How the Marketing Team Can Boost Your Recruitment Strategy

The “5 Secrets for Success: How Talent Teams Can Learn From Other Departments and Finally Win the War for Talent” Series — Part 3 of 5

The “3 Secrets for Success: How Talent Teams Can Learn From Other Departments and Finally Win the War for Talent” Series — Part 3 of 3

Marketing teams use techniques like Account-Based Marketing (ABM), feedback loops, and A/B testing. Applying them to the recruitment process can significantly benefit recruitment teams to improve their recruiting efforts and attract top talent.

These techniques can be adopted in the following ways:

• A/B testing: Recruitment teams can use A/B testing to try out different recruiting strategies and tactics and measure the results, such as different messaging or recruiting channels. This allows the team to determine the most effective strategy and adjust accordingly.
  Imagine you could want to find out if having a tech test at the beginning of the interview was more effective than at the end of the process. Or you can try asynchronous discussions v video interviews. So you create a hypothesis test, take a snapshot of what the data looks like, create the test, and then compare the data to see if it has had an impact. You will always learn something, whether it works or not, so you will adopt the approach that yields the best results, but you will be moving forward and learning.

• Account-Based Marketing (ABM): ABM is a strategy where the recruitment team focuses on specific companies or industries that are a good fit for their open positions. The recruitment team can create targeted campaigns and messaging to reach suitable candidates at those companies. This allows them to be more efficient with their resources and focus on the companies and candidates most likely to be a good fit. Imagine you are going through series B, and you need to start hiring more people for the executive team; you can begin to create the personas of people you would like to hire in detail. Then profile them, where they live, where they get their information, what events do they go to, what tools they use etc and then Highlight 100 profiles before creating a multichannel approach to get in touch so they start to see your brand everywhere before executing on contacting them. This is a similar approach your company will use for customer acquisition of key accounts.

• Feedback loops: Recruitment teams can use feedback loops to gather feedback from candidates, hiring managers, and other stakeholders throughout the recruiting process. This feedback can improve the candidate experience and adjust the recruiting process. This can improve the candidate experience and increase the chances of a successful hire. The problem is that ATS and job boards need to allow you to collect this information better, if at all, and when they do it's limited. So ensure you know exactly when and why people stopped processes so you can learn how to qualify or engage more effectively during the interviews.

• Employer Branding: Branding is an essential aspect of recruitment marketing. Recruitment teams can use ABM, feedback loops, A/B testing, and longer-term content marketing strategy to improve their employer branding strategy and increase the company’s appeal to top talent using different landing pages and UTMs to learn what is working and which has the best engagement. This can help attract top talent and retain current employees. Content marketing will be necessary to nurturing talent that you haven't been able to get interested in this round of hiring for one reason or another, but why the staying front of mind with good quality value add content will arguably make a future applicant think of your business when looking for work.

• Metrics: The same mindset is ingrained in marketing and engineering teams. If you're not measuring, you're not leaning. Recruitment teams can use metrics and analytics to measure the success of their recruiting efforts and optimise their recruitment process. These metrics can include things like time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and candidate satisfaction. But also, the pipeline where and when people drop, benchmarking salaries, and sentiment in the market allow the team to see where they are succeeding and where they need to improve, allowing them to make data-driven decisions to optimise their recruitment process.

In conclusion, recruitment teams can use marketing techniques such as ABM, feedback loops, and A/B testing to improve their recruiting efforts and attract top talent. These techniques can be used to improve the candidate experience, improve employer branding, and make data-driven decisions to optimise the recruitment process. By implementing these techniques, recruitment teams can increase their chances of successfully hiring top talent.