Recruitment is a central part of almost any business. Are you doing everything you can to ensure that you’re hiring the best possible applicants to work for you? In marketing, one of the most commonly used tools is the “buyer persona”: an archetype of a business’s perfect customer, what they look like, and how to approach and attract them as a business. The persona tool can be used outside of just marketing, however. Talent Acquisition is one of the best areas to make use of personas, where recruiters build their ideal candidate for a specific role. Building candidate personas is crucial to having a strong TA strategy. So, here are some of the most important steps of building candidate personas for your recruiters to work with. 

• Sep 22
• 6 min read

AI’s presence across the economy is growing rapidly. It can be found in sales, manufacturing, customer service, marketing, and even in recruiting. The trend toward AI has also made it desirable in general, with businesses making sure to tell their customers that they use AI to make their product.

• Jul 23
• 5 min read

Traditionally, the way companies have gone about talent acquisition has followed a transactional model. Companies announce that they have a job opening through various channels (word of mouth, ads, job portals) and they wait for job-seekers to apply to it. This strategy has worked for as long as anyone can remember, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best approach. 

• Jun 16
• 6 min read

When it comes to SEO, we tend to think of it as a marketing tool that focuses on consumers. You optimize your pages so that you maximize your chances at being discovered by someone doing a Google search, with the hopes of them becoming a customer or client of yours. The thing is that SEO can be just as important for talent acquisition. The basic principles are the same as for consumers: you want to maximize the chances that they’ll click on the link to your page in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). 

• May 31
• 6 min read

Most companies today are heavily focused on job advertising, or emphasizing why qualified candidates should apply for a position, with a more transactional approach in talent acquisition. However, without variety in their recruitment marketing their efforts will fall short.

• May 07
• 7 min read

It is common knowledge that any business should have a corporate brand; the company's mission, values, and objectives, but what about the employer branding? Employer branding is how a company presents itself to a potential employee. This includes its reputation as a place to work and the employee value proposition, which is created through current and past workers. In today’s competitive job market employer branding is crucial for the success of a company. Employer brand metrics helps a business grow, acquire customers, and most importantly, it helps with finding talent. The better your company looks, the better quality of hires you’ll attract.

• Apr 15
• 7 min read

In April 2021 we started a strategic partnership with Appcast, the global leader in programmatic recruitment advertising technology and services, part of Stepstone, the leading e-recruiting player active in 21 countries.
Leveraging advanced technology, unmatched market data and a team of the industry’s best recruitment marketers, Appcast’s technology and services manage over half a billion dollars in job advertising annually on behalf of more than 1,500 clients.

Appcast is revolutionizing how companies attract game-changing talent for their open positions. Leveraging data and advanced programmatic technology, Appcast uses complex algorithms to help employers increase engagement with qualified candidates by showing people the right job ads, at the right time, in the right place.

Launching job campaigns is a seamless process
So, what does this partnership mean? For starters, through the SmartDreamers platform, employers now have the opportunity to programmatically advertise jobs directly with Appcast’s programmatic job ad exchange. This partnership will benefit recruitment teams by streamlining the job advertising process and will offer job seekers greater visibility across roles of interest to them.

• Apr 12
• 1 min read

In January 2021 we started a strategic partnership with Indeed, the world’s number one job search engine. The platform includes job listings from major job boards and company career pages. It generates more than 250 million unique job seekers every month and it’s accessible across 60 countries and 28 languages.

• Feb 09
• 3 min read

Every little helps. This was the guiding principle for Tesco’s famous advertising campaign that turned the British retailer into a market leader. But the idea of how small things add up to make a big difference rings true – and not just when it comes to customer journeys. If you look at candidate experience as a sequence of interactions with your company, even small gestures can go a long way – especially in the context of a global pandemic.

In fact, the way companies respond during these trying times will define their brand for decades, explains Mark Cuban in a CNBC interview. At the same time, a company’s reputation isn’t solely defined by what they’re currently doing – it can also be defined by what they aren’t doing. Because the truth is – what we fail to observe can sometimes batter the strategy of any great talent acquisition team.

• Jan 06
• 4 min read

The context of the global pandemic has sparked innovations in how companies engage with their talent pool remotely. Since casting the widest net is not a viable option, recruiters today tap into strategies that help them focus on quality leads instead. Automated lead nurture platforms have taken center stage. And for a good reason.

• Nov 12
• 5 min read

India is poised to become the third largest economy in the world. Let that sink in. Behind only the US and China, India is set on a meteoric path of economic development and job sector growth.

• Oct 08
• 4 min read

Tech companies resort to all kinds of stunts, publicity moves, and shenanigans to try and differentiate themselves from their competitors to hire top candidates. This comes in the form of anything from massive policy announcements to crazy signing bonuses for new hires. We’re not saying that these techniques can’t be effective, but from our perspective they seem like shortcuts. Not all shortcuts are bad—some of them save time and energy in a way that boosts ROI—but these kinds of shortcuts seem to skip all of the important stuff, i.e. laying the groundwork for future recruitment success. After all, once the barbecue is over and the swag has been handed out, how many of the attendees are you ever going to hear from again? Perhaps more importantly, how many are ever going to hear from you again? 

• Aug 20
• 4 min read

Have you noticed a shift in the tasks you’re being asked to do as a recruiter recently? Things like monitoring your company’s reputation on review sites, being sure to respond to mentions on social media, and even writing posts for the company blog you weren’t even aware existed? That means your department is moving into taking a longer view of the recruiting process and pivoting to include what’s called recruitment marketing.

• Aug 14
• 5 min read

At one time or another, we’ve all been there: scrolling through your phone, you come across a job posting or an ad for a position that looks interesting. You click the link, and it takes you to a landing page that loads at glacial speeds. A second before you would have closed on the window and gone on with your day, the page finally loads—and it’s a mess. It’s clearly not optimized for mobile, and it’s got endless dry paragraphs of awkwardly formatted text, all in print too tiny to read.

At this point, most of us have given up, but if you soldier on you’re eventually presented with a deeply infuriating application, with no autofill functionality, no way to save, and potentially more than an hour’s worth of redundant forms to fill out.

• Jul 03
• 4 min read

If you had a crystal ball, and you asked what the future of HR and talent acquisition was going to look like, what do you think you would see? For many of you, the world that’s coming to mind is defined by AI-powered chatbots and advanced algorithms for sorting potential candidates. You might even be picturing a world where job interviews are enhanced with augmented-reality applications and analyzed in real time to help optimize hiring decisions.

• Jun 17
• 4 min read

And just like that, we find ourselves almost tending the second half of 2020.

As we reflect back, there are encouraging signs that some of the trends we saw first emerge in late 2019/early 2020 are not only still going strong but are in fact ramping up for a big close to the year. 

We’ve gathered our top 7 of these trends, the ones we see not only going strong, but gathering steam and getting set to make an even bigger impact on talent acquisition not only today, but well into the future.

• Jun 10
• 6 min read

Why did you get into recruiting?

• Jun 05
• 5 min read

A career-focused email newsletter is a fantastic way to keep your talent pool updated on company happenings, alert them to new openings, and generally ensure that you and your company stay top-of-mind.

• May 28
• 6 min read

Here’s the thing about recruitment marketing: it’s complicated. Not so much in theory, but in practical fact an effective recruitment marketing strategy has a ton of moving parts and potentially dozens of individual pieces of content spread across multiple channels and media.

This is, of course, the goal—you need lots of content in order to develop employer brand gravity and generate any amount of inbound pull to your careers page.

At the same time, however, it can often be really difficult to figure out what’s working and what’s not.

• May 20
• 5 min read