You already know that outdated, ineffective recruitment marketing can hurt your company. Long hiring cycles and candidate dropouts don’t just cost you money, but they also take a toll on productivity. Without a carefully planned recruitment strategy, you risk trailing behind the competition in the race for talent.
So, what can you do to win first place? To gain a competitive advantage, you need to fully optimize your recruitment campaigns.
By auditing your recruitment campaigns, you’ll paint a clear picture of what your current process looks like, where your bottlenecks are, and how your candidates perceive your employer brand. Then, you can shine and polish your strategy to attract top talent and outpace the competition.
Ready to step out in front of the competition with a knockout recruitment strategy? Here’s how to get started.
Auditing your recruitment campaigns isn’t just a good idea—it drives real results for your business, including revenue. The competition for talent is heating up, and your ideal candidates are browsing dozens of job listings in seconds. You need a clear-cut strategy that sets your business, HR managers, and new hires up for success.
Sure, recruitment auditing probably isn’t at the top of your priority list. Maybe you don’t have the resources to audit your recruitment campaigns, or you’re too busy working in the field to sacrifice hours behind a desk. Unfortunately, the war for talent isn’t ending anytime soon. It’s time to start investing in recruitment—and it starts with an audit.
When you take a deep dive into your marketing strategy, you’ll gain key insights into the candidate journey, your employer brand, and your competition. Then, you can start crafting a comprehensive strategy to captivate your ideal candidates.
The frequency of your recruitment audits should depend on your business, the amount of hiring involved, and how successful your current processes are.
Of course, marketing should never be a guessing game. Even if your strategy is driving results, recruitment is a long-term strategy, and there’s always going to be room for improvement.
To maximize your ROI, schedule regular check-ins to monitor your performance and refine your strategy. If you’re not meeting your hiring goals, don’t wait to conduct an audit. Our clients drive the best results when they make it a priority to carry out minor and major audits at regular intervals.
To improve your recruitment processes, you have to start by understanding what’s working, where there are bottlenecks, and how your business stacks up against the competition. Whether you’re reflecting on your approach or preparing for a meeting with your hiring team, a recruitment audit is necessary to gain insights into your campaigns.
Pro-Tip: Main Street Recruitment, an expert recruitment marketing agency, has compiled a quick and easy audit checklist that consists of 10 questions you and your team can reflect on to assess the current state of recruiting at your organization. Feel free to start here if you’re ready to dive in and get a sense of how you’re doing right now.
No matter what your current strategy looks like, here’s how to start thinking about your recruitment life cycle, including your employer brand, candidate experience, and recruitment metrics.
Before customers decide to hire your company, they go through a lengthy thought process. It takes time for them to research your company, learn about your products and services, and decide whether you’re the best choice for the job.
Just like customers, candidates navigate multiple steps in the candidate journey before sending in an application. When they decide to apply, the second stage of their journey begins.
Understanding the candidate journey from the candidate’s point of view is a key step to improving the overall candidate experience. Every touchpoint with your business plays an important role in whether potential candidates will convert into actual candidates—and auditing the candidate journey can help ensure each touchpoint leaves a positive impression.
You’re dedicating valuable time, money, and resources to captivate your ideal candidates and guide them through the candidate journey, but your efforts aren’t paying off. How can you maximize your ROI and make the most of your marketing efforts?
Even if your candidate journey is flawless, your employer brand can still interfere with your recruitment strategy. According to Glassdoor, 75 percent of active job seekers are likely to apply to a job if the employer actively promotes its brand. What’s more, 92 percent of people would consider switching jobs if offered a position with a business with an excellent employer brand.
In other words, your employer brand can make or break your marketing strategy. To audit your employer brand, start by looking at:
Once you have a clear picture of your employer brand, you can figure out what message to send and set realistic goals for your branding strategy.
Data can be an invaluable resource for your business. It provides insight into how your marketing campaigns are performing and who your customers are—and it can even help you make smarter hiring decisions.
Just like any other marketing campaign, the quality of your data is much more important than the quantity. The secret to a successful audit is knowing where to look and what metrics are worth analyzing.
Depending on your strategy, you might tap into HR data to discover hiring trends, send surveys to gain insight into the candidate experience, or track engagement on your employer social media posts. Once you start collecting data, you can set internal benchmarks to track your marketing success.
Some of the most important recruitment metrics to track include:
At this point, you should have a solid idea of how effective your recruitment marketing is. Now, it’s time to spy on the competition to see how your marketing strategy stacks up.
Whenever you can, take time to check out your competitors’ recruitment campaigns. If you can learn from the areas they perform better than you or understand why they’re attracting qualified candidates, you can tailor your messaging or fill gaps in your own strategy.
So, where do you start? Take a look at your competitors’ employer brands to see how they present themselves to candidates. In addition, consider what methods they use to engage candidates. Maybe they’re actively promoting job openings on Facebook, sharing employee stories on Instagram, or sending email newsletters to interested candidates. How does your marketing strategy compare?
Once you’ve gathered some inspiration from the competition, you can use this information to improve your strategy, strengthen your employer value proposition, and differentiate your brand from the competition.
With so many contractors competing for the same candidates, you need a standout recruitment strategy to get noticed. A recruitment audit is the marketing tool you need to streamline your strategy and boost your recruitment success.
To start updating your recruitment strategy, schedule a discovery call with our partners at Main Street Recruitment. The process begins with auditing your current recruitment processes—and their recruitment experts can help you capture the attention of your ideal candidates.
