Whether you’re a well-established business or a burgeoning startup, your talent pipeline is one of your most valuable assets. If you have an existing flow of interested, qualified applicants into your hiring process at all times you can be virtually assured of quicker time to fill, quicker time to hire, and, as a result, lower cost per hire than you would if you had to start your talent search from scratch every time there was a vacancy. Of course, a talent pipeline can be somewhat of a nebulous concept: you might think that yours is fairly robust, but when it comes time to source some candidates you find that it’s still difficult to get the right person.

• Jul 11
• 4 min read

You’ve been working on spreading your employer brand through ongoing recruitment marketing campaigns. You’ve even got your social media presence on message. Now it’s time to work on your employer brand gravity. Yep, gravity.

• Jun 13
• 5 min read

Recruitment channels. There are just so many of them to choose from, right? How do you know where your candidate personas are hanging out in order to get your employer brand in front of them? Well, a great place to start is by looking at social media statistics for the market you’re in (or expanding into).

• Jun 11
• 5 min read

Recruitment marketing is still in its infancy when compared to either its older sibling HR recruiting, or its first cousin Marketing. There are plenty of ways you can streamline and improve your recruitment marketing tactics by borrowing from both of these related practices.

• May 28
• 4 min read

Or maybe we should say, “where you don’t want your employer brand meeting your ATS?”

The “ATS black hole” is that dark corner of your ATS, the place some applicants go, never to be heard from again. And that’s the last thing your all-important employer brand needs: people you don’t even know out there ready to badmouth your company for something you might not have even been aware of.

• May 21
• 5 min read

As a recruiter, your applicant tracking system (ATS) is one of your most important tools. Without one, it would be exponentially more difficult and time consuming to track all of the applications that are coming in, pull critical information from those applications, and find the right applicant info for review at the right time. In short, your hiring process would be chaos. 

• May 15
• 4 min read

It’s a question we’ve asked on this blog before: what is the best venue for promoting your employer brand and spreading your EVP? And while there is, of course, no one-size fits all answer, recruiters and hiring managers do often find themselves tasked with choosing the employer branding venue that will yield the best results in terms of ROI, employer brand gravity generated, and successful talent pipeline growth. How do recruiters make these determinations in a smart, considered way?

• May 07
• 4 min read

Let’s say you’re a scrappy young startup. You’ve got an innovative product and a dedicated team. While you’re certainly not working out of your friend’s garage anymore, you’re still in a pretty small, bare-bones office space without too many frills—which is just as well, because there aren’t too many people around to appreciate those frills. This is all well and good for now, but you know that it’s not going to be this way forever. Heck, maybe it’s not even going to be this way by the end of the year. If your business is really firing on all cylinders, there’s a good chance that in the near future you’ll need more people, more space, more resources: in a word, growth.

• Apr 23
• 4 min read

The recruiting world can learn a lot from the marketing realm, especially now that recruitment marketing is becoming more established. Organized campaigns, content marketing, and using social media to reach passive job hunters are some of the ideas that made their way in between these two sectors. Another idea that makes sense to cross over is the idea of a multi-channel approach to building a talent network.

• Mar 26
• 4 min read

Employer brand and EVP: they’re not the same thing. Sure, they’re related, and they’re often used interchangeably, but there are important differences between the two. While your employer brand is a story that potential recruits can latch onto as they move deeper and deeper into your recruitment funnel, it doesn’t necessarily need to provide too many specifics about the way that your organization provides value to its people. EVP, in this regard, is just the opposite: it should be a concrete accounting of things like educational opportunities, benefits, growth opportunities, and office perks, all aimed at showing prospective recruits that your employer brand isn’t just talk—that you can back it up with real added value. 

• Mar 22
• 4 min read

Britain has been in the news quite a bit recently, but mixed in with all the political noise there’s one salient point you can be forgiven if you missed—employment is at record levels. The 2018 average unemployment number was just 4.2% (source).

• Mar 14
• 5 min read

A few years ago, it was only really savvy recruiters who thought to use Snapchat to attract new applicants. As an opening gambit, most business who were attuned to the platform’s potential were using it to offer potential candidates a unique, creative way to apply for jobs. A company would send out a Snap advertising a position, and would promise a job interview to the person with the best or most creative response—whether this meant engaging with a particular brand in a fun way, showing off some skills with visual media, or anything else that might entice people into this new version of the applicant funnel. This was all the rage for a while, but it quickly became apparent that Snapchat could be used for so much more.

• Mar 05
• 4 min read

Ah, employer branding. As with any popular—dare we say trendy?—topic, discussions of employer brands and employer branding are often loaded with misconceptions. Some people are confused about what it is, some are confused about how it works, and some are confused about how to do it. The result? General difficulty for recruiters trying to create, leverage, or refine a strong employer brand, owing to the many and manifold myths that surround this critical recruiting topic. Luckily, we’re here to help! Here are a few myths about employer branding, debunked.

• Feb 19
• 4 min read

Whether you’re a large tech company or a growing startup, you’ve probably noticed that attracting top talent into your recruitment funnel is harder than ever. Employment rates are high across various industries, but especially in tech, meaning that candidates can afford to be pickier than ever in choosing where and for whom to work. This puts the onus on recruiters and recruitment marketers to develop strong employer brands and position themselves as employers of choice within their fields. How do they go about doing this? By leveraging a strong employee value proposition, or EVP.

• Feb 12
• 4 min read

50% of Instagram users follow at least one brand, and even more say that they’ve learned about a product or service via Instagram. That’s 50% of 800 million monthly active users, spread across all corners of the globe (80% of the platform’s users are outside the United States). These numbers should give you a sense of the often-untapped power of this unique social media network for attracting and engaging with customer or—for recruitment marketers—job candidates. The question, however, remains: how can businesses leverage this platform to spread their employer brand and drive up job applications? Here are six tips for doing just that.

• Feb 07
• 4 min read

Google Ads is one of the most intriguing advertising platforms on the web, offering businesses the chance to appear as sponsored results in Google search results. While it has long been a bastion of traditional marketing and advertising, recruiters are starting to see the potential that such a platform could have for strengthening their employer brands and attracting new job candidates. After all, if your ideal candidate personas are using Google to search for new knowledge and information (and, let’s be real, they almost certainly are), then what better place could there be for them to encounter your employer brand?

• Jan 29
• 4 min read

Do businesses really need a strong employer brand to hire the best candidates? If employer branding does make an impact on hiring and talent acquisition, where does that impact come from and how can businesses make the most of it? Sure, the talent market is becoming increasingly competitive, but what implications does that have for your recruitment marketing practices and your overall hiring strategy? As always, we at the SmartDreamers blog have plenty of opinions on these matters, but we won’t ask you to take our word for it. Instead, here are some statistics that suggest the answers to the questions above. Hopefully, they can give you some valuable insight into the ways that employer branding is reshaping modern recruitment. 

• Jan 22
• 4 min read

Genpact has always prided itself on innovation. When the company spun off from General Electric in 2005, they were determined to spread the gospel of lean management across the globe, providing data-driven professional services help to a diverse array of businesses spread across the globe. Since then, they’ve only gotten more cutting-edge, incorporating AI and advanced analytics into their offerings as they've helped businesses to completely reimagine their established processes. As result of the success of this innovative spirit, between 2006 and 2017 Genpact quadrupled in size, adding 60,000 new employees to their existing 20,000. Needless to say, they were doing their darnedest to ensure that that level of positive growth continued.

• Jan 15
• 4 min read

On a fundamental level, what are the differences between traditional marketing and recruitment marketing? In both cases, businesses are seeking to familiarize a carefully selected target audience with their brand. In the digital era, both processes depend on campaigns and strategies that center around driving up engagement and clicks in order to entice people into a sale or recruitment funnel, and to convert those already in the funnel into buyers or applicants. Sure, recruitment marketers are trying to garner applications rather than purchases, but in the modern era these two goals don’t necessarily look all that different. This fact has a whole host of implications, but one of the most critical is that recruitment marketers can and should make use of the platforms that traditional marketers have historically had a monopoly on.

• Jan 02
• 4 min read