Recruiting today focuses on next-generation talent. Next-generation professionals excel in digital marketing disciplines of analytics, automation, content, email, mobile, and social. So, what can your organization do to attract modern marketing talent? In short, think like modern marketers and put inbound marketing strategy and technology to work. Here are 7 key ways you can use inbound marketing to recruit.
- Map skill gaps
Start by identifying the skills needed for a modern marketing team, and then rate your staff and agency partners. Consider these core areas:
- Coding/programming
- Copywriting
- Data analysis
- Email marketing
- Event planning/production
- Graphic design
- Lead management/nurturing
- Mobile strategy
- Paid search management
- Public relations
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Social media
- Strategic planning
- Video production/editing
- Website management
Is your staff proficient in these areas of expertise? Which skills could use some revamping?
- Define candidate personas
Profile career candidates the same way you would buyer personas. Ask yourself:
- What matters to them when researching career options?
- Where do they go for information and resources?
- What are their primary concerns and questions?
- What is their educational background and career experience?
- How do they evaluate companies?
- What do they value, and how do they make career decisions?
Once you’ve defined who these people are, you’ll have a solid starting point for your talent search.
- Adjust brand positioning
Attract talent by positioning your organization as a career destination. Intrinsically motivated professionals, who are essential to your success, value companies and careers with purpose. When your organization appears focused and confident, it will then attract focused and confident talent.
- Create candidate-focused content
You should publish blog posts, eBooks, photos, videos, and more targeted at career candidates. These content assets are the ideal way to tell your company story and engage prospective employees in your brand. Create content based on the types of individuals you want to attract – and this very much applies to recruiting goals.
- Build landing pages with profiling questions
Shift away from the standard online forms and job listings and use landing pages with lead forms to capture candidates. The forms should be tied to a back-end contact management system, which maintains updated records for each candidate. This will help to better identify and understand prospective employees.
- Score and segment candidates using behavior-based signals
Once you gather profile information, you can activate a candidate scoring system, which gives preference, or greater weight, to specific skills, education, and experience. By integrating marketing technology into your recruiting process, you can use behavior-based signals to impact candidates’ overall ratings. Segment the most engaged candidates into priority lists.
- Activate automated email workflows
Nurture your career candidates. Use marketing technology to set up automated emails that provide them with valuable resources and offer additional touch points to monitor their engagement and interest. Watch open and click rates, and be sure that you’ve accounted for these interactions in your candidate scoring formula. Your best candidates are going to be the professionals who meet the obvious skill/education/experience requirements, but also demonstrate a desire to continually advance their knowledge and capabilities, and engage with your brand.
By applying inbound marketing strategy and technology to your recruiting process, you will give your organization a distinct advantage when competing for top marketing talent. Simply follow these 7 important tactics, which demonstrate core inbound strategy, in order to recruit next-generation talent that’ll help your business evolve for the better.
