The future of recruiting is marketing and 5 top tools for lead generation.
By: Duncan Carter
Tags: Marketing, Recruitment, Website Design, Lead Generation, Recruitment Marketing

A lot of companies have been saying for a few years that the future of recruiting is marketing.

Recruitment website visitors now account for 20–30% of traffic. What this means for employers is that, unless your website is optimised for mobile, up to one-third of visitors will be receiving a poor experience.

This could be even higher for companies that are embracing social media and especially Facebook since about half of Facebook users are on mobile.

Social media recruiting is by far one of the biggest trends in the recruitment industry this year. Recruiters are using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn to leverage brand awareness, as well as engage and interact with candidates and clients.

In today’s busy digital marketplace, job ads are popping up everywhere online and across social media. In a matter of minutes, candidates can find hundreds of jobs in their field that might interest them.

With such a small window of opportunity to get the attention of the best talent, it is vital that you get your recruitment marketing right. To stay ahead, it is more important than ever for recruiters to start thinking outside the box when creating and delivering a recruitment marketing strategy.

A critical component of good recruitment marketing is to adopt a multichannel approach. This involves automating methods of delivering job ads to various channels (e.g. via email, on Facebook, on job boards) and then creating a schedule to post an ad to them all at the same time. This helps you reach the widest possible audience and allows you to create and develop templates that work for you. It also gives you the ability to connect with potential candidates outside traditional channels and outside of traditional office hours. So your job ads continue to work even after you’ve gone home for the evening.

With the right solution, you can take your recruitment marketing to the next level, drive more of the right candidates to your job applications, foster connections to passive candidates who might be a fit for future roles, and hire top talent faster.

As anyone who has queued overnight in the cold for the latest smartphone will tell you, keeping up with technology isn’t easy. But with many HR departments taking more responsibility for resourcing, it is essential to get to grips with the myriad recruiting channels, tools and technologies that have emerged in recent years.

An overwhelming majority of today’s candidates are passive candidates, who aren’t looking for a job. As a result, HR teams are struggling to capture their attention. According to a recent Glassdoor research, 76% of hiring managers admit attracting top talent is their greatest challenge.

A recruiter with a high-quality talent pool is unstoppable! Imagine that for any new role; you had a collection of top-quality candidates waiting to be chosen. A talent pool should be made up of a diverse range of candidates which could include referrals and people who have applied but missed out on original positions. Creating a talent pool won’t happen overnight; it will take time and be a constant project. So, my advice to you is to start pooling your talent, right now!

And that’s just a start. You can really dive deep by adding stronger social publishing and analytics tools and using Google Analytics for campaign tracking per social source. Even further, recruitment marketing platforms track social analytics on a larger scale, in conjunction with all of your other talent acquisition efforts.

This can be mirrored for your lead generation efforts as well. Knowing which actions are worth repeating. This is where tracking the effectiveness of your lead generation attempts becomes such an important part of the process. You should always have a strong sense of which pieces of content are attracting the most people to the top of your applicant funnel, and how each of your targeted demographics are responding to your messaging. Track the number of impressions for each ad or post, the click rate (or the click-through rate if appropriate), and the conversion rate for every other step in the process. As you nurture those leads, you should be utilising the same approach — closely tracking what works and what doesn’t, and doing more of the former and less of the latter.

Don’t get caught in the never-ending cycle of staying in a safe place and avoiding change, which of course was bred in us by millions of years of navigating the wilderness and surviving predators.

The next important step involves recruitment marketing automation. Collect all information about your target group. Create an inventory for the actions they take, the behaviour they display on your website, the content they find interesting, etc. Then use this knowledge to offer them appropriate content at the right moment. Qualify (score) all actions. Depending on their behaviour, you can very precisely divide the content you offer into what is of interest to them at that moment in time

While traditional recruitment practices remain effective, they can be pretty slow and can lead to lost opportunities. In this modern-day when everything can be done online, there are always new techniques worthy of consideration.

Here are five useful online tools you can use to help boost your online recruitment lead generation:

Meet Alfred — LinkedIn Automation, it runs in the background viewing profiles, making connections and sending messages. They are always updating the system with new features. Worth the money.

Lempod — Always wondered how people go so much engagement on average posts. This is the answer. Join relevant pods to automatically get likes but from relevant people in your industry. $5 to join 1 pod which could have 60 people in it etc.

Hubspot — What they offer for free is amazing. CRM, Email notifications, website forms, automation and a fantastic LinkedIn tool. You can connect your Outlook or Gmail and set up email automation for free.

SourceHub — It’s free and so easy to use — a brilliant boolean tool which can be used with LinkedIn, Twitter and Github — you can be very selective with your search and find your target markets.

Feedly — I use this on a day to day basis. I have all my content sources organised in categories and can share across my social platforms and blog instantly. If you struggle to find content to share — then this is the tool for you.

Not every recruitment or talent acquisition organisation has the budget to recruit a marketing manager, and while it may be in the long-term plan, there is a way to get started today. I specialise in Recruitment Marketing — from building websites to coming up with lead generation strategies, digital marketing and SEO. Get in touch today to discuss this more detail or visit my website https://duncanjcarter.co.uk