Within the recruitment marketing sphere, there are a range of KPIs to measure your success — it could be 500 diversity hires for a particular role, brand building (like improving your brand awareness by 10 percentage points), or improving your time to hire for hard-to-fill roles like AI Engineers. But ultimately, getting hires is the goal we’re all trying to achieve. And unlike a quick consumer purchase that happens over and over again, finding a person who fits the needs of the role, the culture of the organization, and will stay long enough to leave an impact, can’t be solved with a one and done approach.
Sites like Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter and a variety of other niche job boards and aggregators may provide the bulk of applicants and hires for many companies, especially enterprise clients with high demand jobs like retail. And with technology like TMP’s Programmatic Jobs or Google for Jobs, you can drive candidates from these sites to your apply button in increasingly more advanced and efficient ways.
So why do anything else? Isn’t the smart bet to pour money into the bottom of the funnel, since that’s where applications are coming from and where hires ultimately get attributed? Well, the answer isn’t quite that simple.
The funnel is not just for B2B marketing or consumer marketing — it is critical and imperative for the recruitment landscape as well. In an extremely competitive hiring environment — the current U.S. unemployment rate is below 4% — candidates can afford to be more picky, which means that companies need to get their attention in unique and different ways. AT&T, for example, chose to focus on its existing employees to tell its story to prospective employees.
The key is creating a compelling message – one that is relevant, authentic and differentiating — that can be pushed out to drive awareness at the top of the funnel. This means the right message delivered at the right time, and in the right way. Companies need to think about how display advertising can provide a targeted digital awareness campaign, while integrating a social strategy that both reinforces messaging and connects with candidates on their phone, on their commute, or at home even when they’re not thinking about a new potential opportunity. Or, in highly visible ways that help bring new audiences to a company (think strategic out-of-home options or sponsorships that help create a mindset in targeted areas).
Then, companies can use their career site to lead candidates further down the funnel, influencing them in ways that mirror what we’ve all come to expect in our daily lives.
If Zappos knows that I’ve researched a new pair of running shoes and even have it in my cart, I get targeted ads across my email, social media channels and the websites I visit telling me to buy the shoes and hit the ground running. Why wouldn’t employers do the same?
The smart ones do. Using a remarketing tool like TMP’s TalentBrew 360, companies can understand exactly who visited their career site, and who clicked on a job but didn’t complete an application. Then contextual messaging can help influence those interested candidates to come back to apply.
Additionally, with native content, social stories and employee-generated content, as well as highly targeted niche websites and mailing lists, the ability to influence candidates who may have seen a recruitment ad previously is even stronger. However, the messaging must be relevant and the jobs and company must fit the prospective employee.
With more than 400 million user sessions in our network, we know there are endless touchpoints in the candidate journey, which means that simply relying on the bottom of the funnel isn’t enough.
