Like marketing, recruiting relies heavily on branding to attract candidates. Top employers adapt the components of their brand to create a tool known as an Employee Value Proposition (EVP). The EVP helps differentiate your company from competitors and create an emotional connection with potential candidates. A strong EVP communicates the company’s values, culture, and mission to candidates, just as marketing communicates a brand’s values and mission to customers.
Developing compelling messaging is crucial for recruiting and marketing. Effective messaging should be clear, concise, and resonate with the target audience. In marketing, messaging to current and prospective customers highlights the benefits of the product or service, why it is better than their competitors, and the satisfaction of previous customers. In recruiting, the messaging should follow a similar cadence by highlighting the different opportunities available through the organization for a particular candidate, an overview of the skills needed to be successful in each role, and a summary of the organization’s goals.
Digital marketing relies on audience segmentation to deliver the right messages to the right customers at the right time. Understanding the demographics and psychographics of the target audience is critical to developing messaging that resonates with them. Just as marketers segment their audience to develop targeted campaigns, recruiters need to segment their audience to create targeted recruitment campaigns. One way that top organizations have worked to expand their talent pool is by segmenting and engaging with passive job candidates.
Successful marketing campaigns need the proper channels to reach the target audience for their product or service. Similarly, recruiters need to understand which candidate channels generate the best prospects. Whether it’s social media, job boards, or career fairs, recruiters need to select channels that their target candidates are likely to be using.
In both recruiting and marketing, engagement is crucial. Once a candidate or customer has expressed interest, keeping them engaged through the entire process becomes a priority. In marketing, this means providing customers with up-to-date product information and excellent customer support. In recruiting, this means keeping candidates informed about new opportunities, phases of the hiring process, and providing candidates with feedback. Candidate engagement is just as important as customer engagement, so you must get to know your candidates personally and form good relationships. Like customers, candidates are more inclined to work with a brand they know they can trust.
Successful brands use their marketing analytics to help choose everything from ad copy, image colors, target audience, and campaign spending. Recruiters can also benefit from adapting these marketing analytics as metrics in their cost-to-hire. By understanding the cost of critical elements such as posting, placement fees, and other advertising expenses, recruiters can make better decisions while lowering the cost of each new hire.
When all is said and done, marketing and recruiting have become similar because they rely on people. By working to understand the needs of your candidates and how you can resolve them together, recruiters can better communicate the value of your organization. If you want to apply any of the tools listed above to your own recruitment strategy, we invite you to speak with one of SmartSearch’s recruitment specialists. These professionals will introduce you to different tools to expand your capabilities while managing your workload.