Your Ultimate Guide to Modern Recruitment Marketing

Love it or hate it, the recruitment landscape is changing. The Great Resignation not only paved the way for candidate-centric recruitment but also highlighted the vast number of skilled workers who were fed up with their jobs. And with blue-collar workers leading the movement, there’s an even smaller pool of job seekers—and employers need to adapt their recruitment strategies to compete in the war for talent.

To outpace the competition and find new employees, you need a modern recruitment strategy. Your ideal candidate isn’t scouring newspapers and looking up at billboards to find a new career anymore. They’re squinting at their phone screen, scrolling through thousands of online job listings—just waiting to land on an offer they can’t resist.

With so many recruiters relying on outdated methods to attract, recruit, and hire qualified job candidates, it’s no wonder that 73 percent of employers find it challenging to search for skilled candidates. So, what’s the solution? You need to adapt your tried-and-true recruitment strategy to reach the right people, with the right message, at the right time, and that’s where your marketing team can save the day.

Think about it: Sourcing, nurturing, and hiring the right people for your company can be a complex process, and you’re going to need a multi-team strategy to successfully attract talent. Believe it or not, recruitment marketing isn’t dissimilar from the work your marketing team already does to attract customers to your business. Now, you need to take those marketing best practices and make them work in the current recruitment landscape.

Ready to partner with your marketing team to break through the digital noise? Here’s everything you need to know to ditch your outdated recruitment techniques and revamp your strategy.

The Recruitment Landscape Is Evolving

Maybe you’ve been sticking to your tried-and-true recruitment strategy—but it’s just not driving results for your company anymore. Why doesn’t traditional recruitment help you attract, recruit, and hire qualified candidates like it used to?

Let’s take a step back. With record-low unemployment levels and the demand for a more resilient workforce, the job of talent acquisition professions looks vastly different than it did back in 2019. Over the past few years, the pandemic has challenged companies to keep employees engaged and source qualified hires despite shrinking HR teams and ever-evolving hiring needs.

On top of that, your job candidates’ mindsets are changing. In August of 2021, the quitting rate reached an all-time high when 4.3 million Americans, or 2.9 percent of the entire workforce, quit their jobs. It was a record-breaking month, earning the nickname “the Great Resignation,” which can be seen across every industry.

What prompted the Great Resignation? Your candidates—and the talent market—have changed dramatically over the last decade, and we’re not just talking about COVID-19. From the rise of remote work to new in-demand skills, you’re fighting for talent in a drastically different job market, and it’s evolving faster than ever before. With so many changes in the hiring landscape, how can you combat low employee retention and hire qualified blue-collar candidates? And how can you change your recruitment strategy to keep up?

The solution is simple: You need to start treating your candidates like consumers. The gig economy is in full swing, and it has played a major role in the massive decoupling of consumers and candidates. Your ideal job candidates are becoming more like consumers, so you need to work harder to sell your jobs.

Your candidates are starting to view employers as clients, and companies are looking at skilled workers as service providers. Considering these shifts toward a candidate-centric market, it’s easy to see why marketing should be an integral component of your hiring process, especially when the war for talent is so fierce.

So, What’s Wrong With Traditional Recruitment?

On the surface, traditional recruitment might seem like a great way to hire. But everywhere you look, organizations are struggling with two major challenges: recruiting and retaining talent. With countless companies struggling to find and keep skilled workers, it’s safe to assume that the problem isn’t your candidates. It’s the way you recruit in the first place.

That’s right: It’s time to leave old recruitment tactics behind. Outdated processes can suck up your time, energy, and resources—but still leave you with less-than-perfect hires. You’re already working hard to attract, recruit, and hire qualified workers. Now, you need to find hires that will stick with your company over the long term so you won’t have to repeat the same process in a few months.

The main problem with traditional recruitment? It doesn’t put your candidates at the center of the process. Here’s how traditional recruitment strategies can leave your company with long hiring times, lost productivity, and wasted resources.

1. It Relies on Passive Sourcing

Over the last decade, you might’ve driven results through passive sourcing. In a nutshell, passive sourcing involves posting a job description, sitting back, and waiting for the applications to come rolling in. For most organizations, especially larger companies, passive sourcing used to get the job done.

So, what’s changed? With the ever-increasing talent shortage and skills gap, passive sourcing is no longer an effective recruitment strategy. Today, the best job candidates on the market are passive candidates (see: candidates that aren’t actively searching for a new job). According to LinkedIn, 70 percent of the global workforce is passive talent, with only 30 percent of candidates actively seeking jobs.

Unlike active candidates, most passive candidates are already employed. As a recruiter, it’s your job to find them where they’re already spending time online (hint: they’re probably not scrolling through online job boards). Then, you need to capture their attention through strategic marketing, an amazing employer brand, and an irresistible job offer to encourage them to apply to your positions.

In other words, it’s not enough to scour Indeed or Glassdoor for talent. Most online job platforms are already saturated with recruiters who are searching for skilled blue-collar workers. To gain an edge over the competition, you need to tap into programmatic marketing, attend networking events, and find other ways to connect with prospective candidates (more on that later).

2. It Ignores Soft Skills

Sure, hard skills can help you identify your best candidates, but your search shouldn’t end there. When it comes to traditional recruitment, recruiters typically focus on matching a job candidate’s hard skills to those required for the position. Unfortunately, hard skills only scratch the surface of what makes a great hire.

Even if you find a candidate with all the hard skills you’re looking for, there’s no way to tell if they’ll fit your company culture—and that’s why soft skills are more important to employers than ever. According to a recent Leadership IQ study, attitudes drive 89 percent of hiring failures, while only 11 percent are due to technical skills. That means your new hires aren’t failing due to incompetence. Instead, they’re struggling to fit in with your company culture and employees.

Of course, it’s not always easy to access a candidate’s soft skills from their resume. At the end of the day, evaluating soft skills like adaptability, communication, and teamwork can help you determine whether new hires will last a few months or become loyal, long-term employees with your company. You need to learn what drives your candidates’ behavior, what their professional goals are, and what motivates them in the workplace to predict how they’ll blend in with your current team.

3. It Uses the Wrong Metrics

Data-driven marketing matters, but how do you measure your recruitment success? Do you track your time to fill, cost per hire, or the number of applications? What about your quality of hire or offer acceptance rate? What are the best metrics to evaluate your current strategy?

Recruitment metrics help measure the success of your recruitment marketing efforts so you can optimize your hiring processes. When used correctly, recruitment metrics can help you identify areas of improvement so you can hire better people. They’ll also give you accurate insights into your data so you can improve the candidate experience and maximize your return on investment (ROI).

As a recruiter, the best way to grow your company is to make high-quality hires that turn into loyal employees. However, these metrics might look completely different than traditional recruitment goals. Instead of prioritizing fast hires and low costs, look for modern recruitment solutions that can save you time, money, and energy in the long run.

4. It Limits Your Reach

The biggest drawback of traditional recruitment—its limited reach and flexibility—can have major impacts on your hiring processes. For example, if you’re promoting open positions via newspaper ads, your candidate pool isn’t just limited by geographic range; they’re also limited by chance. Your ideal candidates might breeze by your job ads without even giving them a second thought. Or, they might be too busy to pick up a newspaper to sort through open roles.

Unlike digital recruitment marketing, most traditional recruitment tactics lack any algorithm matching ideal candidates to your recruitment ads. And when you share recruitment ads with the world instead of your ideal job candidates, you open the doors to wasted money, low-quality hires, and ineffective campaigns.

Even when you’re targeting local candidates with TV commercials, billboards, or newspaper ads, you’re still left with scarce options. Here’s why.

• Traditional recruitment methods are more likely to target non-internet users. As a result, you might end up with candidates who aren’t well versed in technology.
• Traditional recruitment limits the diversity of your candidate pool since you’re only targeting qualified candidates within a specific geographic location. At the same time, since traditional hiring methods rely heavily on human opinion, you’ll risk introducing bias into your decision-making strategy.

Between restricted job posting flexibility, low reach, and geographic boundaries, traditional hiring methods can quickly eat away at your budget, especially if you’re only getting 10 applicants per commercial or newspaper ad.

5. It Requires a Great Reputation

With modern recruitment marketing methods, you have countless opportunities to build your employer brand and show potential candidates why you’re worth working for. But if you’re relying on outdated recruitment to win over candidates, you’re going to need an amazing company reputation to pique their interest.

Why? Imagine you’re driving down the street, and you see two billboards back to back. One is for a small business you’ve never heard of before—and the other is for Google. Which is going to attract more candidates?

As we already mentioned, traditional recruitment methods like billboards and newspaper ads tend to attract less tech-savvy candidates. And if they’ve never heard of your company, they’re probably not going to scroll through your social media profiles or read your Glassdoor reviews to find out more. Even if you’re not competing against larger companies like Google, your own local competitors with better reputations can snatch away candidates.

After all, the options are limited when it comes to traditional recruitment, and you only have one chance to spread the message about your company and the job role. As a result, the better your company’s reputation is, the higher chances of your success. Conversely, when you tap into the power of modern recruitment marketing, you’ll be able to change your candidates’ perceptions and boost brand awareness through strategic employer branding and storytelling.

What Is Candidate-Centric Recruiting?

To win the war for talent, you need to captivate your dream job candidates with an amazing experience from start to finish—and that’s where candidate-centric recruiting comes in. Simply put, it’s a recruitment marketing approach where you focus on your candidates.

Over the past few years, candidate-centric recruitment has become the norm. In this talent market, your job candidates have the power. That means you need to adapt your recruitment marketing strategy to keep them engaged and interested in your company.

Instead of just hiring the best candidates for your available roles, your goal is to build long-term relationships with job candidates. This way, you’ll be able to fill your talent pool with qualified candidates, cut your hiring times, and fuel your organization with a steady stream of skilled workers.

What makes candidate-centric recruiting different from your average employer-centric approach? Instead of putting your needs first, you’re prioritizing your candidates. While employer-centric recruiting focuses on filling open positions, a candidate-centric approach involves cultivating relationships with an outstanding candidate experience.

The job market is changing, and engagement is becoming imperative for organizations looking to hire. As your candidates become more important than their job titles, you need to shift your focus and leverage every resource at your disposal to fill open positions with the right matches. Candidate-centric recruitment might sound simple, but it poses some unique challenges for recruiters, including:

• • Attracting quality candidates: In today’s increasingly competitive job market, you need to differentiate your employer brand from the competition to attract top talent. How can you stand out in a sea of recruiters? After you’ve gone through the effort to attract and engage your ideal job candidates, how can you guide them through the recruitment funnel and ensure they accept your job offer?
  • Building candidate pipelines: How can you build effective candidate pipelines and nurture passive candidates? Once you’ve reached new candidates through recruitment marketing, you need to fill your talent pool with warm candidates to reduce your time to hire—but not every recruiter dedicates the time or effort needed to keep these potential future hires engaged.
  • Finding the right pace: Even if you’re already using recruitment automation tools to accelerate your hiring processes, it’s important to recognize the difference between haste and speed. Maybe you’re eliminating the time needed to sift through hundreds of applications, but you still need to cultivate genuine relationships with your job candidates to “sell” your employer brand.
  • Keeping your team aligned: You don’t just need a great communication strategy with your candidates; you need to communicate with your HR and marketing teams, too. Make sure your entire team is engaged with your recruitment marketing strategy and candidate retention efforts. Does the team know your employer brand and messaging strategy? What about your candidate journey and recruitment goals? If you’re not communicating internally, you’re going to have a hard time building an effective strategy.

How Does Modern Recruitment Marketing Work?

Now that you’re familiar with candidate-centric recruitment, how does modern recruitment marketing differ from traditional recruitment tactics? Recruitment marketing involves a set of techniques you can use to market your employer brand to potential job candidates. With the right strategy, it’s a powerful tool for building brand awareness and visibility around your company culture to help attract top talent.

Contrary to popular belief, recruitment marketing doesn’t end with sourcing top talent. It’s a multi-faceted process, and you’re going to need a comprehensive strategy to captivate your ideal job candidates. Most recruiters consider marketing a top-of-the-funnel activity, but in reality, it’s actually pre-funnel. Instead of only focusing on candidates who have applied, you need to think in broad terms of anyone who might be interested in your career opportunities. It’s your job to capture their attention and kickstart their candidate journey through recruitment marketing

Just like traditional digital marketing, recruitment marketing can be broken down into four stages:

1. 1. Awareness: Before you can expect job candidates to apply for your open positions, you need to make a strong first impression with a great employer brand. By serving job ads across social media, niche job boards, and careers website, you’ll earn name recognition for your brand so potential job seekers know who you are.
   2. Interest: Once you’ve sparked their interest, it’s time to give job seekers more information about your company. Take the time to answer their questions on social media, interact with candidates, and keep your website updated with useful info. From employee testimonials to FAQs with hiring managers, you should give prospective job candidates all the information they need to confidently hit the Apply button.
   3. Nurturing: Your candidates have already researched your company, but they’re still considering their decision. During the nurturing stage, you’ll need to work on building relationships with those candidates. Here, you can stay top of mind with personalized programmatic ads, omni-recruitment, automated communications, and other effective strategies.
   4. Action: Your candidate is ready to take action, and you need to make it as easy as possible for them to submit an application. Make sure your application process is simple, free of technical issues, optimized for mobile, and doesn’t require any unnecessary information. According to Appcast, a recruitment data provider, the candidate drop-off rate for people who click Apply but never send in the application is a whopping 92 percent. After all your hard work, the last thing you want to do is lose candidates during the final step.

Crafting a Roadmap for Recruitment Success

Now that you know what modern recruitment marketing looks like, it’s time to start piecing your strategy together. Let’s get one thing straight: There’s no one-size-fits-all recruitment marketing strategy. To find the best plan for your organization’s unique hiring needs, you’re going to need to do your research, track your results, and optimize your strategy accordingly.

1. Define Your Employer Brand

Before you start brainstorming your new strategy, you’ll need to align your marketing and HR teams with your employer brand. Employer branding is necessary for promoting your available job opportunities and building awareness of your company’s recruitment efforts.

Even if you’re not actively working to build your employer brand, you still have one—and it can make or break your recruitment success. Over the past few years, employer branding has become one of the main pillars of talent acquisition. You need to know what prospective job candidates expect from your company to position yourself as an employer of choice.

How does employer branding affect your recruitment efforts? Let’s take a look at the numbers. According to Glassdoor, 86 percent of workers and job seekers check out reviews and ratings of companies before hitting the Apply button. Of those job seekers, the majority (65 percent) read at least five reviews before forming an opinion of your company.

Of course, the impact of employer branding doesn’t end with Glassdoor reviews. A poor company reputation can affect your hiring costs, employee retention, and even your productivity. According to recruitment statistics, 50 percent of candidates wouldn’t work for a company with a bad reputation—even if it came with a pay increase. Conversely, 92 percent would consider switching jobs if they were offered a role at a company with an amazing reputation.

In today’s competitive recruitment landscape, selling your employer brand goes far beyond providing flexibility and benefits. If you’re not highlighting the incentives, opportunities, and advantages that set your company apart from the competition, you’ll have a hard time attracting your ideal job candidates.

The good news? You can take steps now to kick your employer brand into high gear. Whether you’re working on your employer brand for the first time or fine-tuning your strategy after a few years, we recommend starting with a recruitment self-audit. Not sure where to start? Download our quick 10-step internal audit checklist here to prepare for your next team meeting.

Our audit covers everything from your candidate experience to your online reputation so you paint a better picture of your recruitment efforts. Plus, you’ll be able to pinpoint what message you’re sending and what impact your company’s brand has on potential job seekers.

Once you’ve completed your internal audit, you can start revamping your employer brand to achieve your recruitment goals. Above all else, you’ll need a clearly established employer brand that reflects your company. And remember: It’s not enough to just talk the talk. You need to walk the walk, and that means showing both candidates and employees how you’re committed to your brand.

Your employer brand consists of multiple elements, including:

Your Employer Value Proposition

Your EVP, or employer value proposition, is the set of values that you offer to your employees. In addition to attracting new candidates, your EVP plays an important role in engaging and retaining your current employees. In other words, your EVP outlines the value employees get in return for the time and effort invested in their performance in the workplace.

We know what you’re thinking: It might be tempting to reel prospective candidates in with a great salary and benefits, but you need a unique value proposition to set your company apart from every other organization offering the same thing. A conversion-worthy EVP should strike a balance between tangible rewards (such as compensation and benefits) and intangible rewards (such as meaningful projects, flexible scheduling options, and a collaborative company culture).

To show candidates why you’re worth working for over the competition, make sure to incorporate these perks into your EVP:

• • Compensation: Salary doesn’t define the success of your EVP, but it plays a role in your candidates’ interest. This component encompasses your employees’ satisfaction with their salary (or hourly pay, depending on the position) and additional rewards, such as bonuses. You’ll need a fair and timely compensation system to keep your employees satisfied and attract new candidates.
  • Benefits: This component encompasses a wide range of benefits. It includes paid time off, health insurance, disability benefits, and other benefits your company offers to employees. Depending on your ideal candidates, you might also go beyond traditional benefits to spark their interest (think: childcare support, mental health care benefits, transportation subsidies, etc.).
  • Career stability: Career stability involves different factors that affect your employees’ career stability, along with their opportunities for upskilling and career development. For example, you might offer professional consultations, weekly one-on-one feedback, or certifications for employees looking to broaden their skillset.
  • Work environment: What does your work environment look like? What differentiates your workplace from the competition? Most importantly, your work environment should offer safety, and you should respect your employees’ work/life balance. Take steps to communicate to employees and prospective candidates how you’ll provide a safe, healthy work environment that matches their lifestyle. Managers should also make an effort to recognize employee achievements and reward high-performing workers with incentives to boost engagement and productivity.

Your Company Mission and Values

Your company’s values are what drive you forward. They guide your company’s culture, hiring practices, product ideation, and business decisions. As a result, your company values should be visible throughout every level of your company, from corporate decision-making to your internal HR processes.

Your company mission and core values should shine through in your recruitment marketing efforts. Why? They can help you strike an emotional chord with prospective job candidates and find the best matches for your company. They also provide a common purpose that all employees understand, follow, and live by. Throughout your recruitment efforts, you’ll want to keep your team informed and aligned on them to develop cohesive messaging.

Not sure where to start? There are hundreds of cookie-cutter values and mission statements you can find online, but you’ll want to stick with values that actually align with your company. According to Gallup, leaders need to take a data-driven approach to define their company’s core values. That means considering the following factors:

• Your core values need to be easily understood by your team. They should be applicable to their day-to-day work, in tune with their actions and decisions, and resonate with them on a personal level. Whether you’re committed to sustainability or giving back to the local community, your values need to be relevant to your employees.
• Your core values should start at the top. Executives, senior leaders, and department managers should practice the behaviors they want to see from employees. At the same time, leaders need to communicate their commitment to core values and highlight how those values influence their decisions.
• Your core values should be easy to identify. When your values are defined and practiced regularly, they’ll ring true with your customers and employees—all while attracting potential customers and job seekers to your company. Actions speak louder than words, and your organization’s leaders should support core values that support your company’s policies, goals, and actions.

Your Company Culture

If you haven’t realized it yet, company culture plays a major role in your organizational success. The right company culture can help you attract and retain qualified candidates. It can also make all the difference in your employee engagement, productivity, and performance, which can give you a competitive edge when it comes to recruitment. So, how can company culture impact your recruitment marketing efforts and drive new hires to your company?

Let’s start with a definition. Your company culture describes your organization’s shared values, attitudes, behaviors, and standards that make up the work environment. It’s about the daily experiences your employees have at work and how that experience aligns with your external brand and recruitment marketing messaging.

As a result, culture dictates the day-to-day experiences at your company. A positive company culture—filled with engaged, motivated employees who are excited to come to work—can make a huge difference in your bottom line. Your company culture stretches from new hires all the way to your leadership team, and it gives potential job candidates a glimpse into what it’s really like to work with your company.

Remember: Every culture is different, and your culture should reflect the needs of your current employees and future hires. Above all else, organizational culture is rooted in core values. Don’t be afraid to step back and evaluate what kind of culture your company currently embraces. Is the culture you currently have working well, or could you find more success with another strategy?

Now, let’s reiterate: Your employer branding needs to reflect your company culture, purpose, values, and mission. Once your HR and marketing teams are both familiar with your branding strategy, you can take the next step: infusing your employer brand into the rest of your recruitment marketing plan.

2. Assign Responsibilities Across Teams

Maybe you’re partnering with your marketing team for the first time, or you’re starting a new project together to revamp your current recruitment strategy. Either way, you’re going to need to assign clear roles and responsibilities across teams so everyone knows what they’re working on.

We’ve said it before, but recruitment doesn’t (and shouldn’t) end with human resources. Both your sales and marketing teams have important roles to play in your recruitment strategy. Sure, most people think of marketing in terms of lead generation, brand awareness, and visibility—but these components can take your next recruitment campaign from subpar to successful.

At the end of the day, your company’s overall brand and culture are reflected throughout every team, from your C-suite employees to fulfillment managers. That’s why your HR team needs to coordinate with marketing, and marketing needs to recognize the role it plays in recruitment.

When done right, a cross-team partnership can be one of the best assets in your recruitment toolbox. Here’s how to get started.

Review Job Descriptions

Before you dive into hiring, your sales, marketing, and HR teams all need to be on the same page about the positions you’re hiring for. Job roles with clear descriptions and transparent requirements can make life easier for your teams and the candidates you market to. When everyone involved in recruitment is familiar with the description and requirements of your available positions, you’ll have an easier time marketing those roles to potential hires.

The benefits of clear, concise job descriptions don’t end with easier cross-team communication. Since job descriptions can influence your employees’ performance in several ways, you don’t want to miss the mark with simple copy-and-paste job descriptions that don’t give candidates any useful information about your company.

After all, if you’re taking on new hires without a clear job description, you’re risking reduced productivity when those new hires are unprepared for their day-to-day duties. Even if you’re thorough during the interview process, you might be surprised to learn that new hires are missing key skills for the job.

How can you create effective descriptions? Sit down with your marketing team and review your current descriptions. According to a 2015 study by Opti Staffing Group, shorter job descriptions can lead to low-quality hires because they don’t provide enough detail or context about the job. On the other hand, job descriptions that are too long may give the impression of a rigid work environment. Ultimately, you need to strike the perfect balance to optimize your application rates.

If you’re not sure where to start, check out our downloadable job posting template. Our job post template is fully customizable, so you can fill in your company information and job specifics to match the roles you’re currently hiring for.

Whether you’re hiring landscapers or manufacturing workers, you’ll be able to change the details of each job post to create efficient descriptions for every role. You’ll also gain access to a standard job post template to help minimize confusion between your marketing and recruitment teams. Whenever a new role opens up, all you need to do is tap into your market research and tweak the messaging as needed to strike an emotional chord with your ideal job candidates.

Prioritize Content Marketing

How can you stand out in a sea of recruiters? Collaborate with your marketing team to create a powerful content marketing strategy. With your core EVP, you have a solid foundation to build your content marketing strategy on. You want to take your key differentiators and infuse them into your content, which should span multiple channels and different types of media.

You need to market both your company and employer brand to prospective job candidates, whether that’s through email newsletters, your careers website, social media, or digital ads. Remember: Everything said by or about your company in the public domain is fair game to scrutiny by job candidates, so you’ll need to be mindful of branding at every level.

With the right content marketing strategy, your marketing team can help you attract the right candidates. Even when you have a steady stream of qualified job candidates, you still need to get hiring decisions right the first time to avoid wasting valuable time, money, and resources.

So, where do you start? Now that you’ve pinned down your employer branding strategy, you can start blogging about your company values, workplace culture, and employee success stories. Share your open positions on social media, show potential candidates why you’re worth working for, and showcase your culture through employee testimonials. By leveraging different channels and types of media across your content marketing strategy, you’ll be able to get your message in front of the right people.

When you pique their interest with eye-catching visuals and compelling messaging, your target candidates will become aware of your brand when they’re scrolling through social media or browsing the web. And if they resonate with your messaging, they might choose to dig deeper into your reputation, company policies, and open job positions.

One of the best content marketing strategies for recruitment? Leverage your existing talent to promote your employer brand. Your people are your #1 asset, and your longest-tenured employees can be your biggest brand advocates. Talk to your employees, find out what makes your company special to them, and ask your marketing team to share their stories.

If you’re trying to recruit entry-level manufacturing employees, talk to former entry-level employees who have gone on to accept promotions with your company. Encourage senior employees to network at local industry events, refer former colleagues to your company, and share team events on social media. Your current employees know your company best, and their expertise can go a long way in growing your team.

Keep Up With the Latest Trends

Just like recruitment, the marketing landscape is constantly evolving—and you need to keep up with the latest marketing trends to attract, recruit, and hire your ideal job candidates. The good news? Between the talent market, employee expectations, and candidate mindsets, your marketing team can help you track the latest trends so you can optimize your recruitment marketing strategy.

After all, recruitment moves fast—and there’s no denying that recruitment has changed drastically since COVID-19. To successfully recruit in the post-pandemic world, you’ll need to pay attention to speed, technological advancements, and intentionality. Proactive recruiters will be the first to attract qualified candidates and outpace the competition. But despite the demand for speedy recruitment, you’ll still need to take time to build relationships, use all available channels to connect with potential candidates, and make positive first impressions.

That said, trend updates shouldn’t end with marketing fads. Your marketing team can also help you stay on top of industry trends, like salary data, so you tweak your hiring strategy as needed. You can even partner with your marketing team to perform competitor analyses and SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) assessments to maintain a competitive edge. When you shift your employer brand to keep up with the latest trends, you’ll take one step closer to competing with the top employers in your industry.

Last but not least, start a two-way conversation with your marketing team. Wherever possible, marketing should share relevant data with human resources (and vice versa) to facilitate the recruitment process. Depending on your industry, the same people you’re targeting as customers might also be your ideal job candidates.

When your buyer personas and candidate personas align, your consumer data can help your talent acquisition team understand who to engage, where they’re spending time online, and what kind of messaging resonates with them. For example, while supply chain managers might be more active on LinkedIn, senior care providers might be more receptive to communications sent through Facebook, Twitter, or industry-specific forums.

3. Set Clear Recruitment Marketing Goals

Once you’ve defined your employer brand and assigned team responsibilities, it’s time to set your recruitment goals. Your strategy will only be successful if you set clear, measurable, and realistic goals for it, so you’ll need to define what you aim to accomplish through recruitment marketing.

Depending on your organization, you might choose to grow your talent pool, slash your hiring times, or lower your average cost per hire. Whatever your goals look like, take the time to outline each goal, discuss them with your team, and put together coherent plans to achieve them.

Of course, setting the right goals is harder than it might sound. The recruitment process revolves around receiving a job order, attracting and recruiting qualified candidates, guiding them through the application process, and successfully extending a job offer. There are several goals you might set to improve during this process, including:

Implementing Quarterly SMART Goals

It’s easy to leave your recruitment goals on the backburner, especially when you’re already working overtime to manage your talent acquisition team. Even if you’re getting overloaded with resumes and struggling to stay on top of interviews, it’s essential to schedule quarterly meetings with your team to check in on your progress and implement goals.

Above all else, your recruitment goals need to be SMART:

• Specific: Your goal should be well-defined, clear, and unambiguous.
• Measurable: You should be able to quantify the goal and measure your progress through data and metrics.
• Achievable: Your goal should be attainable within the specified timeline.
• Realistic: Your goal should be within reach, worth your time, and relevant to your overall recruitment strategy and hiring goals.
• Time-based: You should establish a clearly defined timeline for your goals, including a start date and an end date. For the best results, you’ll also want to create checkpoints along the way (i.e., monthly) to meet with your team, evaluate your progress, and identify potential areas of improvement.

Even if you have clear goals in mind, like increasing your completed application rate by 25 percent each quarter, it’s still important to outline your goal from start to finish. You don’t want to set goals without developing a step-by-step plan for how you’ll achieve them, which metrics you’ll use to measure progress, and how long you’ll take to reach it. If you can’t measure your progress toward goals, you’ll never know if you’ve achieved them or not.

The best way to achieve your goals? Incorporate key performance indicators (KPIs) into your SMART goals to simplify the process and keep your team motivated. It’s also important to understand that your strategy should follow the entire recruitment cycle, from building brand awareness to onboarding new hires.

Reducing New Hire Churn Rates

Let’s face it: New hire churn is real. As a recruiter, you want to hire as many candidates as you can, as fast as you can, to fill your company’s open positions. But the recruitment process doesn’t end when a new hire is onboarded. In fact, employee retention is an important component of any successful recruitment strategy.

If you’re struggling to retain new hires, you’re far from alone. According to Workable, new hire turnover is common, with approximately 20 percent of employees leaving within their first 45 days of employment. While there’s no concrete definition, “new hire churn” typically refers to the number of employees who leave within their first year on the job.

You’re already working hard to attract, source, and hire quality candidates. But a few months later, your seemingly perfect hires are leaving, and you need to start the process all over again. According to a Glassdoor study, the average cost of hiring a new employee is $4,000, and this number can go even higher if you’re losing productivity or dealing with “quiet quitting.”

So, what’s the solution? First, meet with team managers to make sure your job descriptions are clear and descriptive. Your new hires shouldn’t feel deceived on their first day when they realize the role wasn’t what you described.

Next, take a look at your current onboarding program. How are you preparing new hires for their first day on the job? Are you giving them the resources they need to succeed and feel confident in their new role? Onboarding can set the stage for long-term success, so you’ll want to invest in your onboarding program to make a great first impression.

• • Plan their first days at work. Make sure you’re introducing new hires to their team, leadership, and anyone else they might need to contact (think: human resources, payroll, etc.). Prepare their workstation, automate HR processes, and ensure any necessary paperwork is ready to go. During their first few days, your goal is to help new hires settle into their new position, warm up to their team, and give them the freedom to ask any questions they might have.
  • Create a process. Your onboarding process might vary depending on the specific job role and department, but you should have a general onboarding program for all new hires. If you don’t already have a functional program in place, consider asking your hiring managers and current employees for feedback. If you’re just throwing together some paperwork and passing off the new employee to their new team, you’re missing out on valuable opportunities to foster that sense of belonging.
  • Follow up with new hires. Schedule regular check-ins with your new hires to see how they’re doing after 30, 60, and 90 days on the job. If they’re having a hard time fitting in or learning the skills needed for their new position, try assigning them a work mentor or recommending additional training.

Accelerating Your Time to Hire

Depending on your industry, your hiring process might drag on. Unfortunately, lengthy hiring processes are one of the top reasons why qualified candidates reject job offers. To prevent low acceptance rates and long hiring times, you need a proven process for recruiting, screening, and hiring your top picks.

Where should you start? The recruitment process will move significantly faster if you’ve done your research. Instead of writing long lists of required skills in your job descriptions, post the minimum qualifications you’re looking for from a promising candidate. Familiarize yourself with competitive salary and benefits packages in your industry, and don’t try to “low ball” your job candidates. Chances are, they’re already fielding multiple offers from your competitors—and you need to impress them with an irresistible offer to keep them hooked.

If you’re not already using recruitment automation tools to speed up the process, here’s your sign to start. Why should you invest in automation tools? It’s simple: You’ll have much more time to screen and interview job candidates if you’re as efficient as possible with the rest of the hiring process.

For example, applicant tracking systems (ATS) can help you extract key data from resumes, stay organized, and reach out to potential job candidates for open positions. Especially if you’re sorting through high volumes of applications or hiring for multiple positions, automation tools can help you manage monotonous hiring tasks so you can focus on what’s most important.

4. Determine Which Channels You’ll Use

With your goals in place, you’ll need to choose the right channels to build your foundation and get in front of candidates. If you’ve already researched your candidate personas, you probably have a good idea of where your ideal job candidates spend time online. So, which channels should you leverage to promote your employer brand?

At Main Street Recruitment, we recommend an omnichannel approach to recruitment. Chances are, your marketing team is already using omnichannel or multichannel marketing to promote your company’s products and services. It helps make your consumers’ lives easier by creating a seamless experience across multiple channels. This way, customers won’t have to worry about repeating themselves, re-entering information, or experiencing the same marketing messages over and over again across different channels.

How does omnichannel marketing work for recruitment? Simply put, omnichannel marketing allows candidates to move from one channel to another without interrupting the conversation. For example, a prospective job candidate might fill out a form on your careers website and then send you an inquiry on Facebook. From there, you can pull up their previous interactions with your company to nurture your relationship and drive them to apply.

In today’s 24/7/365 always-on digital landscape, shopping for a new career isn’t that different from shopping for a new TV. Just like consumers, your job candidates expect a smooth, personalized, easy-to-navigate experience from start to finish—and that’s where omnichannel recruitment can be your marketing MVP. By choosing the right marketing channels for your omni-recruiting strategy, you can meet your dream job candidates where they’re already spending time online. Here’s how.

Omni-Recruiting Is Ideal for On-the-Go Candidates

Your ideal job candidates are busy. They’re taking care of their families and working hard, and they don’t have the time to sit down at their computers and search for new career opportunities like candidates did a few years ago. Modern candidates are scrolling through their phones, browsing social media, and applying for jobs on mobile. How can you capture their attention?

According to PEW Research, 97 percent of Americans own a cell phone of some type, of which 85 percent own a smartphone. At the same time, only 75 percent of Americans own a desktop or laptop computer. With job candidates increasingly relying on mobile devices to facilitate their job search, you need to create a mobile-first experience for on-the-go candidates.

That’s right: It’s time to stop relying on traditional job boards to promote your open positions. To survive and thrive in today’s fierce talent market, you need to create a recruitment marketing experience that keeps your candidates engaged across multiple channels. Not only that, but you need to optimize your careers website and application process for mobile to keep your top picks from dropping out of the recruitment funnel.

The solution to recruitment challenges? A seamless omni-recruitment experience with effective communication, increased marketing touchpoints, and strong employer branding. Sure, the term ‘omnichannel marketing’ might sound intimidating, but trust us—it’s not rocket science. Instead, it’s a modern recruitment solution to help you deliver the best candidate experience possible.

Omnichannel Programmatic Is the Future

Now that you’re familiar with omni-recruiting, we’re going to introduce you to the hottest trend in recruitment marketing: omnichannel programmatic. They’re both marketing buzzwords that get thrown around a lot, but behind all the buzz are some real-world applications that recruiters should take advantage of.

The programmatic ecosystem is complicated—and it can be a headache for beginners to navigate. Your ideal job candidates can start their journey through a wide range of channels, from mobile and social to display and OTT/CTV, and it’s your job to find the best advertising strategies to reach your top picks.

If you’ve already dipped your toes into the world of programmatic recruitment, you’re probably familiar with all the research it requires. You need to figure out which channels perform best for certain audience segments, where to allocate your advertising budget, and how to leverage the best targeting options to reach your target audience—all while trying to keep your ad strategy as seamless as possible. Sounds familiar, right?

Before you know it, you’re working with a handful of vendors, struggling to keep up with your programmatic media strategy. Without a solid marketing team to rely on, it’s easy to spread yourself too thin across different platforms. If you’re not sure where to turn, omnichannel programmatic can help you piece your strategy back together.

How? When you invest in an omnichannel programmatic solution, you can work with a single vendor—on a single platform—to execute advertising campaigns across your desired channels. By tracking the right data, you’ll be able to analyze which campaigns resonate with your target audiences and allocate your budget accordingly. This way, you won’t have to worry about gathering and comparing data from different vendors and platforms to evaluate your ad performance.

Deliver Personalized Candidate Experiences

Consumer (and candidate) expectations are changing. Just a few years ago, consumers expected basics like quality service and fair pricing. Today, modern consumers have much higher expectations, from proactive service to personalized interactions and connected experiences across digital channels.

Omni-recruitment is all about rethinking the candidate experience. How can you make life easier for your ideal job candidates? What can you do to create a seamless experience across different channels? With omni-recruiting, you can tailor the candidate experience to create personalized experiences for different audience segments. From hyper-relevant messaging to custom touchpoints, omnichannel is the tool you need to create a coordinated experience for candidates regardless of how or where they interact with your employer brand.

So, how exactly does personalization work with omnichannel marketing? With the help of your candidate relationship management (CRM) software, you’ll gain a 360-degree view of your job candidates and their interactions with your employer brand. From there, you can tap into data to create targeted, individualized experiences for each candidate based on their unique behaviors, preferences, and professional goals.

Personalization might seem like a simple way to upgrade your marketing strategy, but it can have wide-reaching benefits across your recruitment efforts. Here’s how personalized touchpoints can be a game-changer for your recruitment plan.

• • You’ll create an unrivaled candidate experience. One of the main benefits of personalization? You’ll leave a memorable first impression with an outstanding customer experience. From the first touchpoint with your company to onboarding, you can create individualized experiences for your ideal job candidates to pique their interest in your brand. This doesn’t just make your candidates feel valued and respected; it’s also a great way to boost referrals and glowing recommendations for your company.
  • You’ll lower your average cost per applicant. Attracting and acquiring applicants can be costly, and recruitment teams are always looking for ways to slash their average cost per applicant. Since omnichannel experiences create tailored experiences that meet candidates’ needs at every touchpoint, you’ll have an easier time building loyalty and plugging leaks in your recruitment funnel. Plus, you’ll be able to optimize your spending, leading to better candidate engagement and more efficient spending.
  • You’ll drive more applications from qualified candidates. When you serve tailored marketing messages to your ideal candidates, you’ll drive them one step closer to hitting the Apply button. How? Individualized marketing experiences help make candidates feel valued, respected, and understood—which is something most candidates look for from a prospective employer. The same holds true for traditional marketing: According to a recent study, 69 percent of customers demand a personalized experience across multiple channels. Meanwhile, businesses that offer personalized experiences through omnichannel marketing typically see an increase in annual sales.

5. Identify Your Resources and Capacity

The next step on your recruitment roadmap? Take a look at your resources and capacity to determine the scale of your recruitment marketing campaigns. Whether you’re working with a 20-person in-house recruitment team or you’re the solo recruitment expert at your company, resources can be limited—so you’ll need to do more with less. For some recruitment teams, that means starting slow and working your way up to bigger goals like frequent content development and multichannel marketing.

If you’re working with limited resources, consider asking your marketing team for advice on how they manage their campaigns, budgets, and capacity for marketing initiatives. Even if you want to revamp your entire recruitment strategy now, avoid spreading yourself too thin. If you don’t have the capacity to handle everything internally, it might be time to partner with a reliable recruitment agency to take the marketing tasks off your plate.

It might feel daunting to outsource your recruitment marketing needs, but choosing the right team can help you create a customized strategy for your target audience—all while saving you the time, energy, and resources it takes to manage recruitment marketing on your own. Still on the fence? Here’s everything you need to know about working with a recruitment agency to make the right decision for your hiring process.

Define Your Hiring Needs

Before you dive into research, you’ll need to take a step back and define your specific hiring needs. What are you looking to accomplish through recruitment marketing? Why are you hiring a recruitment partner in the first place? If you’re aiming for vague goals like hiring more workers, consider how you can build a strong recruitment marketing strategy that drives a steady stream of results for your company.

To get started, download our internal audit checklist to analyze your current recruitment strategy. From there, you should identify which roles you’re currently hiring for, where you’re struggling, and what you’d like to achieve through recruitment marketing. It’s your job to paint a clear picture of your current plan so you can figure out exactly what you need and give your future recruitment partner accurate details.

Need some more clarification? Schedule a meeting with your HR team and ask the following questions:

• • What’s our hiring plan over the next 12 months? What changes are we going to make this upcoming quarter to reach our recruitment goals?
  • How do we currently measure our quality of hire?
  • How do we describe our company culture? How are we currently highlighting our culture through content marketing and other marketing initiatives?
  • Who are the performers at our company? What do they have in common?
  • On average, how long do new hires stay with the company?
  • Are we asking new hires for feedback about their candidate experience and onboarding process? What are they saying?
  • What has employee turnover looked like over the past year? What reasons do workers give for leaving our company?
  • Why do our longest-tenured employees stay with our company?
  • What unique perks and benefits do we offer to our employees?

Do Your Homework

You’ve already worked hard to research your target audience, determine the best channels for your recruitment marketing strategy, and define what a “quality hire” looks like for your company. Before approaching a recruitment agency, you need to understand what they are, what they do, and how they’re capable of helping your organization.

Your main goal is to choose the right partner for your hiring needs, and there are several types of recruitment agencies that take care of different recruitment elements. Once you’ve defined your hiring needs, you can start sorting through different agencies to choose the best fit for your company.

For example, third-party recruitment agencies typically focus on staffing temporary workers, and most agencies pay an agreed-upon rate for placement (often a percentage of the employee’s wage). That said, third-party agencies can be useful for filling harder-to-find workers, such as executive roles, or for filling high-volume positions with significant turnaround.

On the other hand, recruitment marketing agencies can help you optimize your talent acquisition strategy to fill your candidate pipeline and maximize your recruitment ROI. Even if you’re already working with an experienced in-house team, your HR staff probably wears multiple hats—from screening employees to handling payroll. When you’re caught up with other responsibilities, it can be hard to leverage your recruitment strategy to its full potential. And with an increasing demand to fill jobs and integrate marketing tactics into your recruitment plan, it can be a lot to ask.

At Main Street Recruitment, we’re a team of recruitment marketing professionals that offer key insights into your employer brand and audience. No matter what your current strategy looks like, we’ll help you master the art of brand storytelling and find the right tools to reach your ideal job candidates. We’re not here to replace your in-house team or even your third-party recruitment agency. Instead, we’re here to help you make the most of recruitment marketing so you can fuel your organization with quality hires.

Check Their Niche Experience

Maybe you’ve already found a recruitment agency that fits your needs and matches your organization’s hiring style, but do they have the niche experience you’re looking for? It’s important to remember that hiring trends can vary significantly across different industries, so you’ll want to choose a marketing partner with relevant experience in your specific industry.

Whenever possible, take the time to screen your recruitment partner, ask about their past success stories, and check out testimonials from previous clients. Were they able to help previous clients improve their recruitment strategy? Or did they leave past clients with poor hires that needed to be replaced after a few months?

In addition, you’ll want to review how long they’ve been in your industry. Whether you’re hiring logistics managers or automotive workers, you need a recruitment partner that understands the challenges that come with blue-collar recruitment. In many cases, blue-collar jobs are mistaken for unskilled labor. In reality, they require highly skilled candidates, and some positions even require certified professionals.

While white-collar positions have countless digital marketing opportunities (think: LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster…), it’s not always easy to raise awareness of blue-collar job opportunities. Your ideal job candidates probably aren’t searching for manufacturing jobs on LinkedIn—and they’re not looking at newspaper ads or billboards, either. They’re scrolling through social media and browsing niche job boards to see who’s hiring. You need a recruitment partner who knows the ins and outs of blue-collar recruitment so you can get in front of the right people.

At the end of the day, finding the perfect recruitment partner can be challenging—but it’s well worth the time and effort. When you find the right match for your hiring needs, you’ll take one step closer to building your dream team.

How to Tap Into Modern Recruitment Marketing

The recruitment landscape is evolving, and it’s time to tap into modern marketing techniques to get the right message, in front of the right people, at the right time. So, where do you start? You need to focus your recruitment marketing efforts where your ideal job candidates are already spending time, and that means building an effective omni-recruitment strategy to beat the competition.

Think about it: With so many companies fighting for the same skilled workers, you need to leverage every marketing tool, resource, and channel at your disposal to promote your available job opportunities. Your job is to show potential job candidates why you’re worth working for over the competition, drive traffic to your careers website, and reel them in with an irresistible offer. How can you optimize your marketing efforts and get the best bang for your buck?

Two words: Programmatic media. From social media to CCTV, programmatic marketing leverages software and data to get your jobs in front of the right people at the best possible price. Here’s everything you need to know about programmatic advertising to capture your candidates’ attention and win the war for talent.

Why Recruiters Need Programmatic Ads

Newsflash: Programmatic media isn’t just for marketing products. It’s also an incredibly powerful tool to build employer brand awareness, improve your candidate experience, and spark your ideal candidates’ interest with personalized messaging.

If you haven’t tapped into the power of programmatic media, it might just be the strategy you need to get in front of your dream job candidates. After all, you’re constantly working against the clock and uncertain budgets to achieve your hiring goals. Programmatic media can help you save time and find qualified candidates more quickly with smart AI algorithms, unrivaled targeting capabilities, and other tools for the modern recruiter.

If “programmatic advertising” is a new term to you, let’s start with a definition. Programmatic recruitment advertising involves using technology to buy, place, and optimize ads across the web. Programmatic platforms apply machine-driven, rules-based approaches to buy media and serve recruitment ads so you can optimize your ROI while getting your brand in front of skilled candidates.

From saving time with manual job ads to building laser-targeted campaigns, programmatic can be a game-changer for recruiters. Here are some of the top benefits of programmatic job ads in today’s competitive talent market.

Boost Hiring Efficiency

With so many marketing channels to choose from, the modern recruitment landscape can be complex—especially if you’re not a seasoned marketer. There are countless job boards, publishers, and social media platforms to post job ads, but you’ll need to pinpoint the channels your ideal job candidates are already using to drive results. On top of that, there are several ad placement types, from Google Ads to duration-based ads and more.

With so many options at your fingertips, how can you make the best choices for your hiring needs? Even if you’ve spent hours collaborating with your marketing team and analyzing your data, it can still take some trial and error for internal talent acquisition teams to find the best ad placements and channels for your recruitment strategy. Not only that, but it takes time and effort to manage multiple ad campaigns, consolidate data, and allocate your budget.

That’s where programmatic media can upgrade your strategy. Basically, programmatic offers a practical way to experiment with different publishers, ad placement types, channels, and more. Instead of limiting yourself to a few channels, you can identify which advertising tactics deliver the highest-quality candidates without spending months refining your strategy.

Create Exceptional Candidate Experiences

Personalized candidate experiences matter. They not only differentiate your recruitment ads from all the other companies that are currently hiring—but they also give your ideal candidates a glimpse into how they’ll be treated as employees. When you treat prospective candidates with respect throughout their candidate journey, you’ll position yourself as an employer of choice.

So, where does programmatic advertising come into play? An effective programmatic strategy can enhance your candidate experience from their first touchpoint with your company all the way to onboarding. From tailored messaging to individualized retargeting ads, you’ll be able to guide candidates down the recruitment funnel without missing a beat.

Unlike traditional recruitment, you won’t have to worry about floods of unqualified candidates after you share a job posting. With advanced targeting options, you’ll be able to hone your targeting strategy to reach the right people. Instead of saying “yes” to five qualified candidates and saying “no” to 95 unqualified candidates, you can avoid serving ads to candidates who will never convert into hires.

You can pause and resume your campaigns as needed to avoid outsourcing. When you’re only attracting job candidates who meet your specific qualifications and requirements, you’ll be able to provide a better experience for everyone involved.

Real-Time Performance Tracking

Tired of draining your recruitment budget on dead-end ads and ineffective campaigns? What if you could generate predictable leads without wasting money? (Hint: You can.) One of the best benefits of programmatic recruitment advertising is its end-to-end visibility and predictability throughout the advertising process.

When you turn to traditional methods for recruitment, tracking your success and spending is next to impossible. Even if you’re collecting data at the end of each quarter, you still need to piece together data from different sources. And since candidates from some sources will be worth more than others, you’ll have a hard time making an apples-to-apples comparison and optimizing your recruitment plan.

With programmatic advertising, you can track exactly where your recruitment dollars are going in real time. Plus, you’ll be able to track your performance and costs across every marketing channel, from social media to search engines. The best part? You can analyze data however you want—across different campaigns, publishers, or channels—depending on your needs.

How does real-time campaign monitoring benefit your recruitment strategy? It’s simple: When you leverage robust data and insights, you can make intelligent recruiting decisions that drive up your ROI at every stage of the candidate journey.

How Programmatic Recruitment Advertising Works

Maybe you’re already using marketing automation tools to scale your recruitment campaign, and that’s a great start. Contrary to popular belief, programmatic advertising offers more than just serving job ads to candidates at scale. Whether you’re looking to reach new audiences or retarget warm candidates, programmatic media is the tool you need to master the art of modern recruitment.

Programmatic might sound like a relatively new term, but it’s been prevalent in the digital marketing world for decades. Now, it’s not just a nice-to-have for recruiters—it’s becoming a necessity. In today’s fierce job market, your candidates expect personalized ad experiences across every marketing touchpoint, and employers who don’t deliver will be left in the dust.

Thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, programmatic algorithms continually optimize your ad placements and bids based on bottom-of-the-funnel metrics, such as your average cost per hire. Most modern programmatic recruitment advertising platforms share some common elements, including:

Artificial Intelligence

When it comes to programmatic recruitment advertising, AI collects your current and historical data—including your past hiring data, marketing data, and candidate data—to optimize your ad performance. This data is called your “seed data.”

From there, programmatic advertising platforms overlay your seed data with your budgeting data and recruitment goals (your targeted number of hires, time to fill, cost per hire…) to create your target and lookalike audiences. This way, you’ll be able to serve laser-targeted ads to your ideal job candidates without burning a hole in your advertising budget.

In other words, AI outlines the “rules” for your programmatic campaign. It helps you stay on track with your goals, measure your progress, and fine-tune your campaigns to drive the best results for your company.

Campaign Management

You’re already busy managing your HR team, interviewing candidates, and sorting through resumes. Even if you’re working with an in-house team or trusted recruitment agency, a programmatic ad platform can help you take control of your campaign.

Programmatic media platforms analyze your data through machine learning algorithms to inform your media buying decisions, provide data-driven recommendations, and optimize your budget so you can reach your recruitment marketing goals. In turn, you’ll be able to buy media from the most effective sources (where your most qualified job seekers are) with the highest ROI, which will reduce your cost per hire.

Actionable Insights

When you log in to your programmatic advertising platform, you’ll be able to view insights about your campaign performance, multichannel strategy, and more through a centralized dashboard. Essentially, your ad platform crunches your recruitment data to generate real-time insights into your ad performance. You’ll also be able to view your costs at the level of individual campaigns, publishers, job groups, and more.

After all, advertising should never be a guessing game. Even if you don’t have enough time to check your dashboard daily, your platform can provide end-to-end visibility and control of your entire advertising process. You’ll also be able to compare your performance across different channels so you can easily pinpoint which ones are generating the best results.

Machine Learning Algorithms

From collecting data to providing data-driven recommendations, your programmatic platform creates a continuous “loop.” As a result, your insights, hiring outcomes, and candidate data flow back through AI to inform subsequent media buying decisions.

With advanced AI-powered algorithms optimizing your buying decisions, you’ll be able to continuously improve and optimize your ad strategy. That means you won’t have to turn to gut-feeling decisions or limited marketing expertise to guide important advertising decisions.

Implementing Your Programmatic Ad Strategy

To craft an effective programmatic advertising strategy, you’ll need to understand what channels your ideal job candidates are using and how they’re interacting with your brand. Then, you need to build a strong foundation in candidate data. For the best results, you’ll want to leverage your own (first-party) data to create targeted and personalized experiences for your candidates.

Once you’ve gathered all the right information, you can start brainstorming an advertising plan that includes your goals, audience segments, and recruitment objectives. You’ll also need to consider the different types of media you can use, from programmatic display ads to video, and the best ways to deliver that content to your target audience.

Just like any other marketing strategy, your HR team should establish measurable goals and metrics to track your progress, analyze your campaign performance over time, and determine whether or not your programmatic ad strategy is successful. By taking a calculated approach to advertising, you’ll be able to find the weapons you need to win the war for talent.

Map the Candidate Journey

Before you can start brainstorming your advertising strategy, you need a clear view of the candidate journey. Start with your candidate persona: What are their needs, goals, and pain points? What are they looking for in a new career? What are their interests and behaviors?

Once you have a thorough understanding of your ideal job candidate, you can start mapping out their journey with your company. How do prospective job candidates learn about your open positions? Where do they go to learn more about your employer brand, company’s reputation, and culture? How do they interact with your website, and what triggers them to submit a job application?

When you map out the candidate journey, you’ll be able to identify key touchpoints where tailored ads can improve the candidate experience. For example, you might show different messaging to top-of-the-funnel candidates than those in your retargeting campaigns. Or maybe you highlight different benefits and perks to different audience segments. Whatever your ad strategy looks like, your main goal is to deliver personalized experiences that resonate with your ideal candidate.

Consider Your Data Strategy

When it comes to programmatic, your data matters. If you’re using inaccurate data, you’ll risk draining your recruitment budget on candidates that might never convert. Most businesses are still using outdated data strategies that aren’t effective for programmatic media, but you’re going to be different.

One of the biggest challenges with data? It’s constantly changing. Your ideal candidate might look different in a few months. And with data at the core of your programmatic strategy, it’s essential to maintain a flexible strategy to stay ahead of the curve.

There are three main types of data you’ll encounter with programmatic advertising:

• First-party data: First-party data is data you collect from your own business. As a company, you personally own your first-party data because it’s gathered through different systems you use, such as CRM software. Since it’s highly relevant to your target audience, it’s the most powerful type of data you can own.
• Second-party data: Second-party data isn’t collected directly from your audience. Instead, it comes from a partner’s first-party data. You can access partners’ data by making arrangements to share candidate data. This way, you’ll gain access to audiences you wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise.
• Third-party data: Third-party data is typically collected from other companies. It can come from a wide range of sources, from surveys to cookie-based tracking. While it’s the lowest-quality data, it can help you expand your reach and tap into new demographics.

When you’re rethinking your data strategy, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• You need a 360-degree view of your ideal candidate, their customer journey, and their interactions with your business.
• You’ll need to take some time to organize your candidate data for easier audience segmentation.
  You need quick and easy access to your data whenever you need it. Whether you’re storing candidate data on your CRM software or Excel spreadsheets, you need a reliable system to analyze behaviors across job candidates.
• You need the right tools and resources to analyze and take action on your data. Once you understand your data, you’ll be able to create laser-targeted, hyper-personalized experiences for your ideal job candidates.
• You need to test and optimize your data strategy. What types of data are driving the best campaign performance? How can you use your first-party data to your advantage? What works for one campaign might not work for another, so you’ll need to experiment to figure out what works best.

Start Small and Test Often

It might be tempting to scale your programmatic strategy from the start, but it’s important to start small. You can’t just dive into the programmatic landscape and expect your application volumes to explode. Instead, think of programmatic media as a long-term strategy rather than an overnight fix.

Even if you’re working with a recruitment partner or third-party agency, it’s more realistic to make programmatic advertising a gradual process. If you launch too many ad campaigns at once, you’ll quickly become overwhelmed and won’t be able to learn from your mistakes.

Instead, start with a few campaigns on your top-performing channels and gradually expand your efforts as you learn what works. In addition, make sure to evaluate your strategy often—and don’t be afraid to experiment with different targeting options, messaging strategies, and digital creatives to see what resonates with your candidates.

The Impact of Programmatic on Recruitment Marketing

So, how do we tie this all together? Blending programmatic ads with your overall recruitment strategy can give you a major advantage over the competition, especially when you’re fighting for attention in a saturated market. The more you know about your target audience and what resonates with them, the better chances you’ll have at capturing their attention.

The candidate experience is becoming increasingly important—and for good reason: It sets the tone for future interactions. Whether that candidate moves forward with your business or not, prioritizing the candidate experience provides a valuable opportunity for companies to gain valuable feedback on the entire journey.

It’s no secret that programmatic media is rich in data, and taking a deep dive into the interests, pain points, and demographics of your candidates can help inform your marketing strategy. It’s also a great way to quickly draw fresh candidates into your recruitment funnel. By creating personalized experiences for candidates across multiple channels, you’ll be able to fuel your organization with top-quality talent.

Stay Ahead of the Curve With Modern Recruitment

If you’re in recruitment, you need to be where your candidates are. And with dozens of channels where your candidates “live,” it’s up to you to find the right channels for your strategy.

The entire candidate journey matters, from your job descriptions to your application process, and you can’t afford to deliver a less-than-perfect experience to your top picks. Creating a unified experience across different channels and throughout the candidate journey poses a new opportunity to stand out—and we’re here to help you make that difference.

At Main Street Recruitment, we help forward-thinking businesses find active and passive blue-collar employees where they’re already spending time online. Whether you’re looking to grow your talent pool or reduce resources spent on ineffective hiring, our expert team will help you achieve your goals with a modern recruitment marketing strategy.

No matter what your current strategy looks like, it’s always a good time to refocus on your hiring goals, including your recruitment marketing efforts, current processes, and other aspects of the candidate journey. When you’re ready to get started, download our quick 10-question internal audit checklist and customizable job post templates today to take the next step with modern recruitment.