To succeed in an incredibly competitive talent market like the one we’re experiencing now, recruitment marketers need to be more disciplined and deliberate than ever. Consistent social media posting and advertising are critical to getting your employer brand in front of the right people and gaining the impressions, clicks, and applications that your recruitment funnel thrives on.
This shouldn’t be a tremendously tall order, but the schedule of your average recruiter makes it difficult to ensure that she can be in front of her computer and ready to send out social media posts and activate advertising campaigns at exactly the same time every day of the year.
Luckily, many sites, like Facebook, offer you the ability to schedule posts in advance. Still, other sites offer APIs that will let you institute the same functionality on your end. But what about the sites that offer neither? How can you achieve your desired level of consistency without any tools available for doing so?
This was the first application for RPA in recruitment that UiPath and SmartDreamers sought to tackle. Using RPA workflows, we found that we could circumvent the limitations being presented by sites that would otherwise fit awkwardly into recruitment marketing gameplans.
Rather than being tethered to a computer at a particular time every day to post on niche channels with no scheduling options, these automation flows made it possible to treat even sites with no infrastructure for doing so the same way that you’d treat a platform like Facebook, i.e. easily scheduling posts for when you’re going to be away from your computer.
Rather than being beholden to the limitations of a given platform, recruiters could incorporate their desired platforms into existing automated workflows. But scheduling isn’t the only issue that crops up for recruiters when they don’t have convenient API integration on their employer branding channels. This, too, seemed like a job for RPA. By implementing an RPA-based approach to these sites, SmartDreamers and UiPath have been able to bridge the reporting gap that would otherwise stand in the way of successful recruitment efforts.
Again, totting up the performance numbers for a particular ad is the kind of task that a human could perform, but it would be extremely tedious and time-consuming. So tedious, in fact, that it wouldn’t be realistic to actually expect anyone to do it. Thus, where previously a lack of available APIs would, for practical purposes, mean little to no usable data could be collected from these websites, now robotic processes can step in and act as an intermediary to gain the kind of information that recruiters are looking for.
As a result of these efforts, SmartDreamers and UiPath have been able to offer users a level of reporting integration on small, niche websites that would be virtually impossible without RPA. Even on platforms that have no API integration and no data reporting to speak of, our users can gain insight into the ways that their advertisements are (or are not) driving traffic and bolstering their talent pipelines. This can include information like clicks, impressions, and applies, in addition to demographic information: i.e. the same type of data that Facebook and Google already offer.
This means that you can compare the efficacy of your employer branding efforts across different platforms and figure out which ones are reaching the right audience and which ones are either missing the demographic mark or failing to resonate. From here, you can arrive at actual ROI comparisons between particular ads, channels, CTAs, etc., meaning that you can begin to get much more data-driven in your decision-making.
What’s the best channel to spend your ad budget on? These numbers should give you a pretty clear idea. What are the characteristics of content that succeeds in engaging your candidate personas? Let the robots tell you! With this information in tow, you’re that much closer to making your overall strategic vision a reality. An employer brand can seem like a nebulous thing, but the data collected through these RPA-powered processes can make it concrete and legible.
