It won’t be the first or last time we talk about recruitment and marketing disciplines being more closely aligned than ever before.  Both disciplines require gaining competitive advantage to increase revenue.  So whether you’re a direct recruiter or an agency recruiter, what are the practical marketing actions you can take today to improve your success?

Segment your audience

It sounds obvious, but there are also a lot of marketing teams who fail to do this exercise properly.  Segment your potential candidate audience.  What sectors might they currently be working in, what sort of skills might they possess, what motivates them, is there a specific age range?  The more accurate personas you can create the better engagement you’ll get when you communicate with candidates.

Attract

If you think about the sales and marketing funnel, the first phase of this is attract.  Attracting the right candidates form all of your channels into your recruitment sales funnel.  Think about the strength of your personal brand, how do you interact with the market, how do you promote yourself and do you leverage your employer brand when promoting yourself?  This could be through sharing both company content and your own views on your most appropriate professional social media channels.  The other important thing to think about at this stage is the quality and clarity of your job adverts, in the same way a marketer would think creatively about their advertising campaigns.

Nurture

Marketers have been working towards automated nurture programmes for years.  These are more complicated than you might imagine, but with the introduction of candidate automation technology such as Beamery and Clinch it is now easier than ever to do this, it just takes a bit of thought.  You’ve got those all important high quality candidates into your funnel, but you want to keep them engaged, nurture them with relevant content, promote your employer brand and contact them at the right moment about the most suitable role.  By this point they’ll be warm to an approach so more likely to engage.

Customer service

To retain a loyal client base, marketing will invest time and energy to ensure their customer base gets the best experience possible and their needs are properly serviced at all times.  This creates a group of brand advocates who will promote your organisation through word of mouth, social media and in the case of direct employers in particular, will continue to promote your brand through the lifespan of their career with you.  With candidates, regular communication, high quality service levels, detailed feedback for unsuccessful candidates and a fantastic onboarding experience for successful ones is critical for you to create brand advocates and continually increase the quality of candidate applications in the future.

For more advice on maximising recruitment success by taking a marketing approach download our whitepaper below.

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