February 25, 2014
To be an excellent recruiter, you must be an excellent marketer. Although the stereotypes in personal attributes to these two careers seem poles apart, the link between them is getting stronger.
It is no longer about job boards or who you know (although that does play a part). It is about intelligently sourcing candidates, being able to create an engaging and relevant brand for your target talent pool.
What do marketers do best? They test. They test boundaries, they test innovation and most often they are testing results. If something does not work, they analyse what they have done and look into ways to encourage it to work. All so often recruiters are unable to do this, due to time and budget constraints. I have started to look at every job as a campaign; this enables me to focus on each campaign separately and have a project start and end date – and hopefully a budget!
What can you test? You can test response rate, you can test click through rate, bounce rate, etc. As long as you understand the basics (learn them – I have), it will ensure you are casting a wide net. What you are catching may become fewer and fewer, but you only need one right candidate to accept your job offer. Look at any social media platform; you can test anything you post for interaction!
I use LinkedIn (as any of my regular readers will know). Out of the three jobs I have posted, I hired from one, which as job boards go, is a good ratio. But what I really like to do with LinkedIn is post updates for jobs I am hiring for, I do this daily. I use a bitly link to our careers page and this means I can see how my post is working, what days and times it works best and I can see what the user does after they have clicked through – and even how long they have spent reading the job ad! This can tell me a variety of things, from – ‘there’s something not working with this copy’ – to ‘ there is something great with this particular post’ and I can imitate these trends to increase interaction and get to my end goal – to get the right employees working here.
Social media is all about testing what works and what does not. As recruiters, we must embrace this and use it to our advantage. We need to be smart when recruiting and this is the way to go about it.
© Businessman With Chart Stock Photo By Ambro