Recruitment marketing-for-dummies

These materials are © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

by Alicia Garibaldi (@albagaribaldi)

Foreword by J.T. O’Donnell (@jtodonnell)CEO, CAREEREALISM Media & CareerHMO

Recruitment Marketing

Glassdoor Special Edition


Recruitment Marketing For Dummies®, Glassdoor Special EditionPublished by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River St. Hoboken, NJ 07030‐5774 www.wiley.com

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Table of ContentsForeword ............................................................v

Introduction ....................................................... 1About This Book ........................................................................ 1Foolish Assumptions ................................................................. 1Icons Used in This Book ............................................................ 2Beyond the Book ........................................................................ 2

Chapter 1: What Is Recruitment Marketing? . . . . . . . . . .3Understanding Recruitment Marketing ................................... 3

The hiring funnel.............................................................. 4Defining Recruitment Challenges ............................................. 5

Hiring ................................................................................. 5Employer branding .......................................................... 6

Solving Recruitment Problems ................................................. 6

Chapter 2: Building a Content Marketing Plan . . . . . . . .7Creating a Compelling Message ............................................... 7

Defining your employer brand ....................................... 7Establishing your EVP ..................................................... 8Creating a style guide ...................................................... 9

Developing a Content Marketing Plan ..................................... 9Targeting Your Market ............................................................ 10

Creating candidate personas ....................................... 11Keeping an Eye on the Competition ...................................... 12

Chapter 3: Developing a Budget and Calendar . . . . . . .13Organizing and Tracking the Budget ..................................... 13

Determining number of hires ....................................... 14Calculating hiring costs ................................................ 14

Setting the Budget .................................................................... 15Determining spending levels ........................................ 15Assembling helpful tools .............................................. 17

Creating a Calendar ................................................................. 18

Chapter 4: Recruiting with Inbound Marketing . . . . . . .19Attracting Quality Candidates ................................................ 19

Blog and career website ............................................... 19


Recruitment Marketing For Dummies, Glassdoor Special Edition ivSearch engine optimization .......................................... 21Social media ................................................................... 21Events .............................................................................. 21

Targeting the Best Candidates ............................................... 21Job descriptions ............................................................ 22Job titles .......................................................................... 22Calls to action................................................................. 22Compelling messaging .................................................. 22Job advertising ............................................................... 23

Nurturing Finalist Candidates ................................................ 23Perfecting your interview process .............................. 24Building a talent community ........................................ 24

Optimizing Your Marketing Strategy ..................................... 25Analyzing return on investment .................................. 26

Chapter 5: Social Recruiting Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . .27Developing Your Social Media Strategy ................................ 27

Creating social media profiles...................................... 28Developing engaging content ....................................... 28Deciding what to post where ....................................... 29

Employing Social Media Strategies ........................................ 30Hashtags ......................................................................... 30Brand ambassadors ....................................................... 31

Measuring Engagement ........................................................... 31Choosing measurement tools ...................................... 31Monitoring key metrics ................................................. 32

Chapter 6: Recruiting on the Go . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33Building a Mobile‐Friendly Career Site .................................. 33

Providing a quality experience .................................... 34Making job applications easy ....................................... 34

Engaging with Candidates on Mobile Devices ...................... 35Tracking Mobile Analytics ...................................................... 36

Chapter 7: Employing Marketing Analytics . . . . . . . . . .37Determining Baseline Metrics ................................................ 37Knowing Which Analytics to Measure by Channel .............. 38Calculating Cost per Hire by Marketing Channel ................. 39Measuring the Impact of Your Employer Brand .................. 40

Chapter 8: Ten Ways to Win with Recruitment Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41


Foreword

H ave no doubt, there’s a new type of candidate emerg-ing on the global talent spectrum today. Gone are the

days when you could put up a job posting and be guaranteed a bucket of résumés from qualified candidates. Nowadays, thanks to technology and the information economy, the top talent you desire is changing the rules of engagement. Let me introduce you to the sophisticated job seeker.

Studies show that 81 percent of all consumers now do research online before purchasing a product or service. Sophisticated job seekers are no different — they’re consum-ers of your employer brand. They want to know a lot about your company before applying to your positions. They like to interact with your recruiters to explore your potential as an employer. They prefer to take their time and study your reputation prior to making a move. They don’t bother with “old school” job boards. Instead, they create bucket lists of employers they admire and wait until the time is right to con-nect. This means your recruiting efforts must now go beyond the basics so you can earn the trust and respect of those you wish to hire. Therefore, to attract the best talent for your positions, you must be brave enough to ask:

Am I, and is my company, using the best recruiting practices?

In 2015 and beyond, remember this: Brand or be branded. How you recruit defines your company.

If your company isn’t bothering to proactively optimize its recruiting process for sophisticated job seekers, it could be sending one or more of these negative messages:

✓ We aren’t tech savvy enough to stay up with current recruiting trends.

✓ There’s nothing interesting or exciting about us as an employer.

✓ We’ve got something to hide.


Recruitment Marketing For Dummies, Glassdoor Special Edition viLet’s hope none of these apply to you and your company!

In this book, you will see how recruiting is evolving into an exciting marketing process that can be used to attract incred-ible talent. You save time and money by learning to work smarter, not harder. Given that the war for talent is in full swing, leveraging the best practices to build your talent pipe-line could make all the difference in your company’s ability to survive (and thrive!) in the future. Sophisticated job seekers are here to stay — it’s time to show them that, as a recruiter, you’re just as savvy!

J.T. O’Donnell Founder & CEO | CAREEREALISM Media www.careerealism.com



Introduction

Y our employer brand and how it’s perceived is what you put into it, from the actual goods and services you offer

to the people behind them. Although marketing and selling products are often thought of as priorities at any company, we believe bringing in the right talent to create and market those products, as well as help attract future talent to the fold, is even more important.

You can’t have a recruitment strategy without wearing a marketing hat and finding the right channels to attract great candidates. It is also important to (1) nurture those who aren’t quite ready to work for you (yet), and (2) create pro-grams that turn employees into internal brand ambassadors to influence an even wider talent pool.

Whether you’re a company with a recognized brand name or a small business just starting out, implementing a solid recruit-ment marketing plan will help you win the war for talent in today’s competitive recruitment landscape.

About This BookThis book is packed with resources, best practices and case studies designed to help you build a great recruitment marketing strategy. I show you how to build a calendar and budget, leverage inbound marketing techniques and social channels, market yourself on mobile, and understand the key analytics to measure and track your efforts.

Foolish AssumptionsAlthough I hope that this book will be helpful to a wide variety of readers, I’m assuming that your job function falls into one of the following categories: human resources, talent acquisition, upper management, public relations, or marketing.

Recruitment Marketing For Dummies, Glassdoor Special Edition 2


Icons Used in This BookThroughout this book, a few icons point out important infor-mation.

This icon marks information that may well be worth commit-ting to memory.

Here, you find helpful nuggets of information.

If you love to dig into the details, text marked with the Technical Stuff icon may be right up your alley.

Pay heed to this icon. Failure to do so could cost your com-pany valuable time or money, or damage its employer brand.

Beyond the BookAlthough this book is chock‐full of information, it can cover only so much in 48 pages. If you find yourself wanting more, go to http://employers.glassdoor.com and follow Glassdoor on Twitter at @GDforEmployers.

http://employers.glassdoor.com


What Is Recruitment Marketing?

In This Chapter ▶ Seeing how recruitment marketing works

▶ Defining your company’s recruitment challenges

▶ Finding ways to solve recruiting problems

Y ou may have heard that recruitment and marketing are becoming one. Gone are the days of posting a job and

praying for the right candidate to apply.

Job candidates today search for open positions the same way they search for a car, restaurant, or house. Your next great hire will depend on your ability to market yourself apart from the competition and attract talent at the right moment.

In this chapter, I introduce recruitment marketing and show you how it can help solve your company’s recruiting problems.

Understanding Recruitment Marketing

By definition, recruitment marketing includes all communi-cations (such as advertising and social media) that an orga-nization uses to attract talent to its workforce. Creating a compelling recruiting message that entices job candidates to visit a career site and keeping that message consistent across all channels are crucial to gaining candidate trust.

Chapter 1



Depending on your company’s size, service or industry, or the candidates you target, you may employ some or all of these recruitment marketing tools (most of which are free):

✓ Career website: In addition to posting open positions and your company mission, be sure to include contact details and optimize your site for search engines. (See Chapter 4 for details on creating a career website.)

✓ Blog: Updating a blog with relevant posts can help attract candidates for hard‐to‐fill roles by giving them an inside look at the department they will be joining.

✓ Job postings: Beyond listing duties and qualifications, job descriptions should reflect your company’s mission (see Chapter 4) and show how each role contributes to the organization as a whole.

✓ Photos and videos: Adding images to your company’s website or career page or blog (see Chapter 4) brings your organization’s culture to life, giving candidates an inside view of what it’s like to work there.

✓ Social media: Maintaining a social media presence and regularly publishing content is a great way to amplify your company’s message. (See Chapter 5 for more detail on developing a social media strategy.)

✓ Events: Events brand your company to talent you’re trying to reach. It allows candidates to not only meet people within your company, but also get an immediate feel for your company culture and brand.

✓ Emails: Emails nurture both passive and active candidates through both automated and personalized messages.

✓ Talent community: Keeping an engaged database of qual-ified candidates allows you to make hires more efficiently by having an audience that you can target with messages at different points in the hiring process.

✓ Display advertising: Display ads allow you to be strategic and target passive candidates (unaware of your brand) through advertising open positions on competitor pages, running diversity or millennial campaigns, and so on.

The hiring funnelTargeting both active and passive candidates requires a different set of marketing strategies for each audience. For

Chapter 1: What Is Recruitment Marketing? 5


example, passive candidates that are not aware of your brand might be enticed to apply through a display advertisement, while active candidates who are already researching open opportunities could be served targeted emails and job adver-tisements to entice them to apply.

Figure 1-1 shows a recruitment marketing funnel and how to evaluate each step of the candidate journey in order to yield more quality hires. Questions to ask yourself are do you have more challenges at the top or bottom of the hiring funnel, and what marketing strategies can you implement to solve them?

Defining Recruitment ChallengesWhen you’re developing your recruitment marketing strategy and message, first determine the challenges and issues you hope to solve and overcome. Your priorities may range from finding better candidates and speeding your time to hire to building awareness around your brand.

HiringIn developing your recruitment marketing plan, be realistic about the challenges of your current hiring process and identify any drop‐off in your application or interview process.

Figure 1-1: Sample recruitment marketing funnel from Glassdoor.



For example, if drop‐off occurs before the candidate applies, it could be an issue with your job descriptions. Whereas, if candidates are declining the job offer after the interview, it could signal holes in your interview process or the first impression of your company’s culture.

Here are a few common hiring challenges:

✓ Lack of brand awareness

✓ Wasting time on unqualified applicants

✓ Poor candidate (or low‐quality) pipeline

Employer brandingTo attract top talent, you must make your company attractive to potential employees. The complete package of reasons why job seekers should work for your company is your employee value proposition (see Chapter 2).

Solving Recruitment ProblemsA solid recruitment marketing strategy can help you identify and correct problems in your hiring process, setting your organization up for long‐term success.

Here are a few key components to recruitment marketing and questions to consider:

✓ Market segmentation: Who are you targeting with your message and why?

✓ Competitive landscape: Who are you competing with and what can you learn from their strategy?

✓ Your employer brand: What is your company vision and story and what makes you unique?

✓ Demand: How are you communicating your value propo-sition and what channels and tools are you using?

Part of any recruitment marketing strategy should include implementing campaign tracking to see which efforts create the most return on investment.


Building a Content Marketing Plan

In This Chapter ▶ Coming up with a message

▶ Defining your market

▶ Tracking the competition

A ccording to an ERE (www.ere.net) survey, each corporate job opening attracts 250 résumés, on average.

Of those candidates, four to six will be called for an interview and only one will be offered the job. Improving this timely process allows a company to gain a recruiting advantage over the competition by utilizing a marketing strategy and a more targeted approach to recruiting.

Ensuring that the right audience is seeing the right message at the right time is what recruitment marketing — and this chapter — are all about.

Creating a Compelling MessageIt’s important to understand what goes into making compel-ling messaging that encourages candidates to engage and respond.

Defining your employer brandHaving a clearly defined employer brand and being consistent with it across all channels is critical in today’s recruitment

Chapter 2

http://www.ere.net



landscape. If a candidate reads your company mission state-ment on one channel but reads on another channel that your company isn’t living up to its mission, your company’s credibility may be jeopardized.

Establishing your EVPAn employee value proposition (EVP) is the package of rewards and benefits that employees receive in return for their performance in the workplace.

EVPs are closely related to employer branding, with the EVP defining the underlying offer on which an organization’s employer brand is based.

You can develop an EVP and employer brand in many ways, but most companies follow five key steps:

1. Target candidates you want to attract.

Decide your target audience and what candidates you’d like to attract to apply. Factor in culture fit and skill sets needed for both hard and easy-to-fill roles.

2. Analyze employee and candidate feedback.

Find out what stands out in your organization and key themes that drive successful employees, departments, or the company culture as a whole.

3. Determine key areas to highlight or improve upon.

See what areas within your company are doing well and which need improvement. Areas to consider analyzing are: career opportunities, compensation and benefits, culture and values, senior leadership, and work–life balance.

4. Decide on your EVP.

When you clarify your key areas of focus, such as career development or work–life balance, don’t try to be all things to all people. Get to the core of your com-pany message, and continually make improvements.

5. Share the message.

Incorporate your EVP across the entire employee experience, from recruitment and onboarding to career development.

Chapter 2: Building a Content Marketing Plan 9


Creating a style guideA style guide is an essential resource your internal users (for example, recruiters, designers, and copywriters) and external users (such as third‐party company vendors) alike can refer-ence to reinforce and uphold your employee value proposi-tion (EVP) and employer brand identity. Typically, a style guide includes basic details about correct usage of company assets like logos, images, colors, and tag lines. However, it can also go deeper and showcase brand values, company culture, the employee experience, and organizational achievements, highlighting what you want job candidates to feel and learn when encountering your brand.

Figure 2-1 depicts what goes into your EVP and style guide creation.

Developing a Content Marketing Plan

Creating a plan before launch and tracking key performance metrics over time allow you to build a stronger case for investing in the areas where your content is performing

Figure 2-1: EVP and style guide chart from Glassdoor.



best. Setting goals enables you to determine the success of your recruitment marketing plan. For example, is the goal to increase applicant quality, increase offer acceptance, or improve the business outlook of your current employees?

Marketing brainstorm sessions are great for defining your company’s story or EVP, reviewing what content is working (and what’s not working), and plotting new content initiatives to target qualified candidates.

Here are five content marketing best practices to get you started:

✓ Track and compare channels. Just as any marketer would do, you must track each and every advertising channel and compare results. For example, some recruit-ment advertising channels may deliver high volume, while other channels deliver fewer but higher‐quality applicants.

✓ Use a targeted approach. Address candidates’ pain points. A pain point could be that they’re struggling at an existing position with career development or work–life balance. Dig into common trends with the talent you’re trying to attract, and highlight reasons why candidates would be a great fit for your company.

✓ Plan. Create a content calendar, track goals, and measure results against key performance indicators.

✓ Make the message about them, not you. When advertis-ing your company or job positions, sell candidates on what it’s really like to work at your company and what the role entails.

✓ Recycle, reuse, and repurpose. Great content has a long shelf life and is adaptable. It’s worthy of being translated into blog posts, recruiting videos, and social media campaigns.

Targeting Your MarketAs you develop your content marketing plan, keep your target market in mind every step of the way. Ask and answer ques-tions like these:

Chapter 2: Building a Content Marketing Plan 11


✓ Are the right candidates applying after seeing your job descriptions?

✓ Are you targeting job seekers for hard‐to‐fill roles in the right locations?

✓ Is candidate quality what you hoped for?

Creating candidate personasTo create candidate personas for the quality talent (or appli-cants) that you’re trying to reach, you need to track the wants and needs of those coming in for interviews, as well as those who have worked for you for long periods of time. This can be done by researching the audience you’re trying to attract, determining candidates’ wants and needs, remedying any cons brought up during or after the interview process, and gaining competitive intel (seeing what qualities would entice candidates to leave the competition and come work for your company).

Whether you’re trying to attract new college grads or estab-lished talent in competitive job markets, creating fleshed‐out personas of your ideal candidates — including their backgrounds, demographics, pain points, motivations, and other characteristics — helps you guide and frame your job descriptions.

Who are the people you need to hire? Market research allows you to create candidate personas. Here are some great tactics and tools to use:

✓ Culture fit: Be sure that you define who would be a great fit for your unique company culture.

✓ Employee engagement surveys: Ask your “A players” what keeps them at your organization.

✓ Onboarding assessments and exit interviews: Listen objectively to feedback — both positive and negative — to find out what encourages workplace productivity.

✓ Employee focus groups and panels: These groups can help you spot employee trends and motivators.



✓ Collaboration tools: You can use Yammer (www.yammer.com), and other social collaboration tools to create envi-ronments that encourage workplace transparency. These tools allow employees to connect, engage with others, and share ideas to reinvent the way you work together.

✓ Online company reviews: Reviews on sites such as Glassdoor can help you spot trends in departments and teams in your company and in competing companies.

✓ Aggregated data by industry and/or function: Published benchmarks can help you put yourself in the candidates’ shoes and attract your target audience.

✓ Vendors: Search firms, consultants, and agencies can help you develop personas.

✓ Social media and word of mouth: Monitor what employ-ees and potential employees are saying about your employer brand.

Keeping an Eye on the Competition

Part of a marketing plan is monitoring your competitors and analyzing their strategies. You need to answer questions like these:

✓ Are your competitors posting jobs in similar places?

✓ What roles are they trying to fill?

✓ Where do they have a social presence?

✓ What are their strengths and weaknesses?

Competitive intelligence helps you build a stronger message and plan of attack.

A few places to do competitive intel include:

✓ Google: Search news and jobs at competitor companies.

✓ Career sites: Visit the competition’s career pages.

✓ Glassdoor: Read competitor reviews and spot key trends.

http://www.yammer.com

http://www.yammer.com


Developing a Budget and Calendar

In This Chapter ▶ Calculating what you have to spend

▶ Setting up a spreadsheet

▶ Organizing a calendar

D etermining how to allocate a budget among people, systems, and programs is no small task. Drilling down

into the cost of each marketing program can be even more challenging. Recruitment marketing can help you make smart decisions to meet your goals while staying on a budget.

Defining your organization’s key hiring challenges can guide your efforts. It’s also important to keep a detailed calendar that breaks down spending and how it matches hiring initia-tives throughout the year.

This chapter provides everything you need to know about developing a budget and calendar to keep your team aligned with your recruitment marketing strategy.

Organizing and Tracking the Budget

It’s a challenge to prepare a budget without basing your efforts on historical data and planning models. Optimizing your budget requires testing, tracking, and measuring.

Chapter 3



Similar to a marketing budget, developing a recruiting budget is largely determined by the following:

✓ How many people you need to make a hire

✓ How difficult a challenge the goals are

✓ How expensive each (recruitment) channel is

Determining number of hiresTo accurately determine how many people your organization needs to hire, you must also estimate your attrition. Most companies do budget and recruitment planning at the end of the year to get accurate hiring and retention data. For exam-ple, if your attrition rate at the end of the year is 15 percent to 20 percent, multiply that by the number of employees and include them in your hiring goals for the next year. This is the total number of employees needed just for back‐fills for the organization to maintain its current size.

With high‐growth companies, some hires simply may not make the cut, forcing you to re‐hire. Factor in these additional costs in your hiring goals along with all the new roles you need to fill.

Calculating hiring costsEstimating the amount of incremental hires needed to grow revenue is critical to determining overall recruitment budget. There is a two‐step way to determine this:

1. Calculate a high‐level cost per hire.

Tally up last year’s total cost of recruiting (all people, systems, travel expenses, background checks, employee referral payments, recruitment process outsourcing [RPO] fees, marketing expenses, and so on), and divide that by the number of hires made.

2. Determine cost per hire by role.

Categorize your hires based on how easy the posi-tions are to fill (entry level, experienced, executive). After you categorize hiring levels at your headquar-ters and hiring locations, try to identify if your office

Chapter 3: Developing a Budget and Calendar 15


location(s) will make hiring easier or harder. Then factor in hiring growth. For example, if you’re hiring twice as many positions this year, chances are, you’ll face additional hiring expenditures to get there.

Setting the BudgetCommon budgeting challenges include hiring candidates in volume over a short period, recruiting hard‐to‐fill roles in specific locations, building a recruiting team, developing a mobile strategy (so that candidates can apply for jobs with their smartphones or tablets), and doing more with less.Implementing tools and technology that allow you to under-stand the return on investment of every recruitment marketing dollar spent is also critically important.

Setting a recruitment marketing budget can help you achieve your hiring goals by forcing you to make tough decisions on how to spend the budget to generate the best results for your organization. Organizing and tracking spending over time and breaking down spending by category also allow you to model your spending efforts for the following year.

Determining spending levelsBase your budget on your recruiting and hiring goals, such as number of hires, average cost per hire, number of hires per recruiter, and percentage of growth in the current year versus the previous year.

Here are suggested budget allocation areas:

✓ Employer branding: This may include videos, a career site, survey tools, and content, such as “Why Work for Us” messaging and infographics.

✓ Employee referral bonus program: Identify how costly it will be to make one hire, and consider the categories you’ve set (entry level, experienced, executive). From there, determine how you will compensate based on each bucket an employee helps to fill.



✓ Systems and technology: This category may include costs for mobile optimization, running an applicant track-ing system (ATS) or career community, and leveraging passive recruiting tools.

✓ Job advertising: To determine your budget, first deter-mine the percentage of hires you can make internally through your career site and employee referral program; then estimate the cost of those two sources. From there, determine the gap and have a strategy to fill those additional hires through job advertising, email, events, and other marketing programs.

Estimate job posting and advertising costs plus time‐to‐fill metrics to determine your budget. For example, if your organization needs to hire 50 people and it typically takes three months per hire, you may want to budget for 150 (50 × 3) job postings, assuming a one‐month‐per‐post formula.

✓ Email: Sending messages to your talent community and having a strategy for both automated and personalized messages can help you win the war for talent.

✓ Events: Meeting with talent in person allows you to put your best foot forward and give them a feel for your brand and organization. Events are great not only for branding but also for building your talent community.

✓ Recruiting agency costs: Estimate the number of posi-tions that third‐party recruiters will need to fill, factoring in recruiting fees at an average of 25 percent of the first‐year salary.

✓ Recruiting personnel: Determine if you’re providing full service (posting, sourcing, screening, scheduling, nego-tiating) or opting for minimal service (posting, schedul-ing). Depending on the outcome, you may need to budget for sources, recruiting coordinators/interview schedul-ers, and recruiting systems/operations specialists.

✓ Brand awareness campaigns: Ensuring that your brand is top of mind and evolving as emerging generations enter the workforce is important to increase demand to work for your company. The higher the demand, or

Chapter 3: Developing a Budget and Calendar 17


brand awareness, the less you need to spend to attract qualified applicants to your company.

✓ Other: Ensure that you have budget set aside to cover any other candidate costs, such as travel and expenses.

For small companies, allocating funds for promoting the employer brand and publicizing open jobs should be priori-ties. Sample categories for smaller to midsize companies are shown in Glassdoor’s 2014 recruitment budget allocation graph (see Figure 3-1). Larger companies can afford to be more strategic, using their budgets to target specific roles on specific channels.

Assembling helpful toolsTo guide your budgeting, use sample budgets or templates as your road maps. Glassdoor has a detailed recruiting budget template built in Microsoft Excel that anyone can download and customize (http://employers.glassdoor.com/ebooks), as shown in Figure 3-2.

Figure 3-1: Sample budget allocation graph from Glassdoor.

http://employers.glassdoor.com/ebooks

http://employers.glassdoor.com/ebooks



Figure 3-2: Sample budget created from Glassdoor template.

Creating a CalendarA calendar is an essential collaboration tool. It keeps every-one who has a hand in recruitment marketing on the same page and aligns everyone’s efforts with hiring initiatives, holi-days, events, and campaigns throughout the year.

Here are a few items to include in your recruiting calendar:

✓ Hiring dates and onboarding classes: Be sure that all team members know the deadlines to make hires, and when onboarding trainings will be scheduled throughout the year.

✓ Recruiting events: Make note of any events or meetups that may help you get hires in the door.

✓ Big themes and hiring initiatives: These could include any additional hires to make during the holiday season or dates that local college students will be graduating.

✓ Job advertising start and end dates: Monitor which campaigns are live, expiring, and coming up for renewal.

Note dates for when you will be analyzing results and sharing those successes with key stakeholders within your organi-zation. Always test, measure, and refine your recruitment marketing strategy and remember to track your time to hire and quality of hire on every channel. Invest in recruiting channels that you know are giving you the best return on your investment.


Recruiting with Inbound Marketing

In This Chapter ▶ Attracting the right talent with the right message

▶ Targeting and nurturing every candidate that applies

▶ Optimizing your recruitment marketing

I nbound marketing earns the attention of prospects and customers, helps candidates find your open jobs, and

draws talent to your website. Creating compelling content — everything from job descriptions to blog posts — is very important to your recruitment marketing efforts.

Marketing your company involves four main tasks: attracting talent, targeting talent, nurturing talent, and optimizing your marketing strategy. In this chapter, I describe all four tasks in detail.

Attracting Quality CandidatesStart by putting yourself in candidates’ shoes. That means understanding and empathizing with their career pain points (see Chapter 2), motivations, and employment goals. Understanding helps you refine your messaging so that candi-dates can successfully engage with your employer brand.

Blog and career websiteMarketing your open opportunities to candidates requires a focused strategy. You can’t simply throw up a job posting,

Chapter 4



sit back, and expect a candidate to know that he or she is the right fit. People need to be sold and convinced before they apply. A blog and a career website are two of the best vehicles for that purpose.

Creating a career site that attracts the right talent (whether you’re looking for engineers or sales professionals) while explaining the culture and mission of your company can be a challenge. Here are some ways to make your career site and blog stand out:

✓ Personalize by role and department. A salesperson may be looking for something different than a software engineer is looking for. Tailor your message toward the interests of the talent you’re trying to reach by doing your homework on what each role requires and what each audience is interested in culturally.

✓ Involve employees. The days of relying on generic stock photos are over; candidates want to see the real people they’ll be working with. They also want to hear from cur-rent employees via reviews and testimonials about what it’s like to work at the company.

✓ Create a way to connect. Allow candidates to connect with your company on social channels, via live chats with recruiters, or by letting them join your talent community.

✓ Produce “day in the life” videos. Allow candidates to preview your work environment.

✓ Provide a corporate calendar. Highlight upcoming recruiting or other events.

✓ Publish a blog. Encourage employees to write articles about their expertise. As thought leaders, they can show candidates that their voices will be heard when they join your organization. You might even consider taking it a step further and having department‐specific blogs for candidates, such as a “tech blog.”

✓ Offer promotional content. Invite users to subscribe to your blog, newsletters, and other promotional content. Create a platform where candidates can opt in to get more information.

Chapter 4: Recruiting with Inbound Marketing 21


Search engine optimizationMany candidates use online search engines (like Google) to find job openings. Using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques on your career site, such as finding the right key-words, can help ensure that candidates will find your jobs when they’re researching your company or similar companies.

For a tech job, for example, avoid using a vague or flowery title such as coding superstar. Instead, use what search engines and most people look for, such as software engineer or web developer. The job description itself can be colorful, but make sure that it’s stocked with keywords that search engines pick up. A tech‐job description might include HTML, CSS, UI/UX, and Java, for example.

Social mediaSocial media can help candidates connect and engage with your employer brand. For example, post Company Updates on Glassdoor to target talent at the moment they’re making career decisions. Also, ask employees to promote your open jobs on social channels such as Twitter and Facebook, using relevant hashtags (such as #webdeveloper and #opentechjob) to help candidates find your jobs easily. To learn more, see Chapter 5.

EventsUtilize social channels to drive registration and attendance at live events, career fairs, and meetups. Encouraging employees and event attendees to use hashtags on social platforms like Twitter will ensure that those images and messages are found and seen by others, further amplifying each event.

Targeting the Best CandidatesJust attracting candidates to your job posting, event, or career site isn’t enough. You also need to give them the right content, description, and motivation to apply for the job.



Job descriptionsJob descriptions need to be convincing. They should reflect your employer brand and list realistic requirements that attract talent rather than scare away talent with the right potential. If your company’s style or culture is fun and ener-getic, mirror that culture in your job description.

Omit grade‐point averages and years of experience if a role doesn’t require it. Consider using phrases like preferred qualifications instead. Also, if you’re attracting too many unqualified candidates, be sure to use the right descriptors of experience needed for the role and tie in how that role affects the overall mission of the company.

Job titlesEnsure that the job title is keyword optimized for search and specific to the job function within your company. Do research on what similar jobs are titled and test to see which job titles evoke the candidates you want to apply.

Calls to actionCreate a compelling call to action, such as a question that you know will resonate with talent, in an email subject line or job description. If calls to action are weak, you won’t see enough quality candidates (see Chapter 6).

Compelling messagingYour company’s story and message make up the unique offer that you give candidates to seal the deal. Be sure that your employer brand is defined and consistent across all channels where your company has a presence (see Chapter 2). Company news, press releases, articles, and mentions can supplement and support your strategy.



Job advertisingEnsuring that your jobs reach the right talent pool is a chal-lenge for most organizations. To advertise your jobs effec-tively, you need to ensure that you’re posting jobs where you know your candidates may be researching your company.

For example, if your goal is to create a more diverse workforce, look for channels that attract the talent you’re trying to reach and use platforms that allow you to tailor your message. On sites like Glassdoor, you can promote Why Work For Us messaging on your company profile, as well as post job ads that target users based on geography and job title.

Nurturing Finalist CandidatesWhen a candidate is selected for an interview, make sure that his or her subsequent experience reflects and lives up to your company brand. That may mean keeping him or her briefed and updated on the process every step of the way, from initial interview round to final notification.

Word of mouth is highly influential in this age of social media and networking. Even if a candidate isn’t the right fit, he or she may lead you to someone who is.

Case study: AT&TAT&T considers the ways candi-dates consume information and builds awareness around initiatives such as veteran recruiting through social and display ad campaigns. To that effect, AT&T created a career site specifically tailored to recruit-ing and hiring military veterans (http://att.jobs/doing‐great‐things/military).

On this site, veterans can research local events, check out recent mili-tary awards, and join the veterans talent network. By creating a con-nection with veteran candidates through curation, creation, and dis-tribution of engaging content, AT&T recruits veteran talent efficiently and at a lower cost per hire.

http://att.jobs/doing-great-things/military

http://att.jobs/doing-great-things/military



Perfecting your interview processAn interview is like a second date with an employer. Before the interview, a candidate has done his or her homework on you, including researching your employer brand. The inter-view process should help close the deal, validating all the reasons the candidate wants to work for you.

Without an effective interview process, you hinder your abil-ity to nurture talent and maintain a healthy pipeline of quality applicants.

If a candidate has a good experience, he or she is likely to tell three people. However, if a candidate has a bad experience, he or she will likely tell ten or more people, damaging your brand and ability to recruit future talent.

Here are some suggestions to help improve the interview process:

✓ Sync with hiring managers. Know what managers are really looking for so that candidates have solid, realistic expectations of roles.

✓ Communicate in a timely manner. Gather feedback quickly and be sure that both hiring managers and the recruiting team are in the loop on where the candidate stands in the interview process.

✓ Follow a realistic process. Does it take more than six steps to hire a candidate? If so, your process may be overly complicated or inefficient.

Building a talent communityIf a candidate answers your email or clicks a job listing but isn’t ready to apply, you should still keep that candidate in your talent database so that when the right role does open up, you can re‐engage. In the meantime, keep in touch by sending relevant news or content that helps build trust in your company.



Use an applicant tracking system or internal tracking system to keep a record of candidates and measure what happens to them after they enter your organization. An up‐to‐date database can help you prospect, build a talent pipeline, and fill roles quicker.

A talent network (passive candidates who are not ready for a career change at the moment) allows you to nurture candi-dates and follow up with targeted messages later. Candidates who follow, like, or respond to your brand messages should be notified when your company is recognized for an award or hits an important milestone.

Here are some suggestions for segmenting your audience or talent community:

✓ Those you passed on who might be a good fit for a different role

✓ Those who applied, but you didn’t contact

✓ Those who never responded

Include talent network opt‐in options on your career site, in your company signatures, and on your career blog so that top talent can easily add themselves to your database.

Optimizing Your Marketing Strategy

Optimizing your recruitment marketing strategy never ends. As talent changes and candidates’ needs change, your employer brand must evolve as well. Here are a few tools and techniques for optimizing your marketing:

✓ Surveys: The best way to figure out whether your inter-view process is working is to survey candidates and use their feedback to improve your process.

✓ Analysis and testing: Test different initiatives, such as calls to action and themes, to see which ones resonate most with candidates.



✓ Social monitoring: Track social media conversations about your company. Observe candidates’ questions, comments, likes, and dislikes. Also, post updates on social channels where candidates are actively looking for work to ensure high engagement and reach talent at the time they might be researching companies to work for.

Analyzing return on investmentWhen all is said and done, it’s time to measure and quantify your recruitment marketing efforts. In other words, did they pay off? Start by reviewing your recruiting goals. Perhaps your number‐one initiative was simply to attract more applications than you did the previous year, bring in more qualified appli-cants, or lower your cost per hire. More likely, you wanted all of the above.

Here are some key areas and metrics to consider as you deter-mine if your efforts were worth your time, effort, and budget spent (if any).

✓ Cost per applicant: This is a good way to compare the effectiveness of different recruiting channels. However, these may not necessarily be the most telling metrics, especially if your only goal was to fill every open position.

✓ Cost per hire: Probably the most important metric of all, taking into account all costs associated with placing job listings, recruiter fees, and other programs divided by the number of hires brought onboard. A lower cost per hire frees up budget to source additional candidates.

✓ Applicant quality: This is the number of applicants that you wind up interviewing or considering for the role. Seeing how long it takes new hires to come up to speed is also a good way to determine their quality.


Social Recruiting Strategies

In This Chapter ▶ Deciding how to use social media

▶ Implementing social strategies

▶ Determining success

A ccording to a recent Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey, An Examination of How

Social Media Is Embedded in Business Strategy and Operations, 55 percent of surveyed employers plan to increase their social media efforts over the next 12 months.

Social media is a powerful tool to help you recruit top talent and brand your organization. That said, job seekers are bom-barded daily with messages on social channels, so your mes-sage needs to stand out to grab their attention.

In this chapter, I explore ways to use social media, create engaging content, engage employees as brand ambassadors, and track and measure your efforts.

Developing Your Social Media Strategy

It can be tough to develop a corporate social media strategy when there are so many decisions to make. Who will manage your accounts? Which platforms should you sign up for?

Chapter 5



There’s a lot to take into consideration, and sitting down to make a plan and involving all team members from the start can help.

Creating social media profilesIf your company has many initiatives — such as recruiting, selling products to consumers, marketing services to busi-nesses, or all of the above — separate your social media profiles to target different audiences with unique and relevant messaging.

For example, Glassdoor maintains three separate Twitter accounts: @Glassdoor for all job seeker and business‐to‐ consumer (B2C) initiatives, @GDforEmployers for business‐to‐business (B2B) initiatives of interest to HR and recruiting professionals, and @InsideGlassdoor to give job seekers an inside look at working at Glassdoor.

Developing engaging contentThe first step in creating engaging content is defining your target audience by age range, demographics, locations, or per-sonas (see Chapter 2). If you’re looking to attract Millennials, for example, a mobile‐ready website and career page might attract a generation that’s used to using smartphones for daily business, including applying for jobs.

When you’re developing your content strategy, think out-side the box. Don’t assume that a “one size fits all” mentality works — customize your content depending on the platform you’re posting on. For example, LinkedIn is great for profes-sional awards and job postings; Facebook can be the place to post company photos, mission videos, and more interactive content; and Glassdoor is great for job postings, interactive employer brand content (such as photos and videos), and Company Updates that speak directly to candidates at the moment they’re researching what it’s like to work at your company. Think of how you spend time on each platform and build your strategy around that.

Chapter 5: Social Recruiting Strategies 29


Deciding what to post whereIdentify the types of content (such as job openings, company events, and news) to post on various channels. Here are some of the major social platforms worth testing (some of which have free ways to get started and paid options to amplify the message):

✓ Facebook (www.facebook.com)

✓ Glassdoor (www.glassdoor.com)

✓ Instagram (www.instagram.com)

✓ LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com)

✓ Pinterest (www.pinterest.com)

✓ Snapchat (www.snapchat.com)

✓ Tumblr (www.tumblr.com)

✓ Twitter (www.twitter.com)

✓ Vine (www.vine.co)

It’s better to focus on a few social platforms than to spread yourself too thin across too many. For most businesses and recruiting efforts, a presence on major social networks is a good strategy, especially for advertising job openings.

Following are a few types of content that your recruiting team might post on social media:

✓ Open positions, with links that applicants can click to apply (see the nearby sidebar “Posting job openings”)

✓ Company awards

✓ Recruiting photos and videos

Getting senior management involved on social media is a great way to ramp up your strategy and reach more people. Having your CEO or head of recruiting respond to reviews and promote the company as a great place to work, its mission, or open jobs will amplify your efforts.

http://www.facebook.com

http://www.glassdoor.com

http://www.instagram.com

http://www.linkedin.com

http://www.pinterest.com

http://www.snapchat.com

http://www.tumblr.com

http://www.twitter.com

http://www.vine.co



Employing Social Media Strategies

There are many different ways to attract candidates on social media and various strategies you should implement to attract a larger audience and keep your followers engaged. For exam-ple, hashtags help you reach more people on social media, while videos keep your followers interested. And building up a team of internal brand ambassadors may be the best social strategy of all.

HashtagsHashtags are vital to any successful social strategy. Think of them as links to a larger audience. They help with visibility and are no‐cost ways to get your content in front of new audiences.

Create a unique hashtag for your recruiting efforts. Twitter uses the hashtag #JoinTheFlock for its recruiting efforts and not only has a dedicated Twitter handle, but also encourages employees to post using it. Encourage employees to include hashtags when they share work photos or sound bites about

Posting job openingsSocial media is a great place to pub-licize job openings. When you’ve established social media channels for your recruiting team, be sure to get your job postings into the con-tent rotation. Instead of posting “New Job: Software Engineer” and a link, make things interesting. Use hashtags to help your messages get picked up by a wider audience. “Always wanted to be an #Engineer? Join us at @CareersAtDell — we’re hiring!” will engage job seekers in a positive, fun way.

Many applicant tracking systems allow employees to push customized job postings to their social media channels. Anyone who applies by clicking one of these links is imme-diately entered into the system as a referral. This system gives employ-ees an incentive to get the word out, knowing that a referral bonus may be coming their way if someone applies through their post.

Chapter 5: Social Recruiting Strategies 31


why they love coming to work every day. Your employees are your brand. Let their voices be heard.

Hashtag hijacking can be an effective way to tap into wider audiences. Note which hashtags are popular, including event hashtags, and utilize them in your social posts to get your content in front of a wider audience.

Brand ambassadorsTurning employees into internal brand ambassadors is another free way to promote your company, amplify your messaging, and attract candidates through social media. If your company has 500 employees, imagine the combined reach of those 500 employees in their extended social networks.

Hold training sessions to get your employees onboard with your social recruiting plan. Fill them in on the correct account to tag and recruiting hashtags to employ. Run internal con-tests and giveaways to encourage employees to participate. Explaining why you need employees’ help will get you one step closer to having hundreds (if not thousands) of free brand ambassadors.

Measuring EngagementMeasuring social media engagement can be tricky, but using the right tools makes the job easier. Social media measure-ment tools help you pull reports quickly to share with your team or manager.

Choosing measurement toolsTo help your recruiting and measure your efforts on social media, you need two types of tools: one for scheduling and one for analytics/reporting. Some tools combine both func-tions, such as Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com), Sprout Social (www.sproutsocial.com), and Buffer (www.bufferapp.com). Many social networks also have free analytics dash-boards that show information such as top posts that month, impressions, profile visits, mentions, and followers, as well

http://www.hootsuite.com

http://www.sproutsocial.com

http://www.bufferapp.com

http://www.bufferapp.com



as metrics for each post you publish. These tools help you understand which content resonates most with your audience.

Monitoring key metricsHere are key metrics to pay attention to:

✓ Link clicks

✓ Mentions

✓ Retweets

✓ User demographics

✓ Impressions by location

✓ Reach

Specific to job postings, it’s important to note what job seek-ers are clicking. Testing different types of content, hashtags, and visuals is the only way to truly know what’s resonating with your audience.

Case study: CignaRecognized as one of the nation’s leading providers of health benefits and related services, Cigna (www.cigna.com) is dedicated to help-ing people improve their health — a message that the company wanted to present to a wider audience. First, Cigna evaluated how its audi-ence was engaging with content

in social media channels. Then it analyzed what motivated its audi-ence behavior, including listening to social media conversations. All this intelligence helped Cigna achieve its key objectives: increasing quality candidates per job opening, reduc-ing recruiting costs, and increasing career site traffic.

http://www.cigna.com

http://www.cigna.com


Recruiting on the GoIn This Chapter

▶ Making your career site mobile friendly

▶ Interacting with candidates on handheld devices

▶ Analyzing your mobile strategy

T oday, consumers and businesses increasingly use smartphones and other mobile devices to order goods

and services, make reservations, and apply for jobs on the go, so including mobile in your recruitment marketing mix is more and more important. In fact, mobile is a great way to connect a company and its recruiters with both passive and active job candidates, especially in conjunction with social media.

According to a recent Nielsen report, 91 percent of adults have a mobile phone within arm’s reach 24/7. Glassdoor research shows that 45 percent of job seekers use their mobile devices specifically to search for jobs at least once a day.

To attract top talent, you need a mobile‐optimized career site, an easy job application process, and an enhanced mobile mar-keting strategy. Unfortunately, many talent acquisition leaders don’t know where to start when building a mobile strategy. In this chapter, I show you.

Building a Mobile‐Friendly Career Site

Have you ever visited a website on your smartphone but couldn’t make out the site text, zoom in easily, or tap but-tons and links? A poor user experience — too many pages, unreadable buttons, multistep application processes — can

Chapter 6



discourage users. Without a mobile‐optimized career site, you may be deterring an entire segment of candidates from apply-ing for open jobs.

Providing a quality experienceCandidates expect career sites and experiences to be acces-sible, fast, easy to use, engaging, and personal.

Use developers to implement a responsive website design that is optimized for mobile. For a great candidate experience on mobile devices, keep copy short, use photos, and simplify your messaging. If you use video, make sure that the footage is engaging and quickly tells candidates what makes your company a great place to work.

Making job applications easyAnother best practice in promoting jobs on mobile devices is to remove all calls to action from job descriptions except for an apply button. Using bulleted lists rather than lengthy para-graphs to describe a position also prevent job seekers from abandoning your site.

Here are some main points to consider in creating an easy application process:

✓ Questions: Add engaging questions to job descriptions to pique candidates’ interest.

✓ Layout: Use plenty of white space, keep copy to a minimum, and employ bullets.

✓ Branding: Add videos, photos, and other content to give job seekers a realistic preview of the culture and teams they may be joining.

✓ Social: Add social sharing buttons so that candidates can promote job postings with friends via social networks.

The entire job‐application process should take no longer than a minute or two.

Chapter 6: Recruiting on the Go 35


Case study: KforceProfessional staffing services firm Kforce knows that mobile is increas-ingly a preferred way for candi-dates to learn about and apply for open positions. So, it customizes its recruiting messages for read-ability (and response) on smart-phones and tablets. Allison Kruse, Senior Manager of Social Media and Talent Acquisition, says to refrain from asking mobile users, par-ticularly passive candidates, to do

“ homework,” such as locating and submitting a résumé file, which can lead busy users to simply discard the message. Instead, a better practice is to pepper mobile messages with open‐ended questions that provoke quick and concise answers. For example, “Is there anything missing in your current role that you want in your next role?” or “What types of projects do you want to work on this year?”

Engaging with Candidates on Mobile Devices

One of the great aspects of mobile marketing is being able to target both active and passive candidates who may be researching your organization or encountering your employer brand for the first time.

Here are some ways to engage with passive and active candidates on mobile:

✓ Sending job alerts about new job openings, career fairs, or other company news

✓ Sending emails that guide candidates to an easy‐apply landing page or option to join your talent community

✓ Sending text messages that drive candidates to your career page

✓ Infusing your employer brand into all mobile marketing messages to attract ideal‐fit candidates

When you’re marketing to candidates on mobile devices, try to synchronize your efforts with the times when candidates are most likely to be searching for jobs, such as lunch hour, before work, or weekends.



Tracking Mobile AnalyticsWhen you’ve put your mobile strategy in place, you need to track your efforts. Review your career site metrics by breaking out desktop versus mobile traffic.

Here are a few things to track:

✓ Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who land on a website but exit after viewing only a single page. Ideally, your content engages and leads users to visit additional pages, staying longer on your site and lowering your bounce rate.

✓ Average visit duration: How long users typically stay on your site — the longer this average, the better. Note: Visit duration can vary widely based on how engaging your content is and whether pages are optimized for mobile.

✓ Page views per visit: Total page views divided by total visits during the same period. It’s ideal to constantly strive to increase this. Again, compelling and easy‐to‐ navigate content play big factors.

✓ Return visitors: Users who have previously visited your site from a single device (for example, a mobile phone). Ideally, you give users compelling reasons to check back often (such as new jobs, seasonal promotions, blog posts, and other information).

✓ Click‐through rate (CTR): The ratio of people who view a web page, see an online ad, or open an email divided by the number of subsequent clicks on the content (for example, a job post) or link. Higher CTRs are better. This is one of the most essential measures of a mobile cam-paign’s success.

✓ Conversion rate: Clicks divided by desired or targeted action. Higher conversion rates are better. For example, a job posting that receives 100 clicks and 10 submitted applications has a 10 percent conversion rate.

Note the most popular mobile devices or operating systems used to visit your site. This information can help you target the right content for each device.


Employing Marketing Analytics

In This Chapter ▶ Considering baseline measurements

▶ Identifying analytics to measure by channel

▶ Calculating cost‐per‐hire data

▶ Measuring the impact of your employer brand

R ecruitment marketing analytics help you measure the success of your hiring programs, feed teams with quality

hires based on real‐world data, and invest in the right chan-nels. Investing in channels that help you build a database of strong candidates also allows you to tap into that talent pool in times of need.

In this chapter, I explore what analytics to look at to help you determine your return on investment (both with recruiting and your employer brand), easy ways to determine your cost per hire, and how to break down results by marketing channel.

Determining Baseline MetricsWithout determining baseline measurements prior to your recruitment marketing campaign, it can be difficult to know which marketing programs and channels are working and merit more of an investment. Having strong data allows you to make informed decisions about when and where to allocate your recruitment marketing budget.

Chapter 7



With every recruitment marketing campaign, consider looking at the following baseline measurements:

✓ Cost per hire: According to Bersin by Deloitte research, the industry standard is about $4,000 per hire.

✓ Time to hire: Bersin by Deloitte research shows that, on average, companies take 52 days to fill a single role.

✓ Cost per applicant: How much you spent divided by the number of applicants. This varies by role/vertical.

✓ App‐to‐hire ratios: How many résumés you go through to make one hire. This varies by candidate quality.

✓ Applicant quality: The number of applicants interviewed or retention rates post‐hire.

TMP Worldwide (www.tmp.com) is an agency that helps employers break down their spend by channel and optimize recruitment marketing programs. According to a recent Brandon Hall Group research report, TMP Worldwide found that Glassdoor’s cost per hire was significantly lower than other sources and that Glassdoor enjoyed a much better applicant‐to‐hire ratio (47‐to‐1 versus 100+‐to‐1 via other sources). Download the report at http://employers.glassdoor.com/eBooks.

Geography can also greatly impact hiring data. Do your homework: See how long it takes the overall market and your competitors to fill positions.

Knowing Which Analytics to Measure by Channel

To optimize your budget, track the source of every hire and the average time to hire for each role. In some cases, an agency can help. If your small business is on a budget, you may need to invest in a tracking system.

Key marketing campaign channel analytics to look at to deter-mine return on investment include the following:

✓ Job advertising: Cost per hire, time to hire, cost per applicant, app‐to‐hire ratios, candidate quality

http://www.tmp.com

http://employers.glassdoor.com/eBooks

http://employers.glassdoor.com/eBooks

Chapter 7: Employing Marketing Analytics 39


✓ Social: Clicks, mentions, retweets, user demographics, impressions, reach (see Chapter 5)

✓ Events: Candidate quality, time to hire, cost per hire

✓ Employee referral programs: Percent of employees who would recommend your business, cost per hire

✓ Email: Open rates, click‐through rates, response rates

✓ Recruiting and staffing agencies: Cost per hire, time to hire, candidate quality

Calculating Cost per Hire by Marketing Channel

It’s crucial to have a solid estimate of your cost per hire so you can make smarter investment decisions, define referral bonuses, and save your organization money in the long run.

The top sources of hires are important, but so is the cost of each channel. For example, are you paying your recruiting vendor more money for fewer hires compared with other efforts? Analyzing whether a channel is actually effective and providing value for your organization allows you to invest only in the channels that are working for your organization.

To determine your cost per hire by channel, follow these steps:

1. Calculate how much you spent on each recruitment channel last year.

2. Note how many hires you made last year on each channel.

3. Divide what you spent by the number of hires you made on each channel.

Determining a cost per hire means factoring in every potential fee associated with each team member. Consider including these items:

✓ Salaries and bonuses for a full‐time recruiting team

✓ Payments to contract or temporary recruiters



✓ Candidate travel or relocation costs

✓ Miscellaneous items such as benefits and taxes

Not including personnel fees can dramatically skew cost‐ per‐hire data (see all areas to include in Chapter 3).

Note what channels help deliver hard‐to‐fill roles within your company. These typically take much longer to fill and have a higher cost per hire.

Measuring the Impact of Your Employer Brand

Having a strong employer brand can help lower recruitment costs. For example, if your brand reputation is favorable to top talent, you’ll be spending less time sourcing talent and will likely have more qualified résumés to review.

Measuring your employer brand impact can be done in a variety of ways. First, look at awareness by analyzing the following areas:

✓ Increased brand engagement and profile page visits

✓ Increased career site traffic

✓ Increased mobile search and social traffic

✓ Increased job posting clicks, views, applicants, and hires

According to a Glassdoor survey, recruiters spend $129,000 on average annually on their employer brand. Having data to show return on investment is crucial to ensure you can build the case for more budget on the programs that are working.


Ten Ways to Win with Recruitment Marketing

In This Chapter ▶ Creating a great recruitment marketing strategy

▶ Understanding which metrics to track

▶ Sharing results

▶ Taking advantage of social media

E very employer, large or small, has a unique brand, story, and culture to employ in the war for talent. Here are ten

ways to win talent with recruitment marketing:

✓ Create a unique, strong, and authentic brand. Be true to yourself and your unique brand. Don’t try to be some-thing you’re not. Mirror your unique style in all recruit-ment marketing messages so that you attract employees who will thrive (and stay) at your organization.

✓ Train internal brand ambassadors. Ask target employ-ees what they love about working at your organization to ensure it matches your company’s unique mission and vision. Utilize employees in videos and encourage sharing on social networks to amplify your company’s message and attract like-minded talent.

✓ Track key performance indicators. Only by setting goals and benchmarks can you truly measure and track your success. If your priority for the coming year is to lower your cost per hire, do your homework now by calculat-ing which channels bring you the most candidates at the most efficient cost.

Chapter 8



✓ Share results with stakeholders. Having buy‐in from senior management and other company champions is a great way to endorse, optimize, and amplify your recruit-ment marketing mission. Decide who should report metrics and results, to whom, and how often (monthly, quarterly, or annually).

✓ Simplify the message. Whether you’re using a mobile‐optimized career site, blog, or job alerts to attract talent, keep things simple, streamlined, and easy to understand. The clearer and more appealing your message is, the more likely it is to engage users and minimize drop‐off, especially on mobile devices. (See Chapter 6 for details on mobile recruiting.)

✓ Monitor the competition. Study how your competitors market their company, culture, and open jobs. Read com-pany reviews by their employees to spot trends, themes, or weaknesses you can use to your advantage in differen-tiating your company.

✓ Respond to every candidate. Not every job candidate is a good fit, but any candidate may lead you to someone who is. It’s in your company’s best interest not to leave any candidates hanging, even those who aren’t perfect fits. Chances are, they’ll share their experience with your company on social networks and with friends.

✓ Create a marketing calendar. A calendar keeps a team and recruiting efforts on track. Use it to plot the hires you’ll need to make throughout the year and the related campaigns (as well as budget) to attract them. For more on creating a budget and calendar, see Chapter 3.

✓ Run a referral program. In some companies, success-ful employee referral programs bring in up to 50 percent of new hires. Offer your employees referral bonuses to recommend top talent to your organization.

✓ Use social media at every step. We live in a social, networked age. Target candidates where they hang out or do business socially, using specific messages for each platform. Encourage sharing to publicize your open jobs to a wider audience, especially if you have a limited budget (see Chapter 5).

Date post:	15-Aug-2015
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