As more staffing companies get back to the office, it’s encouraging to see much more positive chatter in the hiring landscape. And there’s certainly been an uptick in the number of firms starting to once again get their communication and PR activity running. But the successful implementation of recruitment marketing strategies is reliant on a number of factors. While this certainly isn’t an exhaustive list, the below tips will certainly help businesses hit the ground running.
Don’t skip the planning stage
It’s tempting when you’ve got a lot of ideas in mind or plenty of recruitment marketing thoughts to simply go ahead and just ‘get on with it’. But if you want your activity to be truly successful you need to stop and plan. Crucially, ask yourself ‘why will this be valuable to my business?’ You may have a brilliantly creative idea, but what’s the objective behind it? And how are you going to ensure you hit that target? What tools do you need, what channels are best and what’s the competition doing?
There’s so much that goes into planning a successful recruitment marketing strategy and for good reason. Everything you do as a business needs to have a purpose and needs to deliver the right results. By carefully planning and outlining what you want to achieve and why, you’ll be setting yourself up for the best possible success.
Keep it relevant
This leads me quite nicely into my next point – keep it relevant.
We’ve seen it before where an entrepreneurial business owner has an insanely creative marketing stunt idea that will certainly get attention. But not all attention is good. A random flashmob in one of London’s bigger train stations might certainly get you noticed by those commuting that day (when we’re all back to commuting properly anyway!). But if you place contract IT professionals across the UK, how many of these individuals will just happen to be passing through the station at that exact moment? And how many will remember the name of your company or even know what you can do for them?
Think of it this way. If you as a business owner were looking for a new, better or more efficient CRM, would you go with a company because they happen to have held a big marketing stunt near you? Or would you do your research and look to partner with a business that really gets what you need and can deliver that for you?
The same rings true for recruitment marketing – it might not be as glamorous as a flashmob could be, but planning a truly targeted campaign will deliver better results.
Get consultants behind your activity
The success of any recruitment marketing campaign will be very much driven by how supportive consultants are of the activity you’re planning. On social media, individual profiles have an extensively greater reach than company ones, so getting the team to engage with any company profiles will significantly extend your reach. Blog content will be much more relatable if it’s coming from a person or based on the views of an individual rather than being overly corporate. And coverage on third party publications will be much more credible if written from an individual’s expert view point (not to mention no journalist will take content from a business unless it’s paid for – it’s the knowledge of your team they want).
But you can’t simply force consultants to get involved in the implementation of recruitment marketing or the results will be limited. Instead, it’s important that you truly gain their buy in to any activity. Demonstrating what’s in it for them will help ensure they are really supporting your marketing activity, rather than begrudgingly doing as their told. Simply demonstrating how the content the company is pushing out can deliver tangible leads to them can have a big impact on the team’s involvement. Leading by example and showing how it’s working for the senior team is a fool proof way of getting them involved, but any good PR agency will also be able to help demonstrate what success looks like and why it’s beneficial for your consultants, so use their knowledge to help build your case.
Be different – add value
In an over-crowded recruitment market, any successful marketing strategy will be defined by how different you can be. Pushing out the same sales message or job time and again will simply add to the noise and won’t stand your business out from the crowd. Crucially, it won’t add much value to the audience which will quite simply result in your messages falling on deaf ears.
We’re all inundated with communication. Whether it’s across social media, marketing mailers, online publications or company blogs, we’re surrounded by information. The content that we really digest are the resources that give us more than we already know. So rather than commenting on the fact that recruitment has changed forever as a result of Covid-19, highlight what this means for your target audience and what they can do to thrive in this environment (aside from just partnering with you of course). If you add value to a reader, you build a real rapport with them, and this is what will be crucial to standing out from the crowd in the coming months.
Measure and reassess
You might not consider this as a success factor in your recruitment marketing implementation, but measurement is key. Not only does it allow you to really see what tangible value it’s delivering to your business, but it also provides crucial information as to anything that might need to be changed. Monitoring what is and isn’t working and evaluating this against your objectives regularly ensures that you’re driving efforts into the right channels. It’s important to add that if any of your marketing activity isn’t working, making adjustments will be much more beneficial in the long run than carrying on for the sake of following a plan or halting everything all together.
Recruitment marketing implementation success factors: partner with an expert
Of course, I can’t write an advice piece on the success factors for the implementation of recruitment marketing strategies without highlighting the need to partner with an expert. During difficult times, having an experienced PR agency working alongside you can certainly provide huge value to your business.
