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

At the beginning of 2018, Facebook announced (as it so often does) that it was changing its algorithm. This time, its goal was to show users less content from businesses and more content from friends and family in their newsfeeds. For marketers in general and recruitment marketers in particular, this seemed like a catastrophe. The platform had already been making organic reach harder and harder to come by, and now they were going to drive the final nail in the coffin. The world, however, didn’t end, and Facebook continues to be a platform that can help you further your employer brand and attract job candidates who can make a difference for your organization. How is it able to do this? We’re glad you asked. 

• Dec 11
• 4 min read

Of all the platforms that are currently available for recruitment marketing, Google Ads can often seem like the most complicated. Setting up a campaign involves lots of keyword research and a whole host of minute details that have to be managed very carefully. After all that, the business of tracking your campaign presents further challenges, and arriving at a measurable ROI can sometimes seem like a herculean task. Luckily, we’re here to help! If you’re having trouble measuring your Google Ads campaign, or just need a little help getting yourself oriented, considering these five tips should do the trick.

• Dec 06
• 4 min read

It’s no secret that in many industries right now there simply isn't enough talent to go around. Companies have tried to combat this talent shortage in a host of ways, from sourcing potential job candidates more aggressively to implementing employee engagement programs to retain existing talent—but the tasks involved are daunting, and businesses sometimes meet with limited success. Employee engagement programs, for instance, often suffer from low participation and poor follow-through from management. To wit, when companies give their annual engagement surveys, one third of employees on average now opt out or lie.

• Nov 27
• 4 min read

Fun fact: only 20% of potential job candidates frequent traditional job boards like Craigslist and Indeed. Of the remaining 80%, most already have a job, but a large percentage of these passive job candidates would gladly switch jobs if the right offer came around. This means that if you’re focusing all of your sourcing efforts on old-school job sites, you’re cutting yourself off from a whole wealth of candidates who might be perfect fits for your team.

• Nov 22
• 4 min read

Kurt Vonnegut once said, in response to the question of why one should write books when senators and generals and other important people won’t read them, “you catch people before they become generals and presidents.” As it is with the lessons of literature, so too is it with employer branding. More than 70% of candidates will take a business’ employer brand into consideration before they even send out an application—meaning that if you haven’t made a good impression on most candidates by the time they’re contemplating an application, it’s already too late. Perhaps, for this reason, studies have shown that a great employer brand can reduce cost per hire by as much as 50% while leading to an up to 50% increase in qualified applicants.

• Nov 20
• 4 min read

The way people search for jobs changed in the last years, and Google remains one of the main starting places in looking for a job. This means that your strategy for ranking on google both organic and through ads is ultra important. 

• Nov 15
• 9 min read

In sales and marketing, the sales pipeline refers to the process of moving customers and potential customers through the buyer’s journey from awareness to consideration to decision. At each level of the funnel, salespeople and marketers know that each time a potential customer encounters their brand or interacts with their company, they’re being influenced one way or another towards either becoming a customer or dropping out of the pipeline. As such, smart businesses treat each touchpoint within the funnel as a chance to provide value to customers and give them an experience that causes them to think favorably of the company as a whole.

• Nov 13
• 4 min read

Successful recruitment isn’t about sourcing the most applicants, it’s about sourcing the right applicants. Unfortunately, many of the strategies that modern recruiters employ to aid their hiring efforts are designed to generate a large number of applications, suitable or not. Often, the end result of these strategies is a giant pile of resumes that are mostly off-target. Or worse, a giant pile of applications in which it’s almost impossible to tell how well any particular candidate meets the company’s needs. How can recruiters break out of this cycle and start sourcing candidates that better fit their company’s mission and values? One strategy is to use employee personas.

• Nov 08
• 4 min read

Following the Rio Olympics in 2016, it seemed like there was a surge of interest in Brazil as a business destination. As the largest country in Latin America, it boasts the world’s 8^th largest GDP, and more than two dozen of the world’s 2,000 largest companies call it home.

• Nov 06
• 7 min read

When you think of the most obvious places to promote your employer brand, your first thoughts might be of professional networks like LinkedIn, or popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. What many people don’t think of in this context is YouTube—even though it has more than 1 billion users! Not only does it have a billion users, those users watch 1 billion hours of video each day through its website and mobile app. Sure, the platform has its obvious strictures and limitations (it exclusively focuses on video content, which can be costly and time consuming to produce), but if you’re producing videos for your recruitment efforts anyway, YouTube is the obvious place to promote them. So, let’s dive into some tips and tricks for spreading your employer brand on the world’s biggest video-sharing platform.  

• Nov 01
• 5 min read

We’ve spoken more than once on this blog about the power of recruitment marketing automation. And, indeed, by streamlining the process of purchasing, constructing, and targeting ads across various web channels—not to mention automatically tracking clicks, forms filled out, and applications submitted—automation processes can help businesses save time and money. At the same time, we understand that these things can be daunting, and it can sometimes be difficult to get a handle on how best to approach automation technology in a way that aligns with your recruiting goals. Luckily, we’ve got a list of best practices that you can employ as you get started with recruitment marketing automation.

• Oct 30
• 4 min read

Recruiters use all sorts of metrics to track their efforts: retention rate, time to hire, time to fill, etc. But in many hiring departments one metric stands above the rest in terms of weight and importance. Yes, we’re talking about cost per hire. As it happens, many of the other metrics, like time to fill and time to hire, have a direct impact on cost per hire, just as cost per hire itself has a direct impact on your company’s bottom line. The age-old question is, “what can recruiters do to reduce their cost per hire and recruit talented team members in a more cost efficient way?” 

• Oct 23
• 5 min read

Recruitment has changed a lot over the decades. What used to be done via print classified ads and fax machines is now, for many businesses, almost entirely digital—with even job interviews sometimes taking place over Skype. In some ways, recruiters’ jobs have become more difficult as a result of these technological shifts: it’s now imperative that businesses develop and track their employer brands across numerous online channels, meaning that recruitment is no longer a matter of crafting a succinct job ad and sifting through a stack of resumes.

• Oct 18
• 4 min read

Facebook is gigantic. To paraphrase Douglas Adams (albeit he was talking about space), you won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. It boasts a total user base over 2 billion, and monthly active user over 1 billion, which represents a huge percentage of both passive and active job users all across the world—which means that the questions isn’t whether to use Facebook in recruitment efforts, but how best to take advantage of what the global social media giant offers. If you’re reading this article, it’s probably safe to assume that you already have a corporate Facebook page you use to share news and updates about your company. But do you also have a separate careers page for posting employer brand-related content? If not, you really should. 

• Oct 16
• 4 min read

In 1982, a few years before the creation of the World Wide Web, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania decided that enough was enough. The lone soda vending machine in their workspace was down a long hallway, and because it was restocked by grad student volunteers there was an ever-present danger that the machine would be empty or, even worse, the soda in the machine would be warm. Rather than trudging from their offices to the machine simply to discover that the machine was empty or wasting their money on warm cola, they decided to install counters in the machine that could track how much soda was inside and how long each of the bottles had been there (it took about 3 hours for the soda to get sufficiently cold). From there, they connected it to Arpanet (the early instantiation of the modern internet) so that they could check on the status of the soda machines from their desks instead of taking the long trek to the machine itself.

• Oct 11
• 4 min read

The title of this post may be a little misleading, because we’re actually going to start with the “why” and move on to the “how” as we go. But it is an important question: given all of the possible venues for sourcing candidates in modern recruitment, why use Facebook? Of course, there’s the elephant in the room. Or, rather, the billion monthly active elephants. Not only does Facebook boast more than a quarter of the entire world’s population as registered users, it lays claim to a shocking amount of our collective time. In the United States, the average person spends 40 minutes a day on Facebook. Around the world, Facebook processes more than 4 million status updates, images, and comments every minute.

• Oct 09
• 5 min read