Recruitment Marketing. Where to start?

We see an ever increasing number of organisations wanting to take control of their recruitment process and candidate attraction, systems and strategy.

 A big part of that is ensuring your content and messaging is relevant and reflected through all your channels and candidate touch points. Be it email signatures, social media channels, careers pages, webinars, video content, job boards and sky writing – (ok so you're still reading).

So even on this modest “to do list”, there's a lot to do, and if you’ve read best practice examples, (and in our ever evolving industry the phrase “best practice” and “recruitment” go together like “Briscoes” and “Sale”, its fairly over used!) you’re going to be led to believe all of these touch points are launched at the same time, that the change was something instant, a flick of the switch – updated job ads, new videos, internal and external multi level stakeholder sign off.  

 Well that’s seldom the case. It’s a little less slick than that, in fact often it’s just one little thing to start with. And that’s our view. Create it stick by stick. Starting with one. 

 Experiment with social, change copy; try new digital channels and approaches. But just one thing. And if it’s not right the risk is mitigated. You didn’t paint the whole house, just one room. And if you nail it, you’ve got support and insight to move to the next.

 Here are some great examples where we’ve seen it done.  

Social strategy. Helping a company attract Tanker Drivers. There was discussion on how active the audience is on Facebook. The easiest way was to simply build a group on Facebook and advertise to those with interest or professions in Truck/Trucking. We set up Kiwi Truck Drivers loaded interesting content for the audience and three days later it had 800 members, and everyone had a view on where Facebook fitted in with talent attraction of this audience. And the client is still growing this group years later!

 Video and Digital. What I’ve seen that works really well is finding a champion in the organisation that wants to see their business unit showcased to engage and attract talent. One of our clients needed to hire close to 40 engineers due to growth last year. They developed the “why choose us” story, video and written content for press releases, media and landing pages and took the story to the market. This gave other business units the confidence to own their recruitment a brand led and digital approach.

 Seizing the day. While developing a webinar to attract tech talent to New Zealand with Immigration New Zealand, we were filming business leaders on the “why New Zealand” part. The head of HR and Recruitment at Fiserv popped into watch the filming. He then came back with the SVP of Digital who was in town from the USA and wrangled him on to camera to present to the world why join Fiserv in New Zealand. Creating a free and powerful piece of video content, by simply just doing it and ceasing the moment!

 Be hungry. I recall asking the Head of Marketing at what this time last year was a private start up (They were one of last year’s NZX listings) about their approach to using Workhere. They would constantly send us well crafted blogs, news stories, wins, awards, new employees to profile, more news than any larger company. We then republished it for our networks and shared it. Her answer on why, was pretty simple. They just wanted to start with getting their story out there, be it for talent, investment, or culture.

 So next time the question on where to start with changing your recruitment approach and its marketing direction pops up. Just pick off one thing that you can execute, and use it as the case study of change.