Industry Research: How Your Applicant Tracking Software Can Help You Win At Recruitment Marketing

Marketing and managing candidates

The concept of recruitment marketing has been around for at least seven-right years, and over the past two years has been picking up some momentum. Sometimes referred to as “the intersection of employer branding and recruitment advertising”, recruitment marketing combines multiple elements, marketing, advertising, branding, with the ultimate goal of delivering talent at the right time.

 

For most companies, marketing begins with their most public-facing tool in their armory; their website. The company website provides a plethora of information to its visitors, including anything from company history, products for sale, awards, events, employees, news and blog. It should also include an employment page, or link to an ATS. Most companies with marketing departments are busy updating the website regularly, if not on a daily basis. Updating and adding content, refining details, and aiming to increase their search engine optimization with every change.
 
From a human resources perspective, the career center or employment page, and applicant tracking software provide two essential functions: marketing, and managing candidates.
 
Sadly, it's a frequent complaint from candidates that once their carefully crafted application gets entered into an applicant tracking system or sent through a website, they never hear from the employer again. Essentially, the potential candidate is ghosted, and no one appreciates that. Employers are now having to take a customer service based approach to recruiting – like their sales and marketing departments do - and treat potential applicants the same way you'd treat a customer. This is especially true for public facing industries such as retail, banking, and food services.
 
Another depressing fact is that unlike the rest of your website, most career centers don't get updated very often with new content. Once they are built, the only changes they see on a regular basis are when jobs get posted or taken down; which doesn’t help optimize search.

An ATS is a tool. Like most tools, you get what you make of it. An ATS can be used to post job, receive and communicate with candidates while tracking them through your hiring stages (review, interview, background screen, hiring and onboarding).

In addition to posting your job onto your career center (on your website), your ATS can post your job out to multiple advertising sources. Job boards like Indeed.com, ZipRecruiter.com, Monster.com or a local job board that you regularly use. In most cases, you can also expect to have the option of sponsoring a role for additional exposure, and an increased number of candidates.

Additional sources for advertising include social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Posting to social media can increase your advertising reach at a low (or no) cost, help you reach passive candidates and engage in conversation with potential candidates. So when is the best time to post to social media? A study from Sprout Social shows that the best time to post is on weekdays from noon to 2:00pm in any time zone.

Your ATS as a talent pool? Yes, not just a database. The ATS is a single point of entry to manage all your contacts. You can use your ATS as a lead generator similar to how a customer relationship management (CRM) tool works. ATSs like iRecruit allows for customers to build multiple “application forms”. So in addition to a regular employment application, you can have one or more short forms for potential candidates to show interest, without applying for a specific role. Even ask specific questions so you can segment into lists or groups by interest.

When you have a database of leads in your ATS or CRM, or you’re building a sizeable following on your social media channels, or LinkedIn group, you can develop those leads into potential candidates. Exactly the same way your sales and marketing team would nurture leads. Recruitment marketing is all about increasing awareness of your brand and content, and nurturing interest. If you also use your ATS to segment into types of candidates, by skill or role, you can target them with relevant and useful content.

At iRecruit, I get asked all the time about what to send to nurture leads. Most of the time the recruiter has a role they need to get out in front of people, and they want qualified candidates as quickly as possible. Sound familiar? That part is easy. Coming up with content scares people for some reason. It’s not as difficult as it sounds. I guarantee that you already have tons of content that you can reuse and repurpose. You’re attending an industry event. Share it. You’re going to be at a career fair. Email it. Your company just won a prestigious award (congratulations). Tweet it. The general rule of thumb is that only one out of five pieces of content you share is a job posting. Keep in mind, you can regularly repost content over different mediums to continually reach new candidates.

The number one place educated candidates go to research you is your career site, this is the best branding tool you have to nurture candidates. I mentioned this earlier, the career center is a huge part of your website, but unfortunately most career centers don’t get updated with new content very often. Adding new content to your career center regularly provides enormous weight to your search engine optimization, boosts your visibility and increases marketability to candidates. Your career center should tell your story. It should tell the potential candidate not just who you are, but what you stand for, your company culture. Are your employees happy? The key to keeping visitors interested is as simple as asking, if it were me, “What would I like to know before I apply?” We recommend reviewing your career center every month to see if any changes can be made. Even something as simple as adding a new video or a Glassdoor reviews widget will help.

A call-to-action is sometimes a button or a link, or a form requesting information. On your employment application the call-to-action is “Apply Now.” From a recruitment marketing perspective, the goal is to nurture interest. So while you still need the “Apply Now” button, you also need to provide additional options for interested potential candidates who are looking, but don’t want to apply right away. Offer a sign up form for a newsletter, LinkedIn or other social media.

Employee referrals are said to be one of the fastest way to find new hires. Your ATS can help you manage those referrals and track the referees. From an onboarding perspective, you can also survey your new hires for additional referrals.

Your ATS is a tool you can use to increase brand awareness, share relevant content on social media, as well as post jobs.  Career website/portal can be used as a branding tool and your message, your videos and your content can be used to portray how great a place your company is to work from. You can create email templates to communicate with candidates, and nurture your leads. An ATS like iRecruit is one that is both simple and easy to use, while also having the flexibility to be as configurable as you need.