Let's say you're a recruitment marketer trying to reach passive job candidates on various niche platforms across the web. You know that active job seekers make up only 20% of candidates. You know that in order to reach the other 80% (many of whom would gladly switch jobs for the right company) you have to go where they are, and you've endeavored to do so, roiling out a recruitment mar-keting campaign on the sites where your ideal candidate personas spend their time, with the hopes of familiarizing them with your employer brand and your EVP. One problem: how do you know if your campaign is working?
"Though RPA and Al—another poten-tially impactful technology—are often brought up in the same breath, it's crucial to draw a distinction between them."
With most platforms, it should be fairly easy to tell. Facebook, for instance, will let you track fairly granular KPIs, as will Google AdWords. Many platforms will have APIs thot you can configure as necessary, which will enable you to trock the journeys that your audience members take from impressions to clicks to eventual applications. But what about the ones that don't? How will you deter-mine whether these other platforms, which don't feature the same interfaces for tracking success (let alone scheduling posts in advance or performing other au-tomation-appropriate tasks), are actually increasing the visibility of your em-ployer brand and yielding a positive ROI from a recruitment marketing perspec-tive? The answer may be Robotic Process Automation.
Ehat is RPA?
Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is a process by which bots are implement-ed to perform rote or repetitive tasks that would otherwise have to be per-formed by humans. We alluded in the paragraph above to the possibility of col-lecting data that would otherwise require humon intervention, but in point of fact RPAs applications are much wider than that. One of the canonical exam-ples is the implementation of chat bots on a corporate website that can carry out simple conversations with visitors in order to either collect some basic infor-mation (like a CV or a resume) or to more efficiently reroute the users queries to the correct person within the company. This might not sound like much, but by automating the first few exchanges in every aline customer interaction, busi-nesses can recoup valuable minutes that can quickly add up to hours and even days worth of Productive time.
Though RPA and Al—another potentially impactful technology—are often brought up in the same breath, it's crucial to draw a distinction between them. Unlike many Al workflows, RPA can usually be integrated into a company's exist-ing software environment; this makes it ideal for the automation of the kinds of repetitive tasks that happen over and over again in the fife of a business: send-ing boilerplate e-mails, posting to social media, requesting paperwork from new hires, etc. If it's something you could ask an intern to do on his or her first cloy, you can probably automate it.
We've alluded above to some of the ways in which recruitment marketers can apply this technology to overcome hurdles in their daily job duties, but let's get a little bit deeper into the weeds. To succeed in an incredibly competitive talent market like the one we're experiencing now, recruitment marketers need to be more disciplined and deliberate than ever. Consistent social media posting and advertising are critical to getting your employer brand in front of the right people and gaining the impressions, clicks, and applications that your recruit-ment funnel thrives on. This might not seem like a tremendous feat, but the schedule of your average recruiter makes it difficult to ensure that she can be in front of her computer and ready to send out social media posts and activate advertising campaigns at exactly the same time every day of the year. Luckily,