By Oscar Waterworth
It is no longer sufficient or acceptable for recruiters to simply put up a job advertisement and hope for the best. Regardless of how great (you think) your organization is or how many people are trying to get in, you are unlikely to attract the best possible candidate and even less likely to attract the best possible field of candidates from which to choose without having engaged in recruitment marketing.
For a variety of reasons, the balance of power in recruitment has shifted from employers to potential employees. Candidates - particularly young and educated ones with no dependants - are no longer desperate for stable work and are willing to wait a long time before committing to a full-time, permanent job.
On the flipside, they are not willing to spend a long time in that job if it doesn't suit them – this has made recruitment a very particular and complicated science that is not just about finding the most impressive candidate, but the right candidate and convincing them that their organization is worth committing to.
It also means that the candidate search is not limited to the unemployed – it means attracting the best talent regardless of whether they are employed, unemployed, underemployed, interstate, overseas or even retired! It means targeting the "passive" job market and catching the biggest fish out of the biggest possible pond.
How do You Attract Candidates Who are not Even Looking for Work?
As mentioned above, in order to give yourself the best chance of attracting the best possible candidate you need to cast the web as wide as possible. This means more than just advertising a “position vacant” on as many mediums as possible, and in fact it means more than just advertising a position at all. This means a constant and consistent marketing campaign of your company or organization as an employer, rather than just a goods/services provider.
As such, the search for the ideal candidate doesn't begin once a position becomes vacant – it should have already been occurring in the form of brand development as an employer. It should have been occurring on various mediums, whether exclusively online or on traditional media as well (depending on your organization's budget).
If you are a software development firm, you want all software developers to know that you exist and you want them to know how great conditions in your office are – you want a video of your office to pop up on their Facebook feed, complete with classy footage of your existing staff happily brainstorming on beanbags, sipping on fresh lattes from your state of the art coffee machine!
Your organization may not match this description, but you can certainly find competitive advantages of your workplace (whether this is the location, the conditions or any other factors) and find a way to highlight these to prospective employees.
Developing a Reputation as an Employer of Choice
Most HR departments, although great at their core business, are not equipped to conduct the kind of full-scale recruitment marketing campaigns that are required to stay competitive in the talent market. If this is the case in your organization, it is highly recommended that you engage the services of brand developers.
Brand developers are able to build up the kind of reputation your organization needs to catch the biggest fish through a comprehensive process including content marketing and analytics. Recruitment marketing has become a science in itself, which a company neglects at its own peril.
You may know that you are a great employer, your existing employees may know that their conditions are great and this may be outlined in great detail in your job advert – but nobody knows this except the active unemployed job seeker. And even then, only IF they are using the same channels in their job search that you've advertised on. To avoid the risk of missing out on the best possible candidates (as we speak!), make sure you have a recruitment marketing campaign in place sooner rather than later.
Oscar Waterworth is a writer and a senior editor at Bizzmarkblog. He frequently blogs about the latest developments in the tech, marketing, and business industries. To stay updated with Oscar’s latest posts, you can follow him on Twitter.