Employment Marketing
The recruiting industry used to be considered just another aspect of human resources management, but things are beginning to change. Businesses and recruiters alike are beginning to recognize that recruiting has a lot in common with marketing and sales. Employment marketing is one of the newest buzzwords in the industry that captures this connection. For many professionals, it may take a slight shift in perception, but marketing concepts are very easily applied to recruitment. Here are some marketing concepts and how they apply to recruiting.
Buying and Selling
The easiest way to begin to understand employment marketing is to think of the job candidates as customers and the client as the company selling a product, which is the position. The recruiter has to find the right candidate and then sell the position to the candidate. Recruiters have to do many of the same things that marketing professionals do. They need to get the word out about the product (position) to the customers (candidates) who are most likely to buy (get hired).
Communication and Message
Marketing professionals and recruiters communicate with prospects and clients in similar ways as well, including email, social media and direct calling. People in the marketing industry also talk about the “message,” or the information about the product that needs to be communicated to the target audience. Just like with recruiting, marketing professionals know that they can’t just broadcast a message widely; they have to find their target audience and speak directly to them. In recruiting, this means that you have to market your position to the candidates that are the best fit for the position.
The Employment Brand
Another concept that marketing professionals use a lot is the “brand,” and many recruiters have probably heard of “branding yourself” in terms of marketing yourself as a job seeker. When it comes to employment marketing, the client is more often the brand than the candidate. The best recruiters work closely with their clients to get positions filled, and to do that, they have to market the company as a great place to work. On the corporate recruiting side, employment branding refers to the the myriad of complex messages and PR surrounding the creation of a positive view of employment.
Marketing Technologies
Another way that marketing and recruiting professionals are alike is in the technologies that they use. Employment marketing is all about getting your message to your candidates. The recruiters on the cutting edge of the industry are using marketing software and technology solutions to get the word out. Software for business processes like customer relationship management, sales tracking, emails and contact information tracking can be great tools for the modern recruiter as well.
Recruitment Metrics
As in marketing, recruitment advertising is increasingly being analyzed as a science of conversion. As consumers decide to click an ad or make a purchase online, so do potential employees decide to apply to job listings. The world of eCommerce has been steeped in formal metrics and analysis or many years, but recruitment ads are just started to be studied in this manner. New recruiting software systems analyze application percentages, conversion to hire metrics, and views generated by a particular recruitment marketing channel or job board. Through formal analysis of recruitment marketing, recruiting directors, much like marketers, can optimize their channels and the content that they deliver.
Thinking about recruiting as purely a marketing function is certainly incorrect – it’s only one side of the coin – the “pull” versus the “push” of recruitment. However, taking some best practices from marketing and sales and applying them to job posting, recruitment advertising, and employment branding is a good exercise for any corporation looking to improve their candidate attraction strategy.