Today’s potential candidates employ the same tactics when searching for a new job as today’s consumers do when searching for new products.

Job seekers have changed the way they look for career opportunities.

Just like consumers, they're always online scouting for the next big idea and newest content. You need to be online too with recruiting messages and job openings that engage them. Recruitment marketing helps by giving you strategies to attract top candidates and build your talent brand.

In today’s world, you don’t just pick talent. Talent picks you.

Candidates have access to in-depth information and have more paths to explore job opportunities. Recruiters must use the same inbound and outbound techniques that marketers use to build a sales pipeline, the only difference is that in this case the aim is to build a talent pipeline.

What is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment Marketing is the new approach to Talent Acquisition. It all begins with understanding the difference between outbound and inbound.

• Outbound marketing is when you directly reach out to potential candidates through tactics such as posting a job description, running a paid advertisement, or working with a third-party recruiter.
• Inbound marketing is when you create content that draws candidates to your organization by aligning it with their interests and making it easily accessible online, especially on social media.

Both are needed for successful Recruitment Marketing.

In the past Outbound marketing was enough, posting job requirements and waiting for applications. Many recruiters and many traditional software tools are born around this concept indeed. This is also why the name used for these tools is "Applicant Tracking Systems" which cover the storage of candidate profiles, and the evaluation steps to manage the interview and selection process. However, inbound is gaining in importance as job seekers, especially millennials, look to establish two-way dialogue and long-term relationships with potential employers in the digital world. In fact, successful recruiters always recruit. Even when they don’t have open positions.

The Recruiting process is far more complex that the basic steps of application, selection and hire. A modern recruiter must also consider steps like:

• Make potential candidates aware of your Company and opened positions;
• Trigger their interest into your Company;
• Make them consider you as their next employer of choice
• Drive talent to apply to the open positions your Company has available.

This is the Recruiting Marketing funnel and has many similarities with the Sales funnel and classical Marketing processes

, including the fact that complexity and integrations are in continuous and exponential growth.

This is a challenge but also an opportunity that can be managed with great success if applying suitable strategies and opportune tools.

Recruiting Marketing Stages

As introduced before, the communication and cultural fit between employer and employee is more and more important. So Recruiting Marketing definitely starts from communication and understanding. Companies must communicate their stories, their mission and their working environment and style. They must do it intensively writing articles, sharing discussions of employees and managers; posting on social media and maintaining several communication channels.

OK, this can be very time consuming but the value is immense. Modern recruiters must engage with "candidates" and participate in the community of professionals, providing information and answering questions that such talents are interested in. Candidates start discovering your Company and get interest. This is the stage that commonly is defined the "Awareness Stage" of Recruiting marketing.

You can read more about this argument in this article: How to build and engage a Talent Community

As soon as contact with talent communities is established, the recruiter must focus on increasing their interest by offering answers to questions or issues a potential candidate could have. The candidate is forming opinions and associations with your company. This is the stage when a suitable Talent starts considering the career possibilities offered by your Company. This could be called the "Consideration Stage" of Recruiting marketing.

When the Talent has enough knowledge about your Company and feels a connection with the work you are doing because they feel like they'd fit with their skills and attitudes, it's time to trigger the thought for them apply for a job position and for them to decide to spend time and energy by starting a real interaction. This is the time to present details about job requisitions and Company requirements. We call this the "Interest Stage" of Recruiting marketing.

After this stage starts the candidate's application to the job signaling the beginning of the well known recruiting process of Evaluation, Interviewing, Selection and Hiring. ... OK "well known" doesn't mean that there is nothing new in these stages. On the contrary, there is so much to say, that we need another article to properly discuss it :-) and it doesn't end with the hire either, because modern recruiting should also include an "Engagement Stage" where new hires must be kept happy and engaged as employees, and also participate in brand and referral efforts.

How to organize the Recruitment Marketing process?

A common question and concern within many Companies is if all these additional tasks must be taken by a Recruiter. These outreach activities are indeed necessary for recruitment and only a recruiter has the specific insights about the position requirements. Traditional recruiters however are not used to covering all these aspects and it's not as if th list of traditional tasks weren't plenty already... Busy calendars, meetings with hiring managers, arrange appointments, phone calls, prepare interviews and paperwork (did I forgot to mention: "reading and evaluating CVs?").

Fortunately, here's where technology can help.

Fact is, adding the Recruitment Marketing activities for Talents acquisition on the shoulders of Recruiters is not the way to achieve good results as it would be too overwhelming. It's also clear that the line between Company communication, Company branding and Recruitment becomes nearly indistinguishable.

The solution is: "enlarge the teams" and enable systems to assist in "team collaboration" between Marketers, Recruiters and also Hiring Managers and Project Managers within the Company. Resulting in a task force of company communicators, company recruiters, company ambassadors and, why not, new ideas for the company projects themselves!

Again, it's a matter of organisation and human efforts need an equally powerful support from technology to properly manage the complexity and length of the process. Heterogeneous and large teams, deep communication with sensitive information, collegial decision with multidisciplinary contributions, time management, messaging coordination, multichannel outreach, can all be done efficiently if not automatically, thanks to technology!

This is the driving force of a full Recruiting Marketing platform such as Jobin.cloud. Enabling Businesses to enlarged their team of Recruiters, Marketers, Managers, and also outsourced services and personnel to seamlessly work together without the burdens of all the administrative, scheduling and organizational work, all done in the background for you by Jobin.cloud.