasing the sharing of content and expanding reach. In the next section, we’ll offer tips on how email marketing can give your content a boost.
Recruitment Marketing and Hiring Strategies Part Three: Email Marketing & Talent Acquisition
Email marketing has been around for decades as an effective means of prospect engagement. However, that doesn’t mean that you can just throw together an email, send it out and expect great results. Nowadays, prospects are savvy about techniques deployed by marketers and may become annoyed or tune out marketing messaging that’s done incorrectly.
However, when recruitment marketing email campaigns are successful, recruiters can engage candidates at the right cadence. According to a DataBox survey, 33.3% of marketers said they sent weekly emails, while 26.7% sent monthly emails. In this case, recruiters can leverage the expertise of their marketing teams regarding send times, email schedules and other data points to ensure that content is optimally delivered. Plus, well-cadenced and timely emails ensure that your employer brand is in front of prospects at the right time, making your employer brand more memorable to prospects looking to shift careers.
Furthermore, email recruitment marketing can be an effective strategy for distributing your marketing content to candidates, as well as building additional trust in your employer brand. Notably, 77% of consumers preferred email marketing over other methods of permission-based advertising. And, email marketing often produces results because the audience has opted in to receive marketing materials and wants to hear from you. (Plus, they can choose to opt out at any time.)
So, in this article, we’ll cover the different types of emails that you can use to interact with candidates; how you can use your content marketing collateral to boost the influence of your emails; and how to craft effective messages.
Types of Recruitment Marketing Emails
Email Newsletters
Marketing teams often send email newsletters to prospective and current clients to update recipients on company news, content, products, and other company updates. Similarly, talent acquisition teams should also consider creating newsletters to keep candidates warm.
Specifically, your newsletter could share thought leadership pieces from your organisation, webinars, job events and more. You can also use email newsletters to share the content marketing pieces you’ve created for your careers site. Or, link to articles on your careers blog or a video interview you’ve posted with a current employee. Periodical newsletters and other helpful content will also keep your employer brand top of mind and increase the likelihood of your talent community recommending you to a member of their network.
JobApplication Invitation Email
The first time many candidates hear from an organisation is when a recruiter or sourcer reaches out inviting them to apply for a specific role. These types of emails are common, and your recruiters likely already send them frequently. However, they can be made more effective.
For example, the goal of your email copy should be to gain a prospective candidate’s attention in the first sentence. Therefore, crafting an engaging, but brief introductory sentence or two helps the reader understand who you are and why you’re reaching out.
Typical recruitment emails often begin with an introduction of the recruiter, such as: “Hi, I’m a recruiter with {employer}. We have an open position you may be interested in.”
Instead, consider opening with: “Hi {Name of Candidate}, My name is {Your Name} and I noticed that your experience in X could make you a great fit for Y role at Z company. Would you be interested in setting up a time to discuss Y role and Z company?”
In the first approach, notice how the company puts itself ahead of the candidate. Alternatively, in a more personalised approach, the employer places the prospect at the heart of every communication.
Interview Invitation Email
If a candidate makes it further along in the recruitment funnel, you’ll likely send them an email inviting them to interview. And, when inviting a candidate to interview, it’s crucial that the following are included in your recruitment email:
Where the interview will be
The agenda of the interview
Who will be involved in the interview
Providing all of this information upfront will help everyone be better prepared, more productive and better focused on what matters during the interview. Below, we’ve outlined how to structure your interview invitation email:
1st paragraph: Quickly explain who you are and why you’re emailing the candidate so they know they’re being invited to interview, not apply.
2nd paragraph: Here, provide a date that’s best for your team or give a few options for the candidate to choose from.
Third paragraph: Offer a clear agenda to keep the candidate on track. This will also give the candidate a better idea of what to expect and help them prepare.
Fourth paragraph: Provide the location of where your interview will take place, including how to get there and who to ask for when they arrive. Or, if the interview will not be in-person, share instructions on how to interview virtually.
Offer Emails
Top candidates are often sent offers quickly after interviewing, so it’s important to reach out fast. The moment your talent acquisition team is ready to make an offer, be sure to include the following in your offer email.
First paragraph: Include a brief greeting and review of the interview you had with them.
Second paragraph: Get right to the point and congratulate them on the offer. Double-check everything and make sure that you’re presenting the offer in the best way possible in terms of candidate expectation, salary, benefits and work location. Many times, this information is the deciding factor as to whether the candidate accepts the offer.
Call to action: Remind the candidate that they need to take action, outlining when and how to take it. Also, include contact information in case the candidate has questions about the offer. Finally, to end this email with a persuasive punch, include a line about the candidate’s future with your organisation.
Best Practices for Crafting Recruitment Emails
Subject Lines
Subject lines are arguably the most important component of an email as 64% of email recipients decide to open emails based on subject lines. Therefore, while much of your focus may be on creating the copy and imagery of your email, you should also take time to write a great subject line.
More precisely, a great subject line is short, descriptive and provides a call to action (CTA). Unfortunately, many recruiting emails are written without mobile users in mind. But, with 41% of emails opened on mobile devices, it’s crucial to keep your writing concise because most mobile devices are only capable of displaying five or six words of a subject line. Also, consider a little personalisation in your subject lines. Personalised subject lines in email increase unique open rates by up to 27%, leading to an 11% higher click-to-open rate overall. Consider this option:
In this example, the sender has personalised the email by referencing a career milestone, while simultaneously inviting the recipient to have a low-pressure conversation. This approach appeals to the candidate’s experience and offers the promise of a career opportunity where future growth is possible.
Body Copy
While you may be tempted to share a lot of information in your cold recruiting emails, recipients might not have time for all of it. Conversely, a study by Boomerang found that emails with 75 to 100 words had the highest response rate; so, write short, descriptive and action-driven copy and provide only the essential information that’s relevant to your candidates. Additionally, avoid buzzwords or jargon so that your offer clearly stands out.
The labour market will likely remain highly competitive for the foreseeable future, with employers battling it out for candidates’ attention. And now, more than ever, candidates understand what they want from work and are trying to find an environment where they’ll belong and grow. So, to attract talent, it’s essential to show candidates that you’re offering more than just a job—and that begins with recruitment marketing that showcases the value you provide to candidates.
Remember, the goal of talent acquisition marketing is no longer to just post a job offer and wait for applicants; it’s about fostering a community, enriching its members, and helping to nurture and encourage them to consider a career with your organisation.
Part 4: Recruitment Marketing Strategy in Action: Bridging the Gap Between Consumer & Employer Brand for Vodafone
A well-managed and reputable employer brand can go a long way in helping organisations recruit better talent, improve hiring metrics and position an organisation as an employer of choice in their industry. In fact, according to Glassdoor, 92% of candidates would consider changing employers if they were offered a role within an organisation that had a good reputation. As a result, a strong brand can improve cost per hire by up to 50%.
Moreover, Glassdoor found that the benefits of a powerful employer brand extended beyond recruitment; consider that nearly 30% of candidates have resigned within the first 90 days of starting a role, citing misalignment between the employer and their employer brand. Conversely, organisations that actively invest in employer brand improve their turnover by as much as 28%.
At PeopleScout, we pride ourselves on our ability to partner with clients to hire top talent by building a strategic talent acquisition architecture with employer branding at its heart. So, in this article, we present a real-world example of how PeopleScout’s expert team of talent advisors provided employer branding guidance and delivered a recruitment marketing strategy for the campaign that attracted, engaged and hired the best talent for multinational technology conglomerate Vodafone.
Changing Minds
When an organisation’s brand is a household name, there’s often an overlap in sentiment between consumer and employer brand in the minds of the public—an association that can sometimes come with unforeseen complications. This was the case for PeopleScout client Vodafone. Its reputation among the UK public was one of a mobile phone retailer and nothing else—a perception that hurt the organisation’s ability to become an employer of choice among young people.
However, behind that perception, Vodafone is a multifaceted innovator in the technology and communications industry with a mission and purpose to make the future a better place. With this knowledge, it was up to PeopleScout’s team to reshape Vodafone’s employer brand in the minds of its target demographic: Newly graduated job-seekers who shared the company’s passion for improving communities and the lives of their customers.
Hiring with Purpose
In employer branding, purpose is the key to unlocking the way that an employer engages with job-seekers. Now, more than ever, job-seekers want more from their employer; they want to feel a sense of belonging and that the work they do has meaning and provides a sense of personal development. In fact, according to research from Blue Beyond Consulting of knowledge workers aged 45 and younger, 52% said they would quit their jobs if their employers’ values didn’t align with their own.
Notably, Vodafone’s future hiring strategy was focused as much on purpose as it was on placing great talent in the right roles. Its purpose was to address high levels of youth unemployment head on by committing to hire up to 100,000 young job-seekers with digital workplace experience. Then, Vodafone set another ambitious goal: To support the development of digital skills in 10 million young people, given that one in five candidates in their target demographic stated that they felt underprepared for the digital economy.
To help Vodafone meet its bold vision of the future, PeopleScout needed to craft an employer brand with multigenerational appeal to attract candidates from Millennials to Gen Z and beyond. Ideally, these candidates are achievers with ambitions beyond working in mobile phone retail. As such, Vodafone’s employer brand campaign had to engage imaginations and change its audiences’ perceptions by presenting itself as a major tech company—not a retailer—and by building its reputation as a youth employer of choice for ambitious job-seekers.
Audience Insights: Leveraging Social Media to Reach the Right Audience
For Vodafone, we found that 90.4% of the brand’s target audience regularly used social media. On top of this, 91% of all social media users accessed channels via their mobile devices. With this in mind, we developed a mobile-first, social media-friendly campaign. Additionally, further research showed us that many students with the right background and personal qualifications didn’t apply due to a lack of confidence. Therefore, we needed a message that was bold, relatable and empowering.
Meanwhile, just as important as the audience insights were the strategic considerations. Candidates are also customers; when buying products, they expect a streamlined, user-friendly, friction-free process. And now, they have the same expectation when making career decisions. So, we made every touchpoint (especially applying) as slick and easy as possible.
Granted, no contemporary attraction approach can be just about advertising; long-term connections are far more powerful. So, central to our strategy was helping Vodafone engage in conversations, initiatives and support with high-potential university students throughout their full university lifecycle. In short, the strategy was to start on day one, not year three.
The Core Message: #GENERATIONPOSSIBLE
There are a variety of strategies you can employ to share your employer brand with candidates, but storytelling is one of the most powerful. From career sites to job-search platforms, there are plenty of opportunities to tell interesting, unique stories that capture the attention of job-seekers and entice them to apply. But, knowing exactly what stories to tell—and how to tell them—is not always easy.
So, our message for Vodafone’s campaign aimed to capture the spirit of change and possibility, as well as draw on the opportunity for young people to have an influence on the world for the better. For instance, the visual elements of the campaign approach used photography that reflected our target audience, combined with bold headline statements. Similarly, social and site content featured current grads and interns sharing their advice for the next generation of Vodafone employees.
Campaign Highlights:
A six-month social media strategy targeted to mobile users
A #GenerationPossible video at the heart of the campaign
A campaign matrix of 104 social posts with 20 mini videos/GIFs
Supporting Executions
Our research identified that our target audience felt like they weren’t good enough or lacked the skills to take on these roles. So, we created a series of videos featuring current Vodafone graduate recruits and interns. These videos explored Vodafone life, wellbeing, social responsibility, innovation, assessment centre and other advice to help prepare candidates for the interview process.
Hiring Strategies:Spreading the Employer Brand Message
Apart from social media, we also organised a series of 41 on-campus events to connect students directly with Vodafone employees. We also carefully targeted campuses with the highest female-to-male ratios for tech degrees as a way to help increase female applications.
Results
The campaign comfortably exceeded Vodafone’s expectations:
Vodafone generated more than 16,000 applications, performing 60% above its targets.
PeopleScout’s campaign helped improve diversity, increasing female applicants by 23%.
We increased Instagram post impressions by 89.3% (post-campaign vs. pre-campaign).
Social media drove strong engagement and provided more than 1.5 million Facebook impressions, as well as 6.8 million impressions on organic posts on LinkedIn.
PeopleScout also deployed a hyper-targeted paid Facebook campaign that produced 390,510 impressions and 2,541 clicks—all from the audience we wanted to target.
These numbers are backed up by audience sentiment: We significantly improved Vodafone’s reputation as an employer, jumping 27 places in the TT100 rankings. As a result of this success, Vodafone also asked us to develop the concept for its apprentice campaign audience and roll it out through a new assessment process design.
In the world of talent acquisition, a brand’s presence online can lead candidates to discover new opportunities. And, employers and brands are taking the hint – maximising the online candidate experience through personalisation and optimisation.
This
brings us to the importance of digital recruitment marketing. Digital
recruitment marketing is a way for employers to source and attract potential
candidates; it can include social media, email marketing, display advertising
and more.
Through this article, we’ll share some important aspects of digital recruitment marketing, including building personas, trending digital marketing strategies and channels, and website optimisation.
Understanding & Creating Candidate Personas
Understanding the key characteristics of the candidates your organisation wants to hire provides context to who they are, which is why organisations create candidate personas. Personas are profiles that represent different types of candidates, focusing on individual characteristics. They create alignment across your recruitment and sourcing strategies.
Personas are organised, analysed and assembled by gathering internal data that reflects candidates’ behaviours, interests, goals and challenges. Let’s dive into how to build your personas.
How to Build Your Personas:
1.Gather Your Data: Focus your data on successful hires and placements within your organisation. Interview professionals who currently work in the type of role you’re seeking to fill to understand what qualities make them successful. Prioritise data points such as:
demographic information
background
personal attributes
qualifications
goals
objections
web activity
Also,
try to gather anecdotal evidence or commentary by consulting other recruiters
and hiring managers who have hired for that role in the past.
Quick Tip: Aim to gather as much information as possible regarding each position or job opening. The more data you have to work with, the more detailed your personas will be.
2. Identify Trends: Once you’ve gathered your data, it’s time to analyse the information and identify shared trends and traits. This is where your personas will really start to take shape. How do you do this? Start by asking some important questions:
Which characteristics
or traits do ideal candidates share?
What motivates the
ideal candidate?
Where does the ideal
candidate search for jobs?
What are the ideal
candidate’s goals and aspirations?
These questions – and those similar – will lead you to draw conclusions about the candidate who will best meet your needs for any given role or job opening.
3. Assemble Your Personas: After collecting and analysing your data, the next step is to assemble your candidate persona profiles. At this stage, you will use the insights you’ve discovered to create a profile of your hypothetical candidate. Some organisations create personas and associate them to profiles with names and pictures to seem more realistic and multi-dimensional; however, be aware of unconscious bias. A good way to avoid bias is to create personas that are based on research and surveys done within your organisation, and to focus only on the specific needs and challenges of potential candidates.
What’s Your Digital Strategy?
Content Marketing
Before
you post on your digital marketing channels, focus on the importance of
strategically crafting your content. The content you post should be more about
your audience, or potential candidate, than it is about your brand. It’s a
conversation that says, “We would be lucky to have you as an employee,” versus,
“You would be lucky to work for us.”
To have this conversation, your content needs to adhere to your candidate persona’s desires and interests. Your content also has to create a narrative and capture your audience’s attention, while driving home your selling points in a concise way. For example, social media is one trending digital marketing platform. It is a very distracting environment, and you have very limited time to connect with candidates. So, it’s vital to know what you need to say to them via posts, tweets and images, and truly connect the right candidate, or persona, with your open jobs.
Social Media Marketing
I recently hosted a Talking Talent Webinar, “Digital Recruitment Marketing: A Guide for Employers.” During the webinar, I asked attendees to answer the question, “Which recruitment marketing strategies would you like to implement at your organisation?” What was one of the top answers? Social media marketing, of course, with 36.4%.
Conversion rate optimisation – 45.5%
Social media marketing – 36.4%
Email marketing/marketing automation – 36.4%
Pay-per-click advertising – 9.1%
Display advertising – 9.1%
Search engine optimisation (SEO) – 18.2%
Viral digital marketing – 36.4%
None of the above – 0%
Don’t know – 27.3%
Although proven to be effective, not all social media channels are created the same. Each platform has its own particular set of users with their own quirks as to how they interact with content. Candidate personas can help you identify your target candidates and shape your social strategy to fit each candidate’s specific preferences. You can utilise them to prioritise the platforms you use, to personalise your messaging, and to share content that engages your ideal candidates.
A helpful
tip when approaching social media marketing is to start by researching all of
your top competitors. Check each of their social media pages and see:
what content they are
posting
how often they are
doing so
how many users are
engaging with that content
what platforms they’re
using
Once you conclude which social media platform is yielding the greatest results – whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc. – focus your personalised content on that particular site.
70% of hiring managers say they have successfully hired through social media
91% of employers are using social media to hire talent today
Career Sites Matter – A Lot
If your targeted candidates engage with you on digital
recruitment marketing channels, often they then arrive at your website. Your
website is the backbone to your digital footprint and communications. Not only
should an immense amount of effort go into creating a site that has engaging
content and is aesthetically pleasing, but it must also be user-friendly for
potential candidates.
It’s vital that your website or career site is optimised for job-seekers. Optimising key words in job descriptions, and ensuring your links are working properly and that your site is mobile friendly can help candidates find your organisation and apply to your jobs.
When
building a career site, the process, structure and flow of the site must be
deliberate. Site flow is a major contributing factor to increasing the number
of candidates that move through the funnel and make it through the application
process; It’s all about user experience.
What’s Important in the End
Ultimately, an effective digital marketing campaign takes time, patience, planning and teamwork. It’s important to build customised campaigns that cater to candidate personas, be clear on your branding efforts, really push your employer brand’s unique selling points, and optimise your careers site for search engines and conversions. Put together, each aspect creates a strategy that is focused on personas and will be beneficial as you move forward in searching for candidates in the digital recruitment space.
