Recruitment is Marketing: A New Approach to Attracting Talent

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Today, individual preferences and needs dominate and drive decision-making in every sphere of life. Consumers expect personalization of service, product, and experience, and the ability to tap into all this via the device of their choice. Marketing has recognized and reinvented itself to meet this expectation. So why should recruitment be any different?

Candidates today are smart, well informed, and unwilling to consider one-size-fits-all recruitment strategies. Instead, they favor companies that are able to conduct a dialogue with them, understand them as individuals, build relationships, and offer a hiring and employee experience that looks at not just their skills, but also their needs and aspirations.

And, thanks to the social tools they have at their disposal, they’re able to research your company thoroughly before they even apply. In short, the candidate treats the application process like a consumer would—so recruiters need to start thinking like marketers.

A recent study from IBM revealed that a large number of HR professionals and hiring managers were dissatisfied with their new hires and would not rehire 40% of their recent recruits. It’s a hypercompetitive world for top talent, and finding the right people and keeping them is harder than ever. Let’s step back a moment and consider how talent acquisition has evolved. There was a time when recruiting involved placing ads or calling people you knew.

Then came job boards with numerous pages dedicated to job postings. Further on, the industry created recruitment technology systems to automate the process of recruiting, to stay compliant, and increase efficiencies. Now, assessments, HR information systems and onboarding integrations are commonplace. But none of these address candidate attraction – creating awareness of your company within the talent pool – which is crucial today.

So how can HR go about achieving this? Think of it like great brand management: knowing the audience, and understanding and being able to express the authentic value the brand delivers. This will help define whom they are trying to hire and why someone would want to work at your organization. Recruitment should be about attracting, connecting and engaging with candidates and not just hoping that they somehow find you.

It’s about finding that “just right person” who may not be actively job hunting, who may live in a different part of the world, or be from a different skill group. It’s also not just about finding candidates, but about being visible where candidates may be looking – this could be through a mobile or social platform or some other forum. In other words, promoting brand awareness so candidates know about you and are interested in finding out more.

Just like marketing has been able to market down to an audience of one, we predict a world where recruiters use analytics to learn the exact profile of the right talent and how to market to them.

It all boils down to analyzing the data, and applying insights to help potential candidates understand their match with career opportunities and their fit with your unique company culture. Data insights can help HR understand exactly what candidates are looking for, and to find whether they possess the attributes necessary for high performance in their roles. This way, HR can obtain a comprehensive view of active jobseekers and also identify passive candidates, learn about their preferences, skills, and aspirations and build relationships with them. HR needs to arm itself with marketing tools to find and engage with the right talent to grow the business.

New services being announced from IBM today will help HR organizations do just that. For example, IBM Kenexa Lead Manager uses the same technology found in the IBM Marketing Cloud to automate personalized experiences with prospects; proactively track and engage with internal and external candidates; and track the success of their recruitment tactics. Candidate web traffic analytics capabilities powered by IBM Digital Analytics allow recruiters to track candidate activity across their online application forms to gain insights into bounce rates, visit duration and reference sites they can use to improve the website layout to optimize engagement. And with mobile recruitment, recruiters can build a single unified recruitment experience across a variety of channels to streamline and simplify the application process.

At the end of the day, it’s all about being able to create meaningful conversations with the candidate so organizations can get the best talent when they need it, helping drive superior business performance.