What Recruiters Can Learn from Marketers

Recruiters are marketers of talent. Today’s marketing discipline revolves around creation of worthwhile experiences for customers. It is the overarching objective of every recruitment company that wants to carve a voice in the industry. Each marketer is expected to deliver content that converts into real, measurable business results. Gone are the days when recruitment is a process of managing job boards and job ads, building a huge database of resumes and keeping information fresh.

Recruitment organizations have transformed the way they reach and engage prospective candidates and clients. Proactive sourcing includes building a database of resources and tools for target audience–moving them further along the hiring and selection journey.

Recruiters Know Their Candidates

When recruitment consultants consider knowing the behaviors and motivations of their prospective candidates, they are able to anticipate needs and wants. In order to build long-term relationships with candidates, recruiters must position themselves as a reliable, dependable and trustworthy career ally. By keeping their candidates informed of the career possibilities available to them even when the candidates themselves are not actively looking to move to a new job, the recruiter effectively connects on levels outside a possible ‘sale’ or ‘job placement’ scenario. Here’s what’s meant by nurturing relationships with candidates:

Awareness (Who are you, what jobs are open, what can you do for me?)

• Job boards, job ads, online and offline sourcing

Engagement (Cultivate/nurture relationship)

• Meet candidate
• Understand candidate’s current job status/satisfaction levels
• Find out more about candidate’s motivations on the job and other career aspirations
• Assess career opportunities in the horizon
• Provide helpful information about discovered career opportunities

Consideration (What’s in it for me? What value do you add to my job search?)

• Share relevant trends and insights that help increase candidate’s market awareness
• Find out important life events that impact the candidate’s likelihood to change current motivations
• Share success stories of people who went through the same experiences
• Gain access to candidate’s plans for near- and mid-term
• Scope out the potential employer profiles that fit the candidate’s ideal company to work for
• Present a comparative analysis/pros and cons of moving vs. staying at current position
• Coach prospective candidate on key things to remember should candidate be open to explore career opportunities
• Set and manage expectations
• Validate known information about the candidate

Conversion (candidate receives offer and accepts the position)

• Illustrate how the candidate’s skills match the potential employer’s’ requirements
• Help candidate identify aspects of his expertise and training that can solve and address employer’s needs
• Follow-up and follow through; provide updates post-interview; post-placement
• Keep in contact (onboarding, email or call first 15, 30, 45, 60 days…)

Recruiters Know Their Clients

Awareness

• Study the industry; study the company
• Meet the client and if possible the people involved in the hiring process
• Understand client/hiring and selection influencers’ requirements; the position requirements; their current challenges in filling the role

Engagement

• Find out more about client’s and influencers’ motivations to engage a recruitment partner; how many and who else are they working with
• Assess potential opportunities in the account; company hiring trends/staffing plans and how it affects the other business units
• Share relevant trends, tools and insights that help increase client’s market awareness
• Find out important events that impact the client’s likelihood to change current motivations (change in leadership, change in ownership, recent acquisition/merger, etc.)

Consideration

• Share success stories of companies who went through the same experiences (case studies)
• Gain access to client’s plans for near- and mid-term
• Scope out the potential candidate profiles that fit the client’s ideal candidate for the job
• Present a comparative analysis/pros and cons of hiring candidates that are either moving-up or down or laterally moving based on various motivations; recommend good-better-best options
• Set and manage expectations; Do not over-promise and under-deliver
• Validate known information about the client

Conversion

• Illustrate how each candidate’s skills match the potential employer’s’ requirements
• Help client identify aspects of the candidate’s’ expertise and training that can help solve or address employer’s needs
• Follow-up and follow through; provide updates post-interview; post-selection
• Keep in contact (onboarding, email or call first 15, 30, 45, 60 days…)
• Repeat

Create Value

Like marketing, recruitment is not a Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tale where you throw the magic beans on the soil and find a stalk has grown so tall it reaches beyond the clouds to where the hen laying the golden eggs is. Oftentimes, nurturing relationships with candidates and clients take a lot of tending, watering, sunshine, shielding from harsh weather conditions and sheltering.

Employ a simple workflow to scale your efforts.

Great brand image is one half of the equation. Remember that even the most powerful brands fall flat when the actual experiences they create for customers don’t meet the ‘perceived value’ that the brand has conditioned it to bring. The true value of excellent recruitment services boils down to how well recruiters know and anticipate the needs of both their candidates and their clients. Sophisticated recruitment and marketing tools abound and may eventually automate a lot of the processes we now employ. But real connections built outside the vicinity of ‘robotic selling’ puts a consultant in the bucket of a reliable, dependable and trustworthy friend–a ‘human’ resource, not a placement-hungry head-hunter just in it for the money.