Want to save time, improve candidate experience and fill your talent pool with more relevant candidates? Then get started with recruitment marketing automation. It will minimise the time required of your recruitment (marketing) team and optimise your recruitment results. In this blog, you will find 4 practical steps and lots of examples so you can get started with recruitment marketing automation yourself.
What is recruitment marketing automation?
Recruitment marketing automation is - very simply put - a way of recruitment marketing that is automated as much as possible. With marketing automation, you ensure that all facets of your employer branding and recruitment marketing are seamlessly connected and largely automated.
With recruitment marketing automation, you improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your recruitment marketing, offer a better candidate experience and make it easier to fill your talent pool with candidates of interest to your organisation. In turn, this will reduce your time-to-hire and cost-per-hire.
Want to know more about recruitment marketing automation? Read our blog "What is recruitment marketing automation?" for more explanation and practical examples.
Get started with recruitment marketing automation
Step 1: Mapping the candidate journey
You start by creating an overview. In what ways do you, as an employer, come across a candidate? That is different for each employer and sometimes even for each target group. Often these elements will at least recur:
- Employer branding content that builds awareness and spreads your employer story;
- Job marketing, such as the use of job boards and social media campaigns, to advertise your vacancies to the right target group;
- Your application process, where you have intensive contact with candidates in interviews, emails, and apps.
Step 2: Connect the different components of the candidate journey
The candidate journey consists - simply put - of 3 stages:
- Awareness: candidates encounter your employer brand for the first time and remember it.
- Consideration: candidates become interested in your organisation and see you as an attractive employer.
- Conversion: candidates take action and contact you or apply for one of your vacancies.
At each stage, you offer different content to your target group. To get the most out of your recruitment marketing and automations, it is important that these different components become one. Connecting all touchpoints together creates a logical and relevant candidate journey with the final destination being the hiring process.
To connect the separate candidate journey components, start by setting up storylines. The message in the initial phase of the candidate journey connects logically to the next phase and this is how you build on to the following phases. That way, you create one story instead of separate messages and content.
In the awareness phase, you can start with a general work-at-home video and offer more depth in the consideration phase, for instance by bringing a successful project to the candidate's attention. Finally, you tell the candidate (in the conversion phase) that you have a vacancy and encourage candidates to respond. In this way, you guide talent through the funnel, so to speak.
Each element in your storyline has its own landing page on your work-at-home site. In the awareness phase, you can refer to your homepage, while in the conversion phase you logically link to the vacancy page. This way, you link your website visitors to the various elements of your storyline.
You reinforce this effect with retargeting ads. You can re-engage visitors to your work-at-home site with relevant content and refer them to the website again, so that you stay top-of-mind and candidates become increasingly enthusiastic about you as an employer.
Next, you can add lead generation to your campaigns and/or work-by site, so that you get in touch with talent in an accessible way. Because not many candidates apply the traditional way anymore. You want to harness and nurture the interest you have generated. This can be done by giving candidates who are not yet ready to apply an easy way to make contact, for instance via Skype. Incidentally, that nurturing also applies to candidates you reject now. They might be interesting in the future - if they have developed or if you have another vacancy. With re-activation methods, you keep in touch with your 'silver medalists' (as these candidates are called) and your talent pool is continuously filled with relevant candidates.
Step 3: Automate
Now is the time to set up automations. With automations you minimise efforts for the recruitment (marketing) team, while at the same time improving the candidate experience. Win-win in other words!
The possibilities for automations in recruitment marketing are huge and are constantly increasing due to technological developments. We highlight 6 options for automations for you:
- Always be visible to your target group without worries. With the right tooling, you can plan your employer branding campaigns up to a year ahead, including content changes. So set & forget! This way, you can be sure of a continuous presence and plant a seed in the minds of talent so that they think of you first when considering a switch.
- Automatically promote vacancies, for example by automatically forwarding them to job boards and automatically activating vacancy campaigns on the various social media networks. Of course, with these kinds of automations, you decide how far you want to go. Do you want the system to do the work fully automatically or do you want to decide for yourself how and what? It's all possible. You set it up properly once and then you don't have to spend much time on it.
- If you are one of the lucky ones who still receives many applications, you can automate the pre-selection with screening questions or assessments. By asking for relevant experience, skills or certificates already in the first stage and automatically processing the answers, recruiters can immediately see which candidates are the most interesting and only need to pick up the quality applications.
- Talk to more candidates by offering them an accessible way to contact you, for example with a WhatsApp pop-up on your work-at-home site. This automates your sourcing, as it were, because candidates now come to you instead of the other way around. In addition, you also speak to candidates who are not yet ready to take the big step of applying for a job and make the process more equal.
- Automate lead nurturing campaigns via, for example, Skype or e-mail and ensure that you further develop your relationship with talent. You could, for instance, automatically send a 'behind the scenes' video about the department the candidate has shown interest in, so that you keep the contact warm and enthuse the candidate further. With lead nurturing, you create a talent pool with engaged candidates you can draw from for future vacancies. That shortens your time-to-hire considerably!
- Re-activate silver medalists (candidates you previously rejected, but are still interesting for your organisation at a later stage) by automatically contacting them. This too creates a strong talent pool. Keep the AVG guidelines in mind here, though. Ask explicit permission from candidates to keep their details, so you can approach them again for future vacancies.
Step 4: Continuously evaluate and optimise your process
The job market is changeable, candidates' behaviour changes and the longer you run your automations, the more you learn from what you do. That's why we recommend always keeping a critical eye on your process and results.
It is smart to take a step back and analyse your results every 2 to 3 months to learn from them. If you use a fixed KPI framework, you can easily compare figures and quickly gain new insights from your data.
The results of recruitment marketing automation don't lie
Stedin generates an average of 60 applications per month for challenging IT vacancies. QuaRijn recruits 300 new care workers in one year. At Dura Vermeer, they use recruitment marketing automation to fill their 230 vacancies within the foreseeable future.
"We want Dura Vermeer to stay top of mind for the target group, at the right time, through the right channels. MrWork helps us to both set up a well-defined strategy and ensure smooth and scalable execution. If you look at our figures, you can see that the automated campaigns from the MrWork platform contribute to the final application in 85% of cases."
Robine de Graaf, Manager Online Media at Dura Vermeer
All thanks to the use of recruitment marketing automation. So it definitely pays off to follow these steps and make recruitment marketing automation part of your recruitment marketing strategy.
Fancy discussing how to successfully implement recruitment marketing automation for your organisation? Book a demo and we’ll work through these 4 steps together to integrate bespoke recruitment marketing automation into your workflow!
