Of the seven billion people on this planet, two billion use Facebook at least once a month. Each day, Facebook has more than a billion unique visitors. Its group functionality attracts users with all sorts of niche interests and talents, and its ads platform has some of the most comprehensive targeting options among social media sites. What better place to spread your employer brand and try to source qualified job candidates for your company?
Employer branding isn’t something you have, it’s something you do. This is the reason that so many businesses struggle when trying to measure the effectiveness of their employer brand: they believe that they are trying to measure the effects of a thing, an abstract concept, when in reality they need to measure the effects that their employer branding actions have on their recruitment efforts. This means that things like social posts and everything that makes up the applicant and employee experience at your company all count towards the overall impact of your employer brand, and can be used to measure its efficacy.
As of a few years ago, there were five job openings for every job-seeking developer in the United States. The unemployment rate for developers continues to be well below the national average, and there are more than a few behemoth tech companies who have the time and the inclination to scoop up as much of the field’s top talent as possible. On top of this high level of competition, recruiting developers can often be a slow process, involving multiple technical and behavioral interview stages and a lengthy informational process after a job offer has been handed down. During this stretch of time, smaller companies often have to worry about their top hires being enticed away by larger corporations who can offer more money and faster turnaround times. Luckily, there are a number of strategies that businesses can use to speed up and improve their hiring of developers.
In today’s red-hot market for top talent, it can be difficult for companies to stand out from the crowd. According to a recent poll, 57% of recruiters say their top challenge is differentiating their company from the competition, and with new businesses getting into the game all the time that task is only getting harder. What can businesses do to make an impression on potential candidates and outpace their competitors when it comes to talent acquisition? A well defined employee value proposition (EVP) is an important first step.
Marketing automation is all the rage, and recruitment marketing is sure to follow the same trend into the world of automated workflows. But will it be worth the hype? Will automation in recruitment marketing tasks enable recruiters and HR professionals to improve on the metrics that they really care about? Let’s find out!
There are too many definitions of marketing to count, but one of our favorites comes from Dr. Philip Kotler, who says, “Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires." 86% of HR professionals think that recruitment is becoming more like marketing, and given Dr. Kotler’s definition, it’s easy to see why. While in earlier eras recruiters might have gotten away with targeting only the 20% of candidates who are actively job-seeking at any given time, it’s become crucial in the modern era of recruitment to go after the other 80%, many of whom would gladly switch jobs if the right offer came around. For those people, the first thing you need to do as a recruitment marketer is to help them see a need that they don’t realize they have: the need to change jobs.
Not many people think of them in these terms, but job listings are actually important pieces of employer branding. Yes, they often (though not always) reach candidates who have already moved passed the awareness stage of the candidate journey, but they also represent an important crossroads at which potential candidates decide whether or not to apply, largely based on their perception of your business and the value they would derive from working there. For this reason, crafting your job postings shouldn’t just be a matter of parroting out an internal job requisition. Rather, it should be a carefully constructed piece of branding.
It’s hardly a secret that the Japanese recruitment market is one of the toughest in the world. In Tokyo right now there are two job openings for every candidate, and cultural differences in thinking about work and career decisions can create a disconnect between foreign employers and top quality Japanese talent. That said, just because a task is daunting doesn’t mean that it can’t be accomplished.
Promoting your employer brand through social media channels remains an important keystone for any online recruitment strategy regardless of location. In fact, in a country where many members of the workforce only work for one or two companies throughout their entire careers, employer branding is arguably even more important.
The question is, which channels will give you the best chance of reaching your target audience?
Okay, okay. We realize that it’s the opposite of what we promised in the title, but we’re going to talk about the importance of applicant experience upfront. Why? Because it is an unbelievably important part of the recruitment process. In a recent study, Gartner found that a best-in-class applicant experience not only improved a company’s talent pool (with 95% of applicants saying that they would reapply, and 97% saying that they would refer friends and coworkers), it even improved customer loyalty, with more than 80% of respondents saying that they would purchase more from the company as a result of their positive applicant experience.
Let’s say you’re in the HR department at a promising new startup. One day, one of your most talented developers abruptly quits, giving no notice and taking no steps to ease the transition of her responsibilities to another worker. No one wants to be put in a situation like this one, but what will it take to keep this unexpected snafu from transforming into a full blown crisis?
Somewhere out there, right now, is the developer, or marketer, or manager who’s going to make a huge impact on your business. Let’s be optimists for a few minutes and say that there may even be several someones out there who would be ideal fits for your company culture, and who have the skills, experience, and drive to make a difference. How do you make sure that one of those ideal candidates comes to your organization instead of one of your competitors?
There’s no denying that in the last few years employer branding has become a much more central piece of the talent acquisition puzzle. Talk to any recruiter or recruitment marketer for more than a few minutes and employer branding is sure to come up—and with good reason. Employer brand can play a starring role in building your company’s reputation, and a good or bad reputation can actually save or cost you money in the hiring process. And this is after only a relatively short period of prominence for employer branding as a concept. What about five, ten, or twenty years from now, when employer branding has developed a long history of driving recruitment efforts?
Anyone who works in recruiting can tell you that competition for talent is the most intense it’s been in years. As a result, most applicants can afford to be choosier about who they will even consider working for, leading to an across the board decrease in apply rates. These two circumstances combined may be pushing some recruiters and hiring managers to the brink of panic, but all is not lost! There are, in fact, a number of steps that businesses can take to combat low apply rates and strengthen their talent pipelines in the process.
Recruiting a developer can be extremely time and resource intensive, often taking over a month and costing upwards of $30,000. Given this fact, and given the high level of competition for top talent in the tech world, it’s hard to overstate the importance of finding and hiring the right people for your team. After all, the cost of each new hire is an investment in your company’s future success, and if you invest in the wrong people you’re potentially endangering the continued health of your business. This is why crafting a robust online recruitment strategy to attract top developers has never been more imperative.
They say you shouldn't judge someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes—good advice for anyone, but incredibly potent when it comes to recruitment marketing. Gaining a better understanding of what your applicants are experiencing when they encounter and engage with your company and its branding can go a long way towards informing smoother, more efficient recruiting processes. What is the best way to do this by mastering the candidate journey?
As the market has become very candidate-centric, getting candidates further down your application funnel is becoming increasingly challenging. Each candidate's journey is unique, and understanding it is crucial to improving the overall candidate experience and acquiring the best talent. Understanding what candidates go through can improve your entire hiring process to ensure that candidates don't drop out of the process.
Your company is a great place to work, and you’ve got a strong employer brand to show for it.
But what do you have to show for your employer brand? If you’ve been having a difficult time attracting applicants and recruiting top talent, you might be saying, “not much.” If you’re in these dire recruitment straits, you may sometimes think that a strong employer brand isn’t enough to attract qualified people to apply to positions at your company. And you’d be right—because what good is a brand if no one sees, reads, or hears about it?
These days one of the most important parts of a recruiter’s job is finding ways to maximize the impact of his or her company’s employer branding. This can be done through traditional job platforms, sure, but it’s becoming increasingly imperative to leverage social media as a tool for spreading the word about your company.
For years, most businesses have had things backwards. Conventional wisdom held that the application and interview processes were good ways to test the devotion of your applicants—after all, if a candidate wasn’t willing to spend 20 minutes filling out an online form, or wait two weeks for a response to her application, how could a company expect that person to be a dedicated and invested employee? Unfortunately, in an era where competition for the best talent is at its fiercest, this type of attitude can come at a steep price: losing high-quality applicants to companies that offer a better applicant experience.
When it comes to hiring, reputation matters. Not only can your employer brand influence people when deciding whether or not to apply for a position at your company in the first place, it can also have a tremendous impact on how costly it is to hire and retain them once they do so. To wit, research by the Harvard Business Review found that employers with a poor reputation had to offer a 10% higher salary than employers with a better reputation in order to get applicants to accept a position. Compound this over dozens or hundreds of hires and you could be looking at millions of dollars spent combatting the effects of a poor employer brand. By contrast, the added value of a good reputation (i.e. a strong employer brand) can be just as significant, making your business more competitive when it comes to attracting high quality talent in an increasingly cutthroat marketplace. But how, exactly, does your employer brand translate into measurable ROI?
Fun fact: recruiting a software developer can take more than 6 months and cost more than $30,000 on average—and that’s without accounting for lost productivity during a lengthy recruitment process. Though the numbers may be less eye-popping in other fields, there’s no denying the fact the recruiting even a single employee can be a costly and time-consuming affair, one that makes it difficult for many businesses to attract and engage the type of high quality talent that can make a real impact on their operations. Luckily, there are steps that recruiters can take to speed up time to hire and decrease hiring cost. Chief among them? Building a strong talent pipeline.