People often claim that recruiting is digital marketing to some degree. The reason being, now that a vast majority of the candidate job search and application process takes place online, recruiters use many digital marketing tactics and strategies to meet them there. That said, because both groups are essentially trying to get complete strangers to become prospects, there are lots of similarities.
In this post we will discuss similarities among the challenges that they share—and how both marketers and recruiters can overcome them.
1. Effectively working with their counterparts
Marketing teams and talent acquisition teams share a unique challenge in that they must work among other functions of any given company in order to be successful. The relationship between marketing and sales teams is crucial for any business’ success. If these two functions aren’t aligned properly the content and marketing materials designed to attract new business will have no worth to the sales team, which can lead to frustration from the marketing side of the business.
Similarly, recruiters must work side-by-side with hiring managers to ensure they are vetting the right type of candidates for the open role. There must be a constant feedback loop between the recruiter and the hiring manager, and an understanding of whether or not the candidates are qualified and match the company culture. This can be difficult if the recruiter and hiring manager aren’t in agreement on what the ideal candidate for this role looks like. It’s also nearly impossible to provide a positive candidate experience for your potential new employee if the recruiter and hiring manager aren’t in sync with the logistical and communication pieces of the hiring process.
2. Getting the most out of inbound strategies
Inbound marketing is the most effective way to market online. It takes the old method of outbound marketing (buying ads and email lists) and flips it on its head. The new method of inbound marketing is all about creating quality content that pulls people toward your company using a variety of techniques such as email, social media, marketing automation tactics. By aligning the content you publish with you customer’s interests, you naturally end up attracting inbound traffic that can eventually turn into leads.
There is also a strategy called inbound recruiting, that is the same idea as inbound marketing. Instead of doing tons of outbound recruiting (calling, emailing, and LinkedIn messaging candidates), modern recruiting teams are working towards an inbound approach, where candidates are attracted to their jobs without any touch point from a recruiter early in the process. This can happen through job alerts, strong SEO and organic content, category-specific landing pages, and more.
Both inbound marketing and inbound recruiting have proven to be cost-effective and non-invasive ways to market to customers and candidates alike. However it’s not as easy as it may sound. There are many moving pieces to both strategies and it can take a long time for results to surface, so oftentimes businesses give up and revert back to outdated outbound strategies.
3. Proving an ROI on their campaigns
Most business functions have experienced difficulty proving return on investment at some point or another. However, marketing and recruiting teams are able to do this more easily because of their heavy reliance on the Internet. The web tends to allow for more measurable results.
Marketing automation or recruiting automation software is key for data analysis and understanding the ROI of a particular push or campaign. Using analytics to tie performance to action is crucial to business success. If your recruiting team isn’t currently analyzing metrics to determine the return on investment, they should start now.
4. Nurturing their databases to conversion
Quality content is time-consuming and resource-intensive to create, but it’s necessary to have if you want to effectively nurture your database and/or social followers. Strangely, many companies never worry about the quality of their content, when it’s actually the most important aspect.
Just like marketers want to convert their website visitors into marketing qualified leads, and their leads into paying customers, recruiters want to convert their candidates into hires. Competition is stiff these days, consumers have marketing material coming at them from every direction, and competitors have more ways than ever to get in your customers’ face. It’s also stiff in the workforce, with the economy better than it’s been in years, candidates have the upper hand in the hiring process.
This challenge means marketers and recruiters must make a conscious effort to create content that stands out and provides meaningful insight and information to consumers and candidates alike. If your content doesn’t seem genuine or unique, you’ll get lost in the dust.
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