A couple of years ago I attended a conference and one presentation had me smiling ear to ear. I saw this slide…
| I was beaming because only a few hours earlier my boss had given me the green light on my attending a Digital Marketing Course through General Assembly. Upon seeing this presentation I thought, “Wow I’m a unicorn”! Of course, I realized I was not a unicorn, I was just an HR guy who needed some training! You can see the talk by Bernd Leger here. Learning marketing will allow you to better tell your company’s story and attract more of the right candidates. Marketing teams create engaging content with thoughtful messages in efforts to attract more customers. Recruiters should create engaging content with thoughtful messages in efforts to attract more candidates. As a Recruiter, I found myself creating posts for the company LinkedIn Page but they never seemed to get good engagement. I had no idea what images would engage our candidates or how to write “good copy”. I certainly didn’t know anything about Google Analytics or how SEO can be used to get your content infant of candidates. Taking a digital marketing course will allow you to think of your recruitment function with the mindset of a marketer. It will allow you to trash the bad ideas faster, and double down on your good ideas. Here are 5 things you’ll be able to do better by learning the fundamentals of a digital marketing course. Candidate Journey Marketers map out the customer’s journey to understand and improve their experience with the brand. Applied to recruitment, this can be a very effective way to understand your candidates better. That is, understanding how they hear about the company and how many times they interact with a brand before they complete the CTA (Call To Action). Candidates are doing a lot of research on companies before they actually take the time to apply. You need to think about how they are going to interact with your content, where they are interacting with it and ultimately how you’re going to convince them that you are worth their time. Storytelling Candidates aren’t reading your three-page job description. They are probably not watching all 5 minutes of that culture video either. Storytelling is so important in marketing. It’s equally as important when hiring. To tell your story effectively you’ll first need to figure out your Employee Value Proposition (EVP). You need to know what resonates with candidates and employees. Bringing someone into your company that specializes in this could be helpful, but if you don’t have the budget or resources you can take this project on yourself. Landing Pages When Marketing creates an advertisement for a product it doesn’t link to the homepage of their website, it directs to a landing page. The landing page is filled with very specific and targeted information designed to convince and convert the visitor to become a customer. In the HR world, we call these Microsites. These are separate pages on your career site that give specific information about a department, role, or even a location or committee/group. Before you go paying for ads on Facebook or LinkedIn, make sure you have the perfect place to drive that traffic. Not sure what to put on your landing page? Connect with me on LinkedIn and we can walk through the best practices. Call To Action If you have a desired outcome then you need to have a clear call-to-action. If you want them to apply for a job, make sure it’s in the copy, with a link that brings them right to the application. If you want them to join a talent community then don’t ask them to follow you on LinkedIn or Glassdoor, don’t ask them to apply, just give them the talent community form. The Long Tail There is nothing that you will do tomorrow that will bring a steady stream of qualified candidates to your inbox for all of eternity. Sometimes marketing is about the long tail. For example, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) takes time and will yield results over several months if not years. Get comfortable with the idea that you’re going to need to keep working on your employer brand and making tweaks to your strategy. I personally don’t think SEO matters all that much in Recruitment, but with little effort, you can actually rank above sites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor when people search for jobs at your company. Check out this video for more info on how to get your pages to rank. Final Thoughts Marketing is recruiting. The digital marketing course forced me to be more thoughtful about my strategy and desired outcome. It also allowed me to be more creative. I would recommend every recruiter take a digital marketing course even if you have a marketing team because knowing their language and processes will help you communicate with them. And if you don’t have a marketing team, then you’re going to need the guidance. If you want to connect and talk more about how marketing and technology can play a more strategic role in your recruitment efforts reach out to me at [email protected] Cheers, Brian Mooney Talent Strategist P.S. Here is the Framework for the course I took… -Digital Marketing Framework & Strategy -Digital Marketing & SEO -Paid Social & Advertising -Content Marketing & Social Media -Marketing Acquisition & Conversion Rate Optimization -Customer Engagement & Retention -Analytics, Data, & Reporting -Display, Facebook, or Mobile Deep Dives -Storytelling & Budget Planning |
Join us in Cambridge, MA on 5/21/2019 and learn how to measure Employee Lifetime Value.
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