by Patty Silbert
January 25, 2023
While many HR leaders say that the pandemic, tough labor market, the “Great Resignation,” and “Quiet Quitting” have changed every aspect of the employee experience and challenged recruiting more than ever, there still remains a slow adoption by recruiters to embrace concepts of marketing when engaging with potential talent. For recruiting functions to keep up, there needs to be a NEW future for how recruiting approaches the candidate marketplace.
As I reflect on the last few years and all of their impact on the candidate marketplace, I wonder why there has yet to be a more significant change to recruiting processes. Reports and studies from industry experts continue to focus on "the future of work." Those experts have studied new employee expectations who desire to emphasize "life first and job second." In addition, there is a greater than ever expectation for employers to lead their organizations with purpose as candidates are looking for more than words on their website, and lastly and equally important, employees are placing a focus on asking their employees to teach them new skills. Yet, in most corporate recruiting functions, we have yet to see a change in how recruiters promote and engage with their target audience in a real way.
The bottom line is that a new generation of candidates expects more from recruiting than a good job description and desires a similar experience to what they feel when engaging with brands as a consumer.
TA Leaders will need to address the skill gaps of their recruiting team by helping them gain skills to uncover candidate behaviors and expectations. Upskilling means recruiters need to morph into marketers to quickly make significant strides in leading with their organization’s employer brand and recruiters delivering creative content that is distinctive from what the company offers to their employees.
In many of my posts, I write about how outsourcing your recruiting can be your edge during any type of market disruption, and it continues to be proven. There is proof that RPOs bring a whole new approach to how they structure a best-in-class recruiting program to organizations by ensuring that the recruiting team understands the employee value proposition and ensuring that the brand is represented in an authentic manner. Many RPOs see a broader view of the candidate marketplace, given they work across many industries and organizations of all sizes. RPOs approach the candidate experience as a key differentiator in why they are successful. RPOs know that every candidate wants to see and feel an organization's value proposition, and they create content in their outreach that lets candidates see that in action.
Innovative RPOs also help organizations focus on new ways to approach recruiting just as brands engage with their consumers to gain loyalty and increase sales revenue. It's no longer about the job description and all the requirements a candidate must have; it is more about creating messaging strategies to improve filling the top of the funnel with interested candidates. These innovative approaches take a marketing mindset delivered through digital experiences. Talent Leaders must make a critical choice to either tune in and create recruiting experiences that matter or stay the course of using traditional methods of static outreach on LinkedIn, Indeed, and other platforms that have higher costs and limit their ability to differentiate themselves in these crowded spaces, while seeing a marginal return on the investment.
In the consumer marketing world, great marketers build a customer journey map. It is the visual storyline of every customer's engagement with their service, brand, or product. Marketers create a journey map to understand and see directly where they interact with their customers and to see and understand their customer's processes, needs, and perceptions. Taking a chapter out of marketing's playbook, building an effective talent pipeline must begin before the candidate market changes again. That includes creating your candidate journey map, developing personas that define your multidimensional candidate profiles, and creating content that puts the candidate's priorities first. Like consumer marketing, engagement marketing means leading with content, not products. Therefore, engagement marketing for recruitment means leading with excellent value proposition content, not job postings. And that content must be genuinely valuable to your candidates for it to be a meaningful engagement strategy. Candidates value useful information and convenience, but they also want to be inspired, and one way to inspire your candidates is to share your employer brand's vision. You need to paint an inspiring picture of an inspiring future and show that you play an essential role in that candidate's future. This is especially relevant for companies that are trying to build next-generation talent.
Building talent pipelines is not a novel topic; however, what is still being determined is understanding how your Technology can help you engage faster, measure your message effectiveness, and improve your candidate pipeline. I have been advocating and advising organizations on this topic for years, saying this is where you are and where you need to be in the future. TA leaders, if you are still setting metrics around time-to-find, time-to-fill, and other metrics that leave out measuring your engagement metrics, you are missing a critical component of an effective recruiting strategy.
In a digitized, branded, and networked world, with more automation in place to engage with candidates through personalized and valuable content, today’s candidates are raising the bar for recruitment. If you think otherwise, consider how frustrated and powerless you’ll feel in the future, when you can't see how your competition engages with candidates.
If you are still considering your talent strategy and wondering if RPO is right for your business, I would welcome the opportunity to strategize with you. Don't hesitate to reach out to me.
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