The traditional view on recruitment marketing focuses mainly on generating traffic to the job page, but often there are more bottlenecks in the recruitment marketing process than just a lack of (relevant) traffic. This is also clearly reflected in the poll during the webinar 'A broader view of recruitment marketing'. The majority of participants mainly want more applicants and subsequently more hires. With recruitment marketing automation, you will find a solution to the biggest bottlenecks in recruitment marketing and that will ensure you fill vacancies faster and easier!
4 bottlenecks in traditional recruitment marketing
Almost every employer is involved in recruitment marketing. Logical, because you need to get your vacancies to the right people. At the same time, the view of what recruitment marketing entails is often quite limited. The focus is on referring your target group (candidates you do not yet know) to your job page. So generate traffic to your work-at-home site.
But just getting visitors to your work-at-home site won't fill vacancies. There are usually other bottlenecks in the process that follows. The most common recruitment marketing challenges are:
- Not enough (relevant) traffic on your work-at-home site. You don't have enough visitors on your website and/or the visitors you have don't match your organisation or vacancies. So that traffic is of no use to you.
- Low conversion. The average conversion rate on a work-at-home site (the percentage of your visitors who actually apply) has dropped to 1% to 2% in recent years. Candidates are less and less willing to enter a traditional application process. They prefer to be able to ask a question first and have an equal process to find out from both sides whether there is a match.
- Conversion to hire. Not every applicant ends up getting hired. If the application process is not set up efficiently, candidates regularly withdraw. For example, because they receive a response too late. In addition, the conversion to hire can be low because the quality of applicants is too low.
- There is no interaction with individuals in your talent pools. Many employers and recruitment agencies have large databases of candidates, such as former applicants and alumni. Only, these latent pools are often vastly underused because there is no good way to stay in touch. A shame, because these candidates may have returned to the market by now or have developed further with other employers and are therefore now very interesting for your organisation.
Usually most of the recruitment marketing budget goes to that first bottleneck. More and more money is spent on recruitment campaigns, job boards and other channels to drive traffic to the work-at-home site. At the same time, most marketing channels are becoming more and more expensive. By paying attention to the other three bottlenecks, you can improve your conversion from traffic to application and from applicant to hire plus activate candidates from your talent pool. In the end, that will give you much more - also financially!
Solving the bottlenecks with recruitment marketing automation
With recruitment marketing automation, you will find a solution to each of the 4 recruitment marketing challenges.
Automated recruitment campaigns for more traffic
With recruitment campaigns on social media, Google and other channels, you can strengthen your employer brand and promote your vacancies to the right target group. Many employers have set up their own team (recruitment marketers or corporate marketers who also handle recruitment campaigns) or use a media agency for this purpose.
But there is another way: being at the controls yourself without spending a lot of time on it. With recruitment marketing automation software - linked to your ATS - setting up a campaign takes no time at all. You select the vacancy (fed from your ATS), get a campaign proposal based on data from thousands of previous campaigns and adjust it slightly if necessary, select the texts and visuals in the content hub and click start. That's it! This way, you no longer need an external agency for your recruitment campaigns and that has many advantages.
Share conversions and WhatsApp applying for a conversion boost
To drive the conversion to application to new heights, you need to lower the barrier to respond as much as possible. The easier you make it for a candidate to contact you about a vacancy or working at your organisation, the more people you will bring out of anonymity. With recruitment marketing automation software, you lower that threshold very easily by setting up partial conversions.
A partial conversion or soft conversion is a first step towards applying, for example creating a job alert, asking a question to a future colleague or attending an event.
Another method to boost your conversion rate is to set up WhatsApp job applications. WhatsApp is the most widely used communication channel today and people are much more likely to respond through it than through a traditional application form or by email.
By offering low-threshold response options, you will see your conversion rate soar. A 10% to 15% conversion rate is then suddenly quite feasible!
Automatic follow-up of responses and applications
When you suddenly receive dozens or hundreds of responses from potential candidates, it is essential to follow them up properly and quickly. Manually, this is almost impossible to do and you don't want to do it. You want to use your busy recruiters as smartly as possible and not let them spend too much time on irrelevant leads. That's why you deploy automations in the follow-up of leads.
For example, you can set automatic interest and qualification questions via WhatsApp or a chatbot. This way, you get to know the candidate in advance, know what they are looking for and whether there is a match with the vacancy. You then link the relevant responses directly to the right recruiter (based on region, experience or job type) and reject the non-relevant candidates automatically. Recruiter happy, because they can focus on the best candidates, and candidate happy, because they quickly know where they stand!
Stay in touch with your talent pool via automated calls
To make the most of your database of candidates, deploy lead nurturing campaigns. These are basically automated conversations with candidates. In the RMA software, you set up such a campaign once and then you can run it completely automatically. For example, you can easily keep candidates who don't want to apply yet informed about developments in the organisation. You send them regular updates via e-mail, SMS and/or WhatsApp (fully automated) and thus keep them involved in your organisation. If they indicate that they are considering a switch, the recruiter takes over the contact again and starts the conversation personally.
You can also use nurturing campaigns to maintain strong relationships with alumni (employees who have left your organisation) and reactivate former applicants. This way, you tap into a new stream of candidates and no longer have to start a whole recruitment process for every vacancy. You may already have the right candidate in your talent pool!
Don't strike out, keep the personal touch
Recruitment is still a people business. You can automate a lot and that is a smart thing to do, but don't get carried away. Personal contact remains important for candidates. For instance, don't wait too long to be referred from a chatbot to a real person, because that irritates candidates.
Recruitment marketing automation aims to make the recruitment process more efficient and effective, improve the recruiter experience and optimise the candidate experience. And for the latter, the personal touch is crucial. Read here how to make automation and personalisation work well together.
Want to see more about how recruitment marketing automation fixes these bottlenecks? Watch our demo videos or let our specialists show you around the MrWork platform.
