When Did Recruiters Become Marketers?
These days, we often hear that “recruiters should think more like marketers”. They have to become recruitment marketers if they want to be able to find, attract and hire talent.
This notion has emerged as a consequence of the current situation in the HR industry.
In the current job market, the demand for qualified candidates is greater than supply.
This is great news for candidates, who can choose which companies they want to work for.
On the other hand, this is bad news for employers, who face fierce competition in the so-called “War for talent”.
To gain an advantage in this “War for talent” and attract high-quality candidates, successful recruiters have adopted marketing strategies.
Using marketing methods and tactics in recruitment is called Recruitment Marketing. Therefore, successful recruiters are now successful recruitment marketers, too.
What is the Role of Recruitment Marketer?
The role of a Recruitment Marketer is to advance the process of finding, attracting, engaging and nurturing high-quality candidates by applying marketing methods and tactics.
Their main goal is to drive talented individuals to apply to the company’s open positions.
Characteristics of a Successful Recruitment Marketer
Here are 7 main characteristics of a successful Recruitment Marketer:
1. Recruitment Marketers Love Data
If you’re still rolling your eyes when someone mentions data-driven recruiting, you are in trouble.
Top notch Recruitment Marketers truly love data.
They track and measure every step of their Recruitment Marketing process in order to gain valuable insights on what works and what doesn’t.
Using recruitment marketing metrics helps recruiters measure their productivity, and use the insights to adjust their talent acquisition strategies.
2. Recruitment Marketers are Creative
If they want to stand out from their competitors, Recruitment Marketers need to be creative and differentiate themselves.
Most importantly, they must constantly brainstorm new ideas and innovative ways to present their company’s Employer Brand and showcase their company’s culture.
3. Recruitment Marketers Put their Candidates First
Traditionally, recruiting has been viewed as employer-centric. This means that employers were the ones who get to choose the best among many applied candidates.
However, since the job market changed, candidates are now the ones with a privilege to choose between many different employers.
Therefore, Recruitment Marketers have turned the old employer-centric approach to recruiting upside down.
They now use the candidate-centric approach to recruiting.
This means that they put their candidates first.
Therefore, their focus is on improving candidate experience in every step of the candidate journey.
4. Recruitment Marketers Love Social Media
Social Media is a simple, fast and affordable way to target the right people and spread the word open job positions.
Therefore, Recruitment Marketers rely heavily on the use of Social Media in recruitment. This practice even got its own term – “Social Recruiting”.
Recruitment Marketers use Social Media to target the right candidates, build a relationship with them and encourage them to apply to their companies’ vacant job positions.
5. Recruitment Marketers Understand SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an extremely important, but unfortunately still poorly understood marketing tactics among recruiters.
Most recruiters are familiar with the fact that their job postings have to contain important keywords. However, this is where their knowledge of SEO stops.
Recruitment Marketers understand the importance of SEO. Therefore, they utilize SEO best practices to increase the organic traffic to their career sites and job ads.
6. Recruitment Marketers Collaborate
Recruitment Marketers don’t fly solo. They know the results of their work will be considerably better if they leverage the knowledge and the influence of all relevant stakeholders.
Therefore, Recruitment Marketers collaborate tightly with both the Marketing and HR departments in their company. Most importantly, they serve as a link for these to departments and bring them to work together, combining their knowledge and experiences.
Besides that, the top-notch Recruitment Marketers also work hard to get employees on board with their endeavors. This is because they know that employees are the best Employer Brand ambassadors.
7. Recruitment Marketers Like to Experiment
Recruitment Marketing requires experimenting.
In order to create successful Recruitment Marketing strategies and conduct great campaigns, Recruitment Marketers need to test their ideas and campaigns to find out which ones perform better.
The most common way to do that is to use so-called A/B testing. It is also known as “split testing” because it aims at comparing two different versions of content.
A/B testing can be used on almost every piece of content you can imagine. Think job postings, your company culture videos or employee experiences blog posts.
Once you learn what piece of content performs better, you’ll be able the discern your own best practices examples and guidelines and apply them to your future efforts.
Are You a Successful Recruitment Marketer?
So what about you?
Are you a successful Recruitment Marketer? How many of the mentioned characteristics do you have?
Most importantly, do you agree that, in order to be successful, modern recruiters must think like marketers?
