Mar 2017
How to make someone fall in love with you
“Shake your hips and hope for the best”
Thanks to Camille, aged 9, and a greetings card company called The London Studio for this delightful quote. It reminded me of what far too many organisations do with regard to their candidate attraction – be it on job boards, events, LinkedIn or wherever. You won’t be surprised to know that there’s a better way.
We regularly audit the media effectiveness of our recruitment clients and, whilst the job boards still have a part to play, it’s clear that in some areas the clients are starting to see signs of diminishing returns. Media, like any other market, is a dynamic one and recruiters need to stay ahead of the change. The ‘market' is a bit of a nebulous concept of course, what’s changing is candidate preferences. More and more they are getting fed up with a poor candidate experience, a one size fits all approach and filling in details on online application forms. They now seem to be saying, ‘You should be coming to me and show me what you can offer’. The trick here is to find them in their respective online communities in order to be able to serve those messages to them. And that means more precise targeting and more carefully thought through messaging. This is even more prevalent when specific geography as required and the high quality candidates we seek are more likely to be passive rather than active job seekers.
An integrated search, social and programmatic campaign allows you to go direct to the target audience, however niche, rather than wait for them to come to you. We’re already seeing a huge increase in the quality and quantity of candidates, real ROI for a client’s budget and some compelling feedback in terms of reducing time to hire and increasing referrals both from staff and the talent pipeline.
The key is effective research in the first place to truly identify the target audience. In terms of the campaign itself the initial phase is about raising general awareness to build profile and an audience. Once we have that we’ll serve more employment related messaging and retarget in a more concerted way. And, then and only then will we serve some job specific content which we can supplement with ‘boost’ campaigns for very specific roles as required. The ‘profile, consideration, conversion’ process is mobile heavy in the early phases and then tends to be more desktop heavy towards the end.
Whatever the device campaigns runs are monitored and optimised in real-time all the way to click through to a client’s careers site.
As we always say, ‘Plan carefully, execute with flair and measure everything’. It’s got to be better than shaking your hips and hoping for the best – particularly if you’ve ever seen me shaking mine!
In categories: Employer Branding, Industry Insights
