As the staffing market continues to become more competitive, recruiters have to adopt new strategies to meet the challenges of a tightening market. One such strategy you’ve probably heard of is Inbound Recruiting (IR). More than just a buzzword, IR forces recruiters to think like marketers, and use their techniques to attract candidates, build talent networks, and (ideally!) secure more placements.
But being a recruiter, you might be asking yourself, “Why do I need to think like a marketer?” In a different era, you might’ve been on to something. But given the conditions of today’s staffing market, and its perpetual talent shortage, recruiters need to find a way to separate themselves from the pack to attract skilled candidates. Integrating these marketing tactics into your recruitment strategy is critical to success in 2019.
Using Data Analytics
With the constant accumulation of data, getting into the analytics and making sense of all of it can seem a little daunting. But recruiters need not worry; they can be selective about the data they choose to use, keeping their primary objective of securing more placements top-of-mind, using it as a guiding principle when digging through the layered nature of data science. Tracking, for instance, can be of great use to recruiters. It enables them to access information on pages visited, session duration and other metrics to get an idea where candidates are coming from. This data, in partnership with marketing teams, can help recruiters refine their IR strategy and improve candidate experience.
Search Engine Optimization
In a candidate driven job market, it’s crucial that job openings posted by a staffing firm rank highly on various search engines. Most people in the 21st century understand this fact, but its importance cannot be overstated. According to a recent Hubspot report, 73% of job seekers start their search on Google, thereby excluding agencies that don’t invest properly in SEO. And while it is true that recruiters don’t really have control of their firm’s SEO operation, they can appropriate common-sense SEO practices in their IR strategies when crafting job descriptions. Recruiters need to keep it simple. Identifying and using keywords relevant to your job offering can shoot your post to the top of the search results and, hopefully, the candidates’ preferred list. Over complicated, wordy job descriptions can hurt you on search engines and turn off talented candidates who have no shortage of opportunities.
Thought Leadership
Positioning yourself as an industry thought leader is critical to fortifying your inbound recruiting efforts. If the candidates that you are so tirelessly trying to win over see you, the recruiter, as a trusted source, and by extension the staffing firm you represent, they will be much more open to a job offer. Building trust, though, doesn’t come about by being a good salesperson but, rather, through indirect means: By creating and share relevant content and providing a value-add for candidates in your network.
Marketers have to provide value constantly. They write blogs, create videos, and share relevant information via social channels in large part to elevate the perception of their firm. Recruiters can easily take a page out of their book and appropriate some of strategies to expand their recruiting funnel and attract more talented candidates. You don’t have to become a content creator, but you can certainly become an informed curator, always with the goal in mind of adding value and telling your organization’s story. A . Expressing these values will help separate you and your firm the pack. That way, when a particular job opening comes up, you will have made some attempt to nurture and cultivate your talent pools, likely speeding up your time-to-hire and rounding out your inbound recruitment strategy.
The Takeaway
The staffing industry has changed a lot in recent years. No longer can recruiters simply identify qualified candidates and take them through the onboarding process. Building an Inbound Recruiting strategy doesn’t happen overnight—it’s an ongoing process with multiple moving parts. The hope is that if begin think like a marketer and incorporate some of these tactics into your role as a recruiter, you will have then set the stage for your IR efforts to grow over time. By doing so, you will be able to make a positive first impression with potential candidates before you even sit down to make them an official offer.
