4 Innovative Recruitment Marketing Strategies for Startups
People are vital to the success and growth of any company, and building a team of complementary yet diverse personalities, skill sets, and passions is one of the most challenging aspects of growing any business, especially when it is a startup.
The process of finding exceptional candidates and convincing them to apply on your job boards is quite similar to how marketers attract and convert clients. In one recent survey of HR professionals, close to 86% of the respondents believed that recruitment is becoming more like digital marketing with each passing day.
That’s where recruitment marketing comes in!
But how exactly can talent acquisition leaders and employers leverage recruitment marketing to attract the best hires and grow their startups quickly? Keep reading, and we’ll look at a few innovative strategies that can help!
1. Build a Solid Brand that Attracts the Right People
Today, close to 86% of job seekers and employees research company ratings and reviews to decide whether or not they should be applying for an open position. Another report found that 67% of men and 86% of women in the United States wouldn’t join a company that has a bad reputation.
It’s no secret then that a well-established employer brand is an integral part of building high-performing teams. The only way to stand out in the sea of similar companies is to turn your organization into a memorable and recognizable brand, not only for consumers but also for potential employees.
Some of the best practices talent acquisition leaders can follow to improve their company’s efforts at making the employer brand stand out include:
- Polish your website: Your website is the first thing a potential candidate will see when they look up your brand. Therefore, your marketing team needs to ensure it’s relevant, easy to understand, user-friendly, responsive, and perfectly optimized at all times.
- Work on enhancing your company’s online image: Paying attention to what reviews your past or existing employees post on public forums and improving feedback can take you a long way in building a robust online presence to attract top talent.
- Look to conduct/participate in networking and recruitment events often: Networking events such as professional webinars, conferences, and inter-company competitions are an excellent way to attract the attention of your ideal candidates since it gives out the message that your organization is invested in training employees and fueling their individual growth.
2. Formulate Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy on the Inbound Methodology
Employer branding is all about building lasting relationships with your target audience and inspiring them to come back to your website. That’s why employer branding goes hand in hand with the inbound methodology.
Inbound marketing focuses on attracting, engaging, and delighting people interested in working for your company.
Some of the ways HR leaders can leverage the inbound marketing model to boost recruitment efforts for their startup include:
- Turning website visitors into warm leads by strategically distributing powerful call-to-action (CTA) clusters and user-friendly forms throughout that act as lead magnets.
- Converting leads into potential candidates by sending them relevant content in email newsletters, reminders for upcoming webinars/workshops, your company’s new achievements in their niche, etc.
- Finally, the inbound marketing methodology can also be used in recruitment to turn your potential candidates into brand advocates to drive referrals and spread positive word of mouth about your startup in the job market. You can quickly do this by furnishing an exceptional experience for them during the application process and interviewing and seeking their feedback through survey forms.
3. Think about Ways You Can Improve Candidate Experience
Today, close to 78% of candidates say that the overall candidate experience they receive indicates how much a company values its people. One research paper also found that most job seekers satisfied with their candidate experiences have a nearly 38% greater probability of accepting a job offer.
The talent acquisition leaders succeeding in today’s tough talent market already know that candidate experience needs to become a vital part of the overall hiring process and strategy. This becomes even more important when you’re recruiting for a startup.
Although every business is different and what isn’t working for one won’t necessarily not work for the other, there are a few common issues that can lead to unsatisfactory candidate experience. These include:
- Unclear hiring timelines
- Irregular communication
- Poorly formulated job descriptions
- A long or overly complicated application process
- A bad interview experience
- Inefficient onboarding
To avoid such mistakes from occurring, HR leaders need to understand that acquiring the right candidates begins long before they even apply for a certain open position at your startup. You need to think about the different stages within the regular job search lifecycle and augment each corresponding process at your end to attract these potential job candidates and keep them engaged.
This is where recruitment marketing can help you!
Some of the ways HR leaders can leverage this particular technique to improve candidate experience include:
- Write straightforward job descriptions that are easy to understand for the candidates and optimize them using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools to boost their reach on job portals and other online platforms.
- Design a comprehensive FAQ page for your website wherein you cover all commonly asked candidate questions and provide detailed answers to them.
- Employ chatbots on your website and social networks since these machine learning-based tools can quickly identify the inquiry keywords most commonly used by candidates and provide them with the most accurate, targeted, as well as relevant answers.
- Don’t ignore mobile channels. Close to 45% of job seekers now look for professional opportunities on their mobile devices, while as many as 89% think mobile experiences play a significant role in job hunting.
4. Leverage Social Media Marketing to Engage Candidates
A recent survey conducted by LinkedIn revealed that nearly 49% of professionals are following companies in their respective niches today on social networking sites to keep tabs on their recruitment needs and processes.
These statistics hint that if a recruiter wants their hiring efforts to reap positive results, they’ve got to leverage social media marketing, commonly referred to as SMM.
Dell is one company that has achieved positive results with an SMM-backed recruitment strategy. The main focus of this multinational computer technology giant’s early employment branding strategy was to make its presence felt where potential candidates were spending most of their time – on social media. However, HR managers at Dell had no real approach in mind and followed a “spray and pray” model to increase brand awareness.
In time, higher management at the company realized that they needed to leverage resources in their core markets to create localized content that would resonate with followers and drive conversions. Therefore, the company changed its recruiting strategy.
To attract and convert candidates in the Brazilian market, leaders at Dell piloted a local content strategy in Latin America that mirrored their global content strategy. They empowered social media leads in each country to “tropicalize” the content and create rich posts that would position the company as a great place to work in their specific market.
By dedicating nearly 25-50% of their time on social media channels, Dell’s local recruiters could increase Brazil’s job page traffic by 1,661% compared to the year before. The company’s source of hire for social media also increased from 3% to 8% in Latin America since implementing this new strategy.
Dell is just one company that could quickly achieve positive hiring results with social media marketing. Many companies are doing the same in the world of recruitment today.
While McDonald’s uses Snapchat to inform their candidates about new open positions, Amazon took social recruiting to a whole new level by publishing their job listings on Tinder.
HR managers can choose from an array of social networking sites today, including:
- Snapchat
Start Working on Your Recruitment Marketing Strategies
The key to achieving startup growth with this strategy lies in choosing the right platforms to build strong relationships with potential candidates and increase your brand’s overall visibility in doing so.
To know more about what you can do to fuel your recruitment marketing efforts and grow your team quickly, get in touch with us at Recruiter.com.
We can offer you recruiters that will help you with your strategy and to fill positions and an advanced talent subscription service to deliver qualified candidates right to your email.
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