Steps to a Great Recruitment Marketing Plan

The business landscape is constantly evolving - no industry can escape change. As the number of companies in an industry increases, job opportunities increase, making it hard to find and get qualified candidates. In the past, the company had a plethora of candidates to choose from - but today, candidates are more choosy about where they want to apply.

How will you get these top talents to choose you over other companies? What can you do to promote or attract these talents and make them eager to apply for an opening in your company? Having an effective recruitment marketing plan is one of the best ways to acquire a qualified applicant for your open job position.

A recruitment marketing plan contains concrete steps or methods aimed at generating interest in your company’s open positions. This recruitment action plan has been developed and operated by companies to adapt to the modern recruiting process of each applicant.

Candidate Journey: Past vs. Present

Past

Present

Focus on active candidates

Focus on passive candidates

Steps: Application – Selection – Hire

Steps: Awareness – Consideration – Interest – Application – Selection – Hire

Why Do You Need a Recruitment Marketing Plan?

You might be asking if a recruitment marketing strategy is essential and why? Yes, a company needs to continuously improve its organization and adapt to the modern recruiting process to ensure its success. But as the number of businesses increases, it gets hard to market your company and get the top talents qualified for the position.

According to a LinkedIn survey, 15% of respondents are satisfied with their job, 12% are active job seekers, and 73% are passive job seekers. These passive seekers are employed individuals who aren’t actively looking for a job but are open to a much better job opportunity. Because of that, recruiters, employers, and companies need to actively build awareness and improve their employer brand to attract top talent for their organization.

Having an effective recruiting action plan will make your talent pool more accessible to top candidates. The strategy is more than just posting a job opening on all sites; it needs to be detailed and well-planned to ensure that the potential candidate will apply to the position. This recruitment action plan is focused on the first 3 stages of the modern candidate’s journey in getting a job.

• Awareness – Raising awareness of your company and your employer brand.
• Consideration – Attracting potential candidates that will consider you as their next employer.
• Interest – Convincing top talents to grab your offer and apply for the open job positions.

Recruitment Marketing: What Is It All About? 

Recruitment marketing is a modern tool of HR, and companies use it to attract applicants. It’s a method where marketing is used and applied to talent acquisition - which is the process of identifying and acquiring skilled and qualified employees to meet your organizational needs. It’s now used as a recruiting action plan as the candidate journey has dramatically changed from active to passive candidates.

To attract these candidates, you should use and improve your employer brand, which showcases the reputation and popularity of your company. It’s a strategy used to attract top-qualified talents to your company and retain them. Your current employees, social media, career sites, recruitment and local events, workshops, emails, and job advertisements are some ways to help you promote your company.

How to Make an Effective Recruiting Action Plan

Here are the steps and guides in making an effective recruitment marketing action plan:

Step 1: Look for your goals.

Define and evaluate the specific goals you want to achieve in using this strategy other than to attract candidates to apply to your company? Using or developing an action plan without a purpose is pointless as it will evaluate your progress and help you continuously improve your tactics. 

For the first step, you have to define other goals you should achieve. Plans include increasing applicant engagement and employer brand awareness, getting more applicants from job sites, events, social media, growing employee referrals, offer-acceptance rates, and many more.

Step 2: Know the personality and role of your candidate.

In creating job descriptions, you have to set what will be the specific roles. It helps the applicants determine if they are qualified for the position and understand their role in the company before they apply. It’s a time-saving strategy for both the employer and the applicant. 

But before you make your job description, you also have to define who your ideal candidate is. This is more than about their educational background, work experience, or skills. Some characteristics you may want to consider are the candidate’s age, interest, hobbies, location, personality, motivations, etc.

Step 3: Identify what you can offer.

This is where you will define what you can offer to the candidate that the other companies can't. What's your edge? Tell them why they should choose you. Remember that applicants nowadays don't just focus on getting a high salary. You should also consider career growth, company culture, challenging and exciting work tasks, your workspace, and many more. EVP or Employee Value Proposition comprises five main components: Compensation, Benefits, Career, Work Environment, and Culture.

Step 4: Create valuable content and career sites.

Recruitment content is more than job advertisement. You should also create content that will target the best candidates by delivering the right message. You can use emails, blogs, videos, webinars, infographics, or even games and competitions as your recruitment content. Optimizing your career website is a huge help too. 

A successful career site should describe your company and what you do, updated and active contact information, work environment, and all available job openings in your company. Keep in mind that applicants only use their mobile in job searching, so your site should be mobile-friendly.

Step 5: Utilize the power of social media to attract a larger audience.

While some candidates prefer visiting companies to apply or attend in-person recruitment events, most applicants today use social media for their job hunting. Nowadays, applicants use social media and follow different company’s social networks to be updated with their recruitments. You should use not one but all the social media platforms you can use to reach more audiences. Posting your videos, blogs, job openings, recruitment events, or newsletter on a regular basis will make your page active and influential.

Step 6: Use your employees as brand ambassadors.

Referrals are one of the reasons how applicants find you. In this case, you should get your current employees involved in your recruitment action plan. Asking your employees to share the latest job openings in your company on their social media will make you reach a wider audience. You can also ask them to post photos, blogs, videos that can give an inside perspective on working in your company.

Step 7: Build and manage your talent pool.

Your talent pool is where you can find interested candidates who want to work in your company. These candidates are referrals, recruitment events, campus career fairs, applications from your career website, and inbound recruiting. It’s a database where you can pull and find qualified candidates anytime. Manage your talent pool by dividing them into groups and staying in contact with them by regularly giving valuable and relevant content.

Step 8: Get paid job advertisements.

Job advertisements like search advertising, display advertising, social media advertising, and retargeting offer excellent opportunities to reach top talents. Your target candidates here are passive job seekers or currently employed but open to a promising career opportunity. By these advertisements, you can have audiences looking for jobs or people who are just using the internet.

Step 9: Take action and measure the success of your strategy.

After you use your strategy, you need to measure it to see if it is effective or needs more improvement. By finding out and knowing what strategy method is successful and not, you can continuously adjust and improve your tactics to make it a perfect recruitment marketing action plan. Using this recruiting action plan, you can easily attract and keep the top applicants qualified for the position in your organization.

Tailor a Recruitment Action Plan for Your Company 

Recruiters and companies know how to attract applicants. However, what’s practical today may not be effective tomorrow since the world is evolving fast. Like any company plan, a recruitment marketing plan should also be evaluated and improved continuously to know what works for your company and what did not so it can be appropriately adjusted. 

But don’t worry - Lanteria is here to make things simple and efficient! Our recruiting management system will help you get the right and qualified candidates for you! Leverage our premier candidate self-service feature, which lets top talent review available vacancies, apply for jobs, view interview invitations, accept job offers, and more. Reach out today to get started.