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Digital Recruitment Marketing Predictions for 2016: Part 3

Recruitment Marketing, SEO & SEM| Views: 4027

This is part three in a three-part series in which we discuss what you can expect from digital recruitment marketing in the new year. Here, Nathan Perrott, Senior Digital Strategist in TMP’s London AIA office, predicts that 2016 will be all about data (like it should be every year).

6: Software as a service will have to rely on more and more

There’s simply not enough time to do everything you want to do. So it’s important that companies leverage technology to do some of the heavy lifting. The recruitment/talent attraction SaaS market is becoming more and more saturated and complex, let alone the HR tech space, with hundreds of vendors claiming to do “this, that and the other thing.”

From software that helps with attracting talent (job distribution, SEO, and careers website software), to job application management, interviewing, onboarding and hiring, the marketplace is truly daunting for those looking for something that does everything. And that’s just the tools that get talent in the door, let alone the plethora of talent management and HR software solutions.

Unfortunately, there isn’t one solution that fits all (and probably won’t be). The challenge for organizations is to understand what problems they have that the software can fix and provide you with solutions that matter.

7: Data, data, data

Yes, this one appears every year in prediction lists. It’s crazy to think that some organizations still don’t measure their recruitment marketing activity, especially their advertising spend. How do you know what’s working and where you need to allocate/reallocate your budget if you’re not measuring it? If you’re using digital advertising platforms like job boards, pay per click marketing and programmatic advertising channels, it’s easy to measure your ROI to conversions that matter – that’s traffic, applications AND hires.

If you’re using candidate recall/drop-down selection lists (those ones where the candidate is expected to select from a list of 25 media and remember which job board they saw your ad on), we’ve found this data can be 80% inaccurate on average. So you could be making bad decisions based on poor, misleading data.

The advertising world uses cookie-based tracking to measure advertising effectiveness, so consider looking at that as a crucial part of your digital recruitment marketing strategy.

8: Machine learning websites

A lot has been written about personalization when it comes to website experiences, and this is certainly a step in the right direction. How “personalized” a website should be is often debated, even among ourselves at AIA Worldwide (we’ve decided that if it feels too creepy, it’s a step too far).

Tailoring user paths, information and content based on implicitly or explicitly supplied information is common these days – things like adding the website visitor’s name to a welcome note, using GPS and IP recognition to identify location, or looking at recent behavior to suggest what content they might like. Opinion is also divided by users. Some love the relevancy of their website experiences, some hate that a machine (or worse, the Internet in general) knows what they like and when.

What we’ll see is websites beginning to get even smarter with real artificial intelligence – websites that can respond to a user’s behavior depending on what stage of the decision cycle they’re in, adapt accordingly and deliver the right content and calls to action in the right place and at the right time, coaxing them down the right purchase path.

The bottom line:

How we attract and engage with our target audiences isn’t changing – it has changed. And will continue to, faster than ever. Some organizations are trailblazing this movement. Many others are still in the dark ages and need to take a look at their recruitment marketing and talent attraction strategies to see where they need to get up to speed.

Traditional, disruptive advertising and outbound marketing practices are being replaced with content marketing and native advertising methods. Throw in a decent SEO strategy and you’ve got what has been termed by HubSpot as “inbound marketing.” And we’re big fans at AIA Worldwide.

As with many predictions, not all of them will come true. And there probably aren’t many surprises above. But I do see the next 12-18 months changing significantly through the adoption of what we’re seeing already in the consumer space.

About Nathan Perrott

As VP, Strategy & Innovation at Radancy, Nathan is responsible for observing emerging trends in technology and the future of work to drive product and strategy innovation, bringing the value of Radancy Labs' work to our clients and colleagues, and also leads the European team of solutions engineers who drive value from the Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud.

3 Responses to " Digital Recruitment Marketing Predictions for 2016: Part 3 "

  1. […] Part One: Social media, mobile and programmic ads in recruiting Part Two: Content strategy and native ads in digital recruiting (you are here!) Part Three: SaaS, big data and machine learning in digital recruiting […]

  2. […] Part One: Social media, mobile and programmic ads in recruiting (you are here!) Part Two: Content strategy and native ads in digital recruiting Part Three: SaaS, big data and machine learning in digital recruiting […]

  3. Not measuring recruitment marketing activities and spend is a huge mistake. In order to be more efficient you need to measure and then adapt your strategy using only the tactics that work the best.

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