Candidate marketing is one of the most crucial elements of modern business recruitment. By simply gathering the right information, many great businesses of the past and present have dramatically improved their success in finding great candidates. While it may seem complicated or intricate at first, candidate marketing is surprisingly simple: find or create the potential hires you want. All other understandings and definitions work against the true simplicity of marketing. And, fortunately, finding a suitable candidate is as simple as creating candidate profiles, identifying how potential employees behave and what experience they generally have, and finding new ways to approach them. This process is called target marketing, and it is the core approach behind some of the most prominent and successful companies in history. There is no reason why this philosophy cannot be applied to recruitment, in addition to traditional marketing.
Creating the Profile
The first step in target recruitment marketing is to create detailed profiles of potential candidates. Profiles need to be as detailed as possible: missing information will translate to a recruitment pool that is much too large and non-specific. Focusing on details like education, experience, and history of personal motivation will help you identify candidates that will be an asset to your company.
Identify Key Behaviors
Behavior is a broad, general word. Everyone behaves, so focusing on behavior will never accidentally exclude anyone. Behavior is habitual, so learning about behavior can provide a window into the lives of the candidates you want. You’ll want to know where your ideal candidates are gathering online, as well as where any industry-relevant discussion takes place. Joining this discussion will make your company visible to those you wish to recruit, along with suitable candidates whom you may not have given consideration to previously.
While you take the time to identify the behaviors of your ideal candidates, examine your criteria. Are you aiming for recruits without much experience? Are your educational requirements for candidates too narrow for the diverse needs of your company? Several academic disciplines can lend themselves well to a business environment—many of which recruiters hardly ever consider. For instance, an Event Marketing specialist with a degree in Sport Management, says having academic training relevant to his field has been an invaluable asset. With this training, he reports, he is better prepared to assess the behaviors of his target demographic—in this instance, sports fans. Recruiters must think critically about the behaviors, experience, and academic background of the potential hires before actively recruiting.
Test and Invest
With the right information about potential candidates, where they are located and the way that they behave, companies can start spreading their recruitment message in a strategic fashion. However, any potential hire could also turn out to be a catastrophic failure. Tests are the only true way to gauge the efficacy of a recruitment marketing strategy, and running tests can both improve profits and reduce costs by virtue of experience. Always test a new strategy before implementing or investing into it on a large scale.
A myriad of books, articles, videos and documentaries have been created with the sole purpose of explaining target marketing. It is one of the most reliable ways to earn business, and those that seek to better understand target marketing are at a clear advantage in the business world. The same principles can be applied to recruitment marketing—by understanding these, you will know better how to identify and attract your ideal candidates.
