Every recruiter, in every department, at every company on the planet thinks their situation is uniquely challenging. We’re not going to dispute those claims. Seriously, the current worldwide job market has amped up the difficulty for everyone across the HR field.
HR technology in 2019 is changing rapidly. According to Crunchbase, VCs invested the equivalent of 700 million USD in recruiting software startups this year alone. The race to define the perfect HR technology ecosystem is on in full force, and there are as many potential answers as there are startups. Even amidst all of these new and exciting developments, one thing remains pretty clear: there are a lot of considerations that go into defining the right technology for any given HR team, and making that determination really requires a deep dive into the way that candidates are attracted, engaged, and converted in the modern era.
The labor market turned a corner when no one was looking. It’s now largely, if not completely, candidate-driven. That means HR departments and contract agencies alike are scrambling to find the best ways to attract candidates for their openings. This situation is leading to a set of problems recruiters have never had to deal with in modern memory:
Candidate experience has always been a primary concern for HR and recruitment marketing. That said, the current candidate-centered job market has pushed it even further into the spotlight. If a candidate doesn’t have a good experience working with you, or if your online presence doesn’t resonate with them, they’ll just walk next door to your competitor.
Technology moves fast, and these days so does recruitment. The introduction of recruitment marketing automation into the HR landscape, for instance, represented a big technological shift, and that's just one of a new of new concepts and ideas that are changing that ways in which businesses connect to new candidates. And of those emerging technologies, robotic process automation, or RPA, has direct applicability to the RM world. In short, RPA consists of software-based robots, or “bots,” that can be configured to reproduce formerly human-centered computer activities like clicking on a drop-down menu and making a selection. This is revolutionary, since, before now, the only way to automate a sequence of tasks was to use an API or another back-door method to connect to the software, and these frequently required coding skills. Unsurprisingly, the effects on talent acquisition can be considerable:
Recruitment marketing and customer experience exist in a mutually beneficial feedback loop, with each feeding and at the same time playing off against each other. That means that any change made to your RM efforts will have an impact on the way your potential candidates and applicants experience their time interacting with you. It also means that you need to be paying attention to those experiences so you can adjust and tweak your marketing to reflect what you learn.
Recruitment marketing has one primary goal, to reach the right potential candidates, at the right time, and in the right place. Increasingly, that means on their mobile devices. To wit, candidates now spend more than five hours a day on their smartphones, and up to 70% of web traffic happens on a mobile device (CIODive, 2018). Yet, for some reason, fewer than 1 in 10 companies say they have a mobile-friendly application process. How many awesome candidates are those other 9 missing out on? And how much would you love to have them in your applicant funnel instead?
Recruitment marketing is about attracting passive job seekers and making them want to search for openings at your company. What role does candidate experience (CX) play in that? Well, since CX refers to each and every touchpoint a potential applicant encounters on their way from audience member to employee, and those touchpoints are created by your recruitment marketing efforts, we’d say quite a bit, wouldn’t you? After all,
Of all the countries in western Europe, Germany has been the slowest to warm up to social media. Whether that’s a holdover from the Cold War era and people’s lingering concerns over governmental prying, or whether it’s due to the coming generation’s distrust for the privacy policies many social media companies have in place remains to be seen.
Sometimes as a startup it feels like the only way to accomplish anything is through sheer force of will. You often don’t have the resources you need to behave like a traditional company, so any time there’s a push to hire new employees you’re stuck crossing your fingers and hoping for a referral to come through. After all, when you’re a growing company it’s almost impossible to attract top candidates to your careers page without a personal connection—right? Well, it’s not quite impossible. In fact, it’s exactly what a strong employer brand is designed to help you do.
In 2006, HubSpot coined the phrase “Inbound Marketing” as a key part of its larger "inbound" methodology. The term refers to a proactive method of attracting, engaging, and delighting potential customers through carefully targeted and crafted web content. The idea is that by offering up educational blog posts, whitepapers, and emails that help your audience identify their pain points and understand potential solutions, you can gain the trust of your ideal buyers. Eventually, this leads to boosted sales, business growth, and happy, repeat customers.
In today’s hyper-competitive job market, it’s extremely difficult for a company to stand out. That’s where recruitment marketing comes in, but how to know if your campaigns are paying off? With data, of course!
In the world of startups, growth is good. Not just good, growth is pretty much the holy grail of startup culture. Growing a business comes with a lot of built-in risks. Most startups are working with limited cashflow, limited time, and a limited amount of built-in hiring expertise.
According to CB Insights, 70 percent of upstart tech businesses fail, usually about 20 months after first raising financing. Among the many reasons, 23% of startups cited an inadequate team as a causative factor to their failure! In this specific context, everyone is jockeying for position, for funding, and for people. It’s that last one that we find the most interesting since, well that’s our thing, but also because the need for talent acquisition means the HR department (or the person multitasking as HR) has to be able to scale rapidly as the company grows.
At Kaufland, we have to hire a high volume of blue collar workers each year. With nearly 1,300 hypermarkets in Europe (including 126 stores in Romania and 2 logistics centers, with 2 more stores planned for the near future in Moldova), we employ 150,000 workers throughout 7 countries. At the same time, we need to hire a number of white collar positions. As you can imagine, the recruitment and talent acquisition costs for hiring on this scale can get quite high—even higher in times like these when employee turnover across the entire retail sector is astronomically high.
Historically, retail businesses haven’t been the quickest to change. Compared to industries like tech and automotive where new technologies are always being created, refined, and integrated into daily life, many brick and mortar retailers have gotten by for long stretches of time by doing business the way they’ve always done it. As new industries and technologies change and evolve all around us, however, it looks like retail is finally ready for its digital transformation. After all, how are companies supposed to keep up with e-commerce giants like Amazon if they’re not willing to adapt?
Every startup’s dream is having the chance to grow at light speed. It means that you’re doing something right, that your investors can see your vision and are willing to support you, and you get to go all-in on your product or service. What many businesses realize late in the game, however, is that the reality of growing a startup can also be harsh and grueling. Why? Well, a number of reasons, but chief among them is the difficulty of making sure that the growth of your team keeps pace with the growth of your operations.
In recruitment, as in so many other fields, it can be difficult to separate the innovations from the buzzwords. Things like employer branding, recruitment marketing, recruitment automation, etc. all sound nice enough on their face, but how can recruiters and other HR personnel figure out if there’s any substance to them? To really evaluate a new trend or a new concept, you need to find something concrete to use as a yardstick—something like the actual implications a given business practice might have on your ROI.
