5 Hiring Strategies You Can Borrow From Your Marketing Team

Best recruiting practices to meet your high-volume hiring goals

In a hiring climate, where demand for hires outweighs the number of people who want to work, companies that need to hire at high volumes are struggling to reel in candidates.

To navigate this landscape, Talent Acquisition (TA) and Human Resources (HR) teams can look within their own organizations to learn new ways to source candidates and attract the right talent. The Marketing team—whose job is to make the organization’s service or product appealing to a specific target audience—is an ideal place to start when refining your recruiting practice. 
 

Below, we dive into five strategies you can borrow from your Marketing team to help you reach your high-volume hiring goals.

Set Clear Goals

The first step of any marketing plan is to define the goals you want the company to achieve. For recruiting, these goals might look like “attract more quality candidates” or “increase candidate engagement.” The more specific you make these goals, the more likely you’ll be able to devise a hiring strategy that yields the results you want.

From these initial goals, you can build out the rest of your hiring agenda, which should conclude with a reporting and analysis step to review how your goals panned out (covered below).

Market Research

Your Marketing team likely has done extensive research and identified personas as part of its targeting strategy to find the types of people who will benefit most from a product or service. A “persona” is a fictional figure who represents a company’s target market. Marketing breaks these personas down and evaluates the needs of these theoretical people based on their job duties.

TA and HR professionals can apply similar thinking when exploring how to attract the right applicants. Below are a few questions to consider for each new job posting:
 

• What professional and personality characteristics will align best with these job duties?
• What sort of company culture are we trying to establish?
• What background (i.e., education, work experience, etc.) do we want our applicants to have?

As part of this market research, consider also reviewing the benefits of working for your company, also known as the “value proposition.” After all, not only do you choose your talent, but the talent also must decide whether they want to choose you. 

For example, ask yourself whether the workplace, pay, and benefits align with the needs and expectations of your ideal candidates. Do you offer opportunities for on-the-job training? Advancement? Flexible time off for working parents? Conceptualizing an ideal candidate profile will help you construct a job description and targeting strategy to match.

Target and Nurture Your Ideal Candidates

Once a Marketing team conducts market research, they’ll create targeted lists of people or companies to whom they’d like to push their message and eventually capture as customers. 

HR can use this same strategy to target applicants that are most likely to apply for their openings. This may mean posting job opportunities to geography-specific job boards, if applicants are required to live in a certain location, or on college campus job websites, if entry-level positions need to be filled.

Just like a marketing funnel nurtures potential customers, recruiters should also define a nurturing timeline for applicants. Similar to a marketing nurture stream, the recruiting nurture stream can include steps, such as Awareness, Consideration, and Interest, followed by Application, Selection, and, finally, Hire.

Brand Recognition and Promotion

Brand recognition and promotion are two key cornerstones of marketing, and the first place to start is your website.

Jobseekers who use search engines to look for jobs will benefit from SEO-friendly career pages. Test this by entering different phrases into a search engine to see what comes up first, and tailor your website language (as naturally as possible, of course) to increase your chances of nabbing that top search spot.

Next, conduct a quick audit of your social media accounts to get an idea of how you present the company online. What message are you conveying to users who visit your channels? Does your company seem like a desirable place to work? How are your current workers interacting with and sharing your content?

If you’re not doing so already, use your social media channels to promote company events and news, such as promotions and recent hires. Encourage your staff to get involved with posting and sharing, especially when new job openings arise.

Take brand management a step further by checking in to see how you fare on public review sites like Glassdoor, Google, and Yelp. Use these platforms to redeem your organization against any negative comments.

Analyze Your Efforts

Any good marketing plan has a review process baked in that allows team members to learn what efforts worked and what didn’t work. 

Frequent and thorough reviews also should be part of the recruiting process as the needs of both recruiters and applicants are constantly changing. 

First, decide what metrics you plan to track, such as those involving the candidate experience, the number of visits to the career site, or application completion rates. Next, choose a method you plan to use to track these data. This is an easy task if you’ve adopted an Applicant Tracking System, which often includes reporting functionalities.

The End Goal

HR and Marketing teams don’t necessarily work in tandem on a day-to-day basis, but there’s plenty of overlap when it comes to department objectives: get the right message to the right people and ensure a return on investment, which—in the case of recruitment—means more hires.

Sean Behr is the CEO at Fountain, the high-volume hiring platform that empowers companies with an hourly workforce to streamline and scale their recruiting operations across the globe. Previously, Behr was the Co-Founder and CEO of STRATIM (acquired by KAR). Behr previously served in leadership roles at Adap.tv (acquired by AOL), most recently, as SVP, Global operations. Before Adap.tv, He held various management roles at Shopping.com (acquired by Ebay) including roles in HR, sales, product management and strategy development.  Visit www.get.fountain.com  Connect Sean Behr