We’ve talked briefly about recruitment marketing, and how HR and Marketing departments can team up to improve recruitment efforts. Beyond teaming up, your Marketing team uses a number of strategies that lend themselves well to the HR department. Here are some of the things you can do to improve the hiring process, lifted right from the marketer’s handbook:
Embrace The Funnel
Your Marketing team probably talks about funnels a lot: getting more contacts in to the top of the funnel, addressing contact churn in the middle of the funnel, etc. It’s time to view your hiring practices through the same lens.
The funnel methodology can help you determine which areas of the hiring process need attention. Check out this article from TalentLyft to understand what this might look like at your organization. Roughly speaking, recruitment marketing takes up the first half of your hiring funnel, while the actual hiring process makes up the bottom half. Sort of how Marketing takes on part of your company’s sales funnel, while your Sales team deals with another part.
Pro Tip: Still wondering what recruitment marketing is all about? Here’s an introduction.
This method makes it easier to decipher where you need to focus your attention. Not enough applicants for an open position? Time to tackle top-of-funnel issues, like generating awareness that your company is hiring. Lots of interviews but very few candidates accepting offer letters? Consider how your Sales team closes deals, with demos and other strategies that prove that your product is worth the investment. On the hiring side, what could you do better to prove to candidates that your company is worth working for?
Talk To Personas, Not To Everyone
Your Marketing team loves personas – those fictional people with various problems that your products can solve. Marketing uses personas to build stories around your company’s products. Instead of telling everyone the same thing, they highlight different benefits of your product, depending on what they think the persona needs. You can do this too – and you already have some of the tools to do it.
Consider creating candidate personas based on the requirements of the job at hand. What sorts of skills would your ideal candidate have in this role? What sort of personality traits might they have? Based on those elements, you might be able to dig a bit deeper: what might their career aspirations be? Where might they spend their time, online and offline?
This can help you speak more directly to the people you want to hire. Use their language in the job posting, not stock language that could apply to any company. Highlight what makes your company a great place to work for that kind of person, not just standard nice-to-haves that exist everywhere.
Knowing more about your potential candidates is beneficial in every stage of the hiring process, and a slightly more personalized approach can help improve candidate experience. This article from Talention explains it well.
Consider The 5 Ps
Ever heard of the 5 Ps Of Marketing? Also known as the Marketing Mix, it was originally 4 different terms that started with the letter P. Now, many organizations use 5 terms, since the original Marketing Mix didn’t have a spot for People. Here’s how marketers use the 5 Ps to cover their bases when developing a campaign together:
- Product: what are you selling?
- Price: what does your product cost?
- Place: where will customers find your product?
- People: who would be interested in buying this product?
- Promotion: how will you entice those people to buy the product?
Now, let’s modify these to fit the hiring process:
- Product: what position are you trying to fill?
- Price: how much will an employee make in this role?
- Place: where will employees work, and what will that experience be like?
- People: who would thrive in this job? (Hey – this seems like a good time to bust out that candidate persona.)
- Promotion: how will potential candidates become aware of the job, and how will you convince them to apply?
Some of these questions are harder than others, and you might find yourself digging deeper into each one. Price might not just include salary – maybe you’ve got really competitive benefits that other companies just can’t touch. For place, consider what the company culture is like, as well as specifics about the role’s environment. What experiences do all employees get (snacks, ping pong tables, common spaces, etc.), and what might be more specific to the role (open concept office space, close to or far from other members of the team, etc.).
This article from HR Bartender takes the approach in a different direction, indicating that the 5 Ps can also help educate candidates on your company and why you do what you do. This can be a great way to determine whether candidates really buy in to your vision. After all, intrinsic motivation is a great way to maintain employee engagement.
You might already be familiar with these strategies in a marketing sense, but it makes sense to view them through the HR lens as well. After all, you’re trying to sell candidates on your company being a great place to work, just like your company tries to sell products and solutions to potential customers. And if Marketing can convince customers, maybe it’s time to start convincing candidates in the same way.
For a deeper look at how assessments can help you avoid making hiring mistakes, get a free trial of McQuaig today.