4 Steps to Creating Captivating Campaigns for Candidates
In order for your recruitment marketing campaigns to become more strategic, recruiting teams must understand the underlying principle that “candidates are consumers” and leverage similar consumer-based practices to promote employer brand and job opportunities.
With the rise of mobile technology, candidates expect a personalized and optimized experience across all device types — from their interactions on your career site, through the application process and on-going communication regarding status updates and general information on your organization — with tailored, relevant content.
Adopting a marketing-based approach to recruitment can help set you apart from other organizations in the 2020 war for talent.
Here are 4 things to take into consideration when building relevant, tailored recruitment marketing campaigns to engage with your candidates and hire the talent you need.
1. Align with your Marketing Team to Build your Employer Brand
Brand consistency is vital when building out recruitment marketing campaigns, and the good news is, you may not have to start from scratch in building out your content for your employer brand.
Aligning with your internal marketing team can work in your favor — understanding your organization’s external brand identity with consumers can be leveraged and pivoted to attract new talent and engage with your existing candidate pipeline.
2. Optimize the Candidate Journey
From your career site to social media to the application process itself – ensuring interactions are optimized across all device types is of paramount importance.
Defining answers to the following prompts will help you to outline the journey you wish to take the candidate on:
What is my ultimate goal?
Are you looking to get people to register for a hiring event?
Are you trying to drive applicant traffic to a specific job opening?
Do you have a specific hiring initiative (i.e., campus, D&I, veteran, etc.)
Who is my audience?
Understanding the ‘who’ will help you in crafting your messaging.
Are you targeting candidates in a specific industry or sector?
Are you looking for candidates in a specific location?
Do you want candidates with specific certifications or other qualifications to engage with you?
What is the call-to-action (CTA)?
Be clear with what you would like the candidate to do and ensure the experience is optimized across device types.
Do you want people to visit your website? A landing page? Register their details for an event? Apply to a specific job opening?
Consider candidate communication preferences when it comes to building out your recruitment marketing campaigns. Streamline your engagement strategy with candidates, allowing your recruiters to focus their energy on sourcing more top-tier talent.
3. Invest in Technology
More specifically, leverage technology that provides recruitment marketing functionality, allowing you to schedule your campaigns and control the candidate journey.
A recruitment marketing system can help you understand your data to build your target audience and craft relevant content.
Build out a database of contacts and segment it to understand demographic information, such as:
- location
- areas of interest
- availability
- relocation
- other preferences communication preferences
- certifications
- candidate communication preferences
A good rule of thumb: look for technology that supports text messaging as a mode of communication. Candidate communication preferences lean heavily in favor of mobile/text messaging with read and response rates averaging exponentially higher than traditional email.
4. Launch. Measure. Iterate.
As with any goal, it must be attainable and measurable.
Define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These will give you a baseline to measure the effectiveness of the campaigns you create.
Don’t be afraid to fail, and if you do fail, do it fast and iterate.
Consider the factors that might impact effectiveness, such as time of day, the mode of communication, the messaging, who the messaging is coming from, etc.
A Note on Best Practices
It is important to test your campaigns internally before you launch to ensure your messaging, content, and landing pages, etc., display as intended.
Create a small group of internal employees you trust to provide you with feedback on the content, design, and experience.
Learn how Loop can help you engage with your candidates through the power of campaigns.