Welcome to the fifth part of our five-part series on recruitment marketing, where we’ll focus on some of the most exciting and effective new trends in the field as we head into the summer of 2020. The previous four parts of this series focused on Recruitment Marketing: Definition and Strategy, Best Recruitment Marketing Software, Tools, and Platforms, Recruitment Marketing: Best Social Media Practices and Great Recruitment Marketing Campaigns.
Culture is king – The idea of good company culture is now deeply embedded in every job seekers psyche as they look for work, and top talent – who have more options to choose from – have no reason to settle for anything less than a fully-modern company that treats employees well. Businesses know now, if they didn’t before, that pleasing their customers is no longer the whole of a company’s aim: they have to keep employees happy as well, because unhappy employees can easily use the internet and employer branding sites to get the truth of a bad experience out in front of any good news about your employer brand. So the job of the recruitment marketer, now more than ever, is getting that good news out there. This means hiring to that point and bringing on the most like-minded candidates.
Employer brand has more meaning than ever – Companies with bad reputations will see word spread quickly and turnover rates increase. There’s a need for transparency about core values, and for an understanding of those values to be clear between leadership and employees. Even if you’re still working on perfecting the brand, it’s better to be upfront about what the employer brand is as new hires who come aboard and discover a less hospitable work life than they were led to believe will not be keeping that to themselves. Recruitment marketing strategies should be focused on honing that true brand and getting it to travel.
Assessing Potential – Instead of simply focusing on where job candidates are currently in their careers, the trend in recruitment marketing is to focus more on that candidate’s potential. That means assessing their capacity for growth and learning new skills they may not have at the time of the first round of interviews. Pre-employment assessment tests can cover cultural fit, situational judgment, cognitive ability, and personality. Having this kind of specificity means leaning on a pre-existing set of requirements that your company can use to fish for the best job candidates, and which those candidates can clearly understand from job postings and communications.
Diversity and inclusion in action – With a focus on culture and employer brand, the time has come to completely let go of any internal bias against hiring women or minorities. This needs to be deeply learned and understood, and not simply something that gets paid lip service. If this means real fundamental changes for HR operations, so be it. Because any bias towards old ways will out quickly kneecap any existing positive employer brand sentiment. (And let’s not forget the obvious: when you broaden your search for top candidates beyond any racial or gender biases, you open up your doors to more highly qualified candidates for your talent pool.)
Artificial Intelligence lends a hand – AI will become an even more important part of recruitment technology, despite setbacks. At LinkedIn, AI already uses algorithms to rank candidates based on their fit for particular job postings. A Gallup poll says that companies choose the wrong candidate for a job an alarming 82% of the time, so human error and fissures between interview perception and working reality need to be lessened: AI can and will help with this issue more and more, hopefully dodging whatever biases cause such dismal poll numbers regarding the hiring of proper candidates.
Social media skills are increasingly crucial – There’s simply no way to be an effective recruitment marketing specialist in HR without having a razor-keen sense of social media and the absolute latest trends in that area for the employees you most want to reach. If you’re looking for young candidates, this is of bottom-line importance. The younger the candidate, the more likely they are to social media as fish are to the sea, and recruitment marketing angling requires constant adjustments.
The sharing of candidate experiences on employer brand platforms will continue – Job candidates will increasingly share their experiences as candidates specifically on employer brand-focused platforms, because that information is used more and more by top candidates to determine whether they want to investigate working for a particular company. A good candidate experience says a lot about the company at large. So make sure the candidates get treated like customers.
Email marketing campaigns will get fresh wind in their sails – While email certainly has more than a few whiskers as it as a form of mass communication, it’s still in many ways the best option when attempting to reach out to a large audience. Email will get a boost now from automation and AI to regain any lost relevance in the world of recruitment marketing. Email is especially good for continued conversations between HR and desirable candidates.
Employee stories, employee stories, and more employee stories – We now expect, when job seeking, to be able to access easily real stories of a company’s current employees and their experiences on the job. We can’t say enough times how invaluable positive employee stories are to an employer brand. Increasingly, they’re basic currency in terms of recruitment marketing.
A hard-hit economy means less budget – Times are tough right now for the economy, and with a return a fully active economy still something of a hazy future even, count on budgets for recruitment marketing to be slimmer than before. The bright side is that the best recruitment marketing often counts of genuine wit and cleverness, and those things don’t require much budget so much as they do the right conditions. So a good team of smart HR talent can keep pumping out good and novel ideas to fit any occasion and condition. The real things that count right now in culture, in employer brand, and in recruitment marketing can’t be bought so much as they have to be earned.
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The previous four parts of this series focused on Recruitment Marketing: Definition and Strategy, Best Recruitment Marketing Software, Tools, and Platforms, Recruitment Marketing: Best Social Media Practices, Great Recruitment Marketing Campaigns.
We recently completed a 5-part series on employer branding. The parts of this series are available here: I: Employer Brand Definition, Strategy, & Benefits. II: 12 Examples of Great Employer Brands III: The Best Employer Branding Software Solutions. IV: New Employer Branding Ideas.V: Employer Brand vs Recruitment Marketing
