I’ve heard from a number of employers this year who are looking to scale their recruitment marketing efforts in order to attract more applicants using less resources. Many companies have small teams and recruitment marketing duties often get shifted to HR professionals who weren’t trained on the various ways to market your jobs. If you are an HR department of one you probably understand this more than anyone.
As attracting talent gets more technically challenging, a number of tools and techniques have emerged to reach many candidates with the click of a button. To maximize your scaleability you’ll need a few important assets; a job XML feed that contains all of your job listings, a modern ATS and a solid social media tool.
Note: If you don’t know what an XML jobs feed is, just ask your ATS. Most applicant tracking platforms provide a job feed as part of the service.
Here are my top five solutions to ramping up your recruitment marketing campaigns through technology platforms.
- Programmatic Job Advertising: Still spending time posting jobs manually? There’s no need to with programmatic job vendors like PandoLogic, Recruitics, Joveo and others. These platforms take all the jobs from your ATS and automatically distribute them to many job boards at once. All you do is set a budget and the technology does the rest by sending money to the jobs that need the clicks. For example if a job hasn’t gotten enough applicants after a certain timeframe the algorithm will automatically start to spend more to reach more candidates. Programmatic advertising is perhaps the cheapest and most effective form of job seeker traffic you can buy today.
- Automated RSS Campaigns: This is one of the best kept secrets in marketing. I frequently use MailChimp to send automated email newsletters. If you have an RSS feed of jobs or blog posts you can automate that content by creating an RSS Campaign inside their platform. You simply enter the URL of the feed, choose a day and time to send it, add your logo or choose a template and press the launch button. Then once new content gets put into that feed the email goes out according to the schedule you set up. I think this functionality exists in tools like Hubspot as well.
- Texting: No surprise here, but adding a text recruiting platform to your HR tech stack will supercharge your efforts and save you valuable time by reaching more candidates. 90% of texts are read within 3 minutes vs. 80% of emails that are never read at all. Those are convincing numbers to make the switch now.
- ATS Triggers: Just about every company needs to review and revamp their automatic message triggers in their applicant tracking software workflow. This feature (which any good ATS has) sends a message via email or text to the candidate alerting them of their new status. Those messages should inform the candidate to what’s happening to their application and where they stand in the process. If you aren’t leveraging those alerts to their maximum use you are not optimizing the candidate experience.
- Social Media Tools: Social media management tools like Buffer, Dlvr.it and Zapier allow you to send and track job and other career content to your followers. They feature RSS publishing campaigns like I mentioned above and more importantly you can schedule and recycle important content. Zapier even has several ATS integrations with platforms like Workable, BambooHR, Greenhouse, BreezyHR and many others. Employers can set up automations called “Zaps,” to build candidate nurturing funnels that provides custom content to candidates based on their actions. For example when a candidate is added to a specific Breezy HR stag, Zapier will share the details as a Slack message.
Leveraging these tactics will, for many of you, become a set it and forget it solution, thus leaving you more time to connect with those most important to you…the candidate.
Do you have other suggestions on scaling recruitment marketing? I’d love to hear them so drop me a note on our contact page.
