I’m bullish on recruitment marketing.
I called the category last year. The 2013 #HRWINS and 2014 #HRWINS were chock full of recruitment marketing vendors. I believe that recruiting, sourcing, talent attraction, and talent acquisition are all analogous in deep ways to B2C and B2B marketing concepts.
The current crop of recruitment marketing vendors have been at it for a while. They’ve evangelized the concept of recruitment marketing. The capabilities they offer represent a big step in the right direction. But, these early leaders – the innovators are ripe for disruption themselves. There’s something missing.
Candidate engagement.
The same behaviors that have changed the way B2B buyers engage – getting 57% of the way through their buying process before engaging with a vendor- are changing the way candidates look at direct employers.
When I see your job posting, do I apply right away? Or, do I go to LinkedIn and see who I know, then go to Glassdoor and read some reviews. Do I email the contacts I have that have worked for your firm and find out what it’s really like? Or, email the recruiter listed in the job ad? How much time do you think I spend on your website before ever applying? Do you think I look at any content that has nothing to do with your jobs, but everything to do with your products, services, or stability before I apply? What are the most effective sources of traffic? applications? What are the most effective pieces of content? Does anyone actually spend time with your benefits overview before they apply, or after?
What if recruiting teams knew these things?
In the marketing world we track everything. We know when you come to our website. Where you came from. What brought you there. What you click on. What pages you spend time on. What content you engage with. We enable our sales and customer success teams with tools and tailored content that fits your profile based on everything we know about you. We experiment and test so that we learn when we should offer you more content, which content, and when we should email or pick up the phone and call you. And when we do pick up the phone, we are incredibly well prepared based on everything we already know.
This is what’s missing in recruitment marketing. A platform that understands what the next generation of B2B and B2C marketing concepts and tools are and is offering a path to that for recruiting teams, or a path to integrate what the marketing teams have already built for tracking in the marketing tech stack into the recruiting tech stack.
Vendors are racing to analytics to solve this problem. That won’t do it alone. By definition recruiters aren’t analytics jockeys. Talent acquisition teams need solutions that look at the data and provide a path – a decision point spelled out in recruiting terms – not a view to reports, dashboards, filters, and/or data cubes.
