3 Crucial Marketing Tactics Every Recruiter Can Leverage

Your Intro to Marketing Tactics

Marketers and recruiters have a lot in common. I could argue that they’re 2 sides of the same coin. Both industries are people-centric, right? You know, we pique our audiences’ interest, build a funnel (a close relative of a talent pipeline), form a connection, and guide the most qualified individuals to a particular goal, like a placement, purchase, partnership, or email capture. Recruiters don’t have to be expert marketers to leverage effective marketing tactics. In fact, some recruiters already do and they might not realize it. If you’re not one of them, let me give you a quick and dirty rundown to help you become a marketing-driven recruiter.

Analyze metrics

The past predicts the future. I don’t always agree with this, but in the name of marketing and recruiting, I stand by the cliché.

The first marketing tactic comes even before us marketers launch something new (like an email campaign for example). We have to establish the most important metrics:

• Clickthrough rate (how many people clicked through the email)
• Conversion rate (the percentage of people who clicked a link and completed an action, such as filling out a form or a purchase)
• Sharing/forwarding
• List growth rate (how many new subscribers or email addresses acquired)

We measure the results of previous campaigns, identify the most successful ones, the product/service they promoted, the audience, and determine how to craft a new campaign to get even better results.

Like marketers, recruiters should look at past recruiting and hiring metrics to make more informed decisions, cut costs, and improve efficiency. Jennifer Paxton, director of talent acquisition at LevelUp, recommends the following:

• Candidate experience
• Quality of hire
• Time-to-hire and cost-per-hire
• Acceptance rate

Let data guide future improvements

When recruiters and marketers collect critical metrics (⬆️), they’ve got to do something with it. They make adjustments to processes and programs and create an optimized framework for continuous improvement.

For example, look at your recruiting funnel. Where do candidates come from? Is it a career website? Social media? Is it direct traffic to your website? How many page views turn into applicants? Content marketing experts say that it takes 5 emails before a conversion. Data-driven marketers are slaves to a tool called Google Analytics (GA). Recruiters can use GA to map traffic and page views and take advantage of this widely-used marketing tactic to help them out.

You should also review how many phone screens it takes to get qualified applicants to an onsite interview and how many on-sites convert to a hire.

Say a role has been open for 30-days. Go back in time to see what part of the recruitment process worked in the past and what flopped. A reflection analysis is one of the best ways for recruiters to streamline the recruitment process and fill roles quicker.

Look at another classic marketing tactic. Take a stab at an A/B test (a data-driven marketer’s baby). For those unfamiliar, an A/B test is when you test 2 versions of something, like a webpage or a job description, but change one variable and compare them against each other. Email marketers will A/B test things like subject lines or images within an email vs. plain text. Recruiters can A/B test job titles or the descriptions. 

Conduct market research

Before we launch a new service, product, or campaign, marketers ask a lot of questions and do a lot of research. Recruiters like to think they know candidates. Marketers love to think they know their market. In reality, nothing’s ever that easy, but we can make it easier.

Here’s an example. Earlier this year Qualigence began to offer sourcing as a service. Before we began to even think of a launch plan, we started to research the following questions:

• How big is the demand for sourcing as a service?
• Who’s our target audience? Where is our target audience?
• What are their pain points? How does sourcing as a service solve them?
• How should our internal sales team pitch sourcing as a service?
• What type of messaging will increase awareness, make us stand out, and where should we distribute our messaging?
• What questions, hesitations, or feedback can our existing clients offer? Could a focus group or survey potentially tell us this?

Once we analyzed the data, we had a complete picture of sourcing as a service, its demand across varying industries, how to improve the quality of our delivery, and where to find our audience. It paid off, too. Within 3-days of launch, we gained 8 new sourcing clients.

A recruiter here at Qualigence leveraged this marketing tactic and asked similar questions when a client gave her this assignment:

Find top attorneys in New York with 6-years of experience practicing law who are willing to stop practicing in exchange for a creative role at a brand-new department at a fortune 500 company. The best part? They had to take a 49% pay cut. LOL.

She attempted to recruit like any other assignment—she thought she knew her market. Long story short: she didn’t. So, she asked herself the following questions and let them guide her market research:

• Who’s my target audience? Where can I find them?
• What are their pain points and how does this role solve them?
• How should I pitch the opportunity?
• What pushback should I expect?
• What type of message will be most effective?

Based on her analysis, she discovered that her target candidates would be strictly female. They weren’t on track to become a partner, were married with children, and wanted better work-life balance. Her research and clever marketing tactics also paid off. She placed over 10 attorneys.

Thanks to the talent shortage, candidates are picky these days. Recruiters don’t have much of a choice but to adopt new recruitment strategies, most of which fall into the marketing umbrella. But, thanks to the digital world, recruiters have countless marketing tools and information at their fingertips. So, get out there and leverage these marketing tactics. Like, right now.

Recruiting at Qualigence

Recruiters at Qualigence are data-driven. They embark on their own research and analysis and work closely with the marketing team to ensure best practices never fall short. To learn more about recruitment services at the Q, get in touch today.