RECRUITER S GUIDE TO INBOUND MARKETING. Matt Charney

RECRUITER S GUIDE TO INBOUND MARKETING Matt Charney

RECRUITER S GUIDE TO INBOUND MARKETING The competition for top talent is becoming increasingly cut-throat, driving front-line recruiters to search for new techniques, tactics, tools and technologies that can help them meet their talent acquisition needs. One of the most important strategies used to find top talent is candidate sourcing, the concept of building a pipeline of passive candidates and then converting them into applicants and ultimately into your next great hires. A strategy to target passive candidates is vital 85% of the workforce consider themselves passive candidates. While it s a mystery how anyone who self-identifies as a job seeker is paradoxically passive, the fact is that recruiters have to do more than ever before to successfully attract, engage and hire top talent today.* The good news is there are best-practices that recruiters can borrow from their Marketing colleagues to make a significant impact on building their candidate pipelines. This Recruiter s Guide to Inbound Marketing ebook aims to tell you what you need to know and how to apply the techniques to recruiting. *http://talent.linkedin.com/blog/index.php/2014/03/active-vs-passive-candidates-the-latest-global-breakdown- Copyright 2015 All rights reserved worldwide..com 2

WHAT IS INBOUND MARKETING? While we in recruiting tend to constantly be searching for the next best thing, when it comes to building and engaging a pipeline, that best thing is already here and has been for well over a decade. Meet inbound marketing. Which is a fancy way of saying using the internet to attract qualified leads to a product or a service. If you ve ever filled out a form on the web, downloaded a white paper or registered for a webinar, you ve already had first-hand experience with this ubiquitous and established marketing best practice. WHY RECRUITERS SHOULD CARE ABOUT INBOUND MARKETING Inbound marketing, like candidate sourcing, encompasses the full cycle of lead generation and ultimately conversion - what recruiters traditionally refer to as sourcing and hiring, although these are more or less duplicative disciplines. From attracting candidates to your employer brand, to converting visitors on your website into leads in your database, to keeping leads warm through drip marketing or e-mail nurturing, the strategies for inbound marketing success are similar to those required for effective candidate sourcing and recruiting. Moreover, the increased need to adopt analytics in recruiting mirrors the data-driven mindset inherent to marketing; continuous measurement enables marketers to accurately track, allocate and manage spend while maximizing reach and ultimately, ensuring ROI. For recruiters to adopt inbound marketing principles, the first step is knowing who you are targeting. And in recruiting, that s the candidate. WHO IS A CANDIDATE? EVERYONE! The fact of the matter is, candidates and customers are often the same exact pool of leads the only difference between selling them on a product or service and selling them on a job opportunity is a different call to action. In fact, candidates who are already connected to or customers of a brand as consumers are almost 50% more likely to apply for career opportunities at a company than those with no existing connection.* *http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/business/employers-increasingly-rely-on-internal-referrals-in-hiring.html Copyright 2015 All rights reserved worldwide..com 3

And those candidates reporting they had a positive experience with an employer are 83% more likely to become customers than those who had a neutral one.* In short: today s customers are tomorrow s candidates, and potentially vice versa. But it doesn t stop there. Candidates can come from any of your stakeholders partners, vendors, competitors, alumni and even past applicants. That s why if you still think recruiting is a cost center, think again. Applying inbound marketing s proven blend of high tech and high touch to create scalable, sustainable and engaged pools of candidates can have a positive impact on more than just recruiting its ROI can be felt (and measured) throughout the broader business. INBOUND MARKETING FOR RECRUITING & HR: A GUIDE FOR GETTING STARTED Don t worry it s not that hard. If you re already using the internet for posting jobs or company career information (which is pretty much every single recruiting professional, like, in the whole world), then you ve already started applying inbound marketing to recruiting. Even if you didn t know exactly what it was called. The recruiting function of the future looks nearly identical to marketing today and by adopting marketing s core competencies you ll likely see incremental improvement immediately and bigger results long term for building an engaged pipeline of qualified leads. Which is pretty cool and a great opportunity to stand out from the recruiting competition by depending less on cold calling and instead focusing on converting those warm leads into new hires. It just means following a straightforward, simple inbound marketing process that can be broken down into 5 stages, defined below. If it looks familiar, it should - it s completely congruent with the traditional recruiting process (we ll focus mostly on the first 3 stages for this ebook): 1 2 3 4 5 Attract (Sourcing) Nurture (Engagement & Relationship Building) Convert (Apply, Screening & Selection) Close (Offer Extension & Onboarding) Delight (Retention & Referrals) Got it? We told you it was seriously simple. Let s break it down. *https://www.metlife.com/assets/institutional/services/financial/financial-education/fin-education-whitepaper.pdf Copyright 2015 All rights reserved worldwide..com 4

1 Attract The first step to integrating inbound marketing strategies into your talent attraction efforts is the same as building any successful online marketing campaign. After all, you can t target the right leads if you don t know what, exactly, the right lead looks like just like you d never kick off a search without knowing what role you re filling or which candidate profile you re sourcing for. It s time to segment your target audience. CANDIDATE SEGMENTATION Segments are the categories of prospects you re looking to target with your recruitment marketing initiatives. For the purposes of recruiting and HR, segments more or less translate into different types of job seekers, from software engineers to sales professionals to service representatives. Each of these represents a distinctly different profile requiring a drastically different approach for ensuring your call to action gets heard particularly when they re the ever-elusive passive candidate. Online marketing campaigns generally target and segment leads based on demographic data such as location, gender, diversity status or even income level. If you re in recruiting, and you re tasked with, say, hiring for a Silicon Valley startup, you should segment your target candidates first when developing a sourcing or talent attraction strategy. Not all leads are created equal, which is why it s important to segment leads according to where each respective lead is in the buying cycle, in other words, candidate journey. Copyright 2015 All rights reserved worldwide..com 5

TIMING & TARGETING According to Forrester, it takes 8 unique touch points, from a brand impression (think: display ads or social) to corporate website visits and opt-in communications like e-mail updates, to influence a purchasing decision.* Similarly, your recruitment marketing strategy should focus on leveraging multiple touch points to attract leads in various stages. Think about it: not every candidate you attract to your employer brand will be ready to buy (apply) now. Some will be interested in the content you share via social media, while others will be more ready to search for and evaluate job descriptions. To begin adopting inbound marketing principles in recruiting, start by concentrating on a single stage and candidate persona the passive candidates who might be open to opportunities at your company, even if they re not actively searching for jobs. This approach makes sense; after all, unlike inbound applicants from traditional sources like job postings or company career sites, recruiters have to capture a lead s attention enough to develop their interest and then convert them into potential candidates. This process, obviously, takes time, but given the seemingly inordinate amount of time and resources recruiters dedicate to sourcing and attracting passive candidates, automating and optimizing these touch points for the unique segments should ultimately lead to increased efficiency and efficacy. TURNING ATTRACTION INTO ACTION The attraction stage is where most potential candidates begin researching and exploring your employer brand; according to the Conference Board, 60% of the online recruiting process happens before candidates ever contact an employer or recruiter directly.* That s why the ultimate goal of segmentation should be to focus your strategy on attracting candidates you re looking to hire for a specific function, industry, location or skill set. Once you ve segmented your prospects, you can begin building compelling career content custom-made to increase their interest and affinity to opportunities at your organization. This content is critical for capturing leads and, optimally, converting that interest into real action and real candidates. Which brings us to the second stage of the inbound marketing process. *https://www.forrester.com/revisiting+the+touchpointimpact+framework+for+2014/fulltext/-/e-res115443 *http://www.slideshare.net/blogs/recruitment-marketing-101 Copyright 2015 All rights reserved worldwide..com 6

2 Nurture Once you ve attracted candidates, the next focus is to nurture their interest, typically with content. If you hate writing, don t worry. You ve probably heard the phrase content is king, but while it s become a tired cliché, this is one aphorism that s actually true. Content is the heart of all inbound marketing activities, and the single most important asset for any lead nurturing or demand generation campaign candidate sourcing and development included. Content can be any piece of information that a candidate can easily consume. Content marketing transcends medium, and can take many forms. Some of the most popular and prominent lead generation content includes such standbys as white papers, infographics, surveys, videos and blog posts. Like recruiting, these can be created either in-house, by a third-party agency or, optimally, some combination of both. No budget? No problem. You don t have to necessarily create content to add value; In fact, curating targeted career content is equally effective at building trust, engaging candidates and showcasing employer subject matter expertise. CONTENT FOR RECRUITING: LONG LIVE THE KING If you re like most recruiters, you re probably thinking that content just involves writing, and you have no time, ability or desire to cranking out copy. But you re already creating and utilizing targeted content every day that s what a job description is, after all. It goes without saying that this is the most obvious place to improve content, because this core piece of recruiting collateral doesn t have to be boring. It just almost always is. You should see a significant improvement in your inbound marketing efforts simply Copyright 2015 All rights reserved worldwide..com 7

by making these more conversational and compelling, and killing the bulleted lists and boilerplates. Beyond job descriptions, if you ve got a career site or social media account, if you re submitting candidates to hiring managers or sending personalized offer e-mails, you re already creating content on a regular basis as a part of your recruiting routine. Make sure it s written to attract and engage the leads you want. PERSONA CREATION Since you ve already segmented your data, you know the demographics you re trying to reach. Now, you ve got to figure out the kind of content that s going to resonate the most with them. If, for example, you are hiring software developers in San Francisco, you ve got to know what, exactly, interests software developers in San Francisco. The content that s compelling for that segment will be far different than, say, recruiting for an HR Director. In either case, when you re targeting passive talent before the point of apply, in the decision stage marketers call preconception, candidates are unlikely to be receptive to reading job descriptions just yet. But they d probably love to read about the day in the life of someone in their function or role at your company, or your approach to employee development and career advancement. A persona involves 3 distinct parts: One essential exercise to identifying exactly which targeted content is going to resonate the most is creating a persona. By turning your target audience into a real person, you ll make it easier to refine what messaging and value your audience needs to convert into leads. Background this can be as simple as the profile of targeted candidates, or as complex as coming up with a full backstory about their personal lives, informed by their hard skills and desired experience. Demographics such as diversity status, income level and location, as discussed before related to segmentation. Identifiers arguably the most important part of persona creation are the drivers and behaviors associated with this person. These identifiers should include personality attributes, professional goals and primary pain points these are the emotional elements that can draw candidates to your content and convert leads. For example, when conveying culture, distinctions like work/life balance, paid time off or flexible work arrangements can resonate differently with your targeted persona and audience. Copyright 2015 All rights reserved worldwide..com 8

3 Convert Ok. You ve segmented your candidates, documented their personas, begun nurturing candidates with content you ve developed or curated, populated your Recruitment Marketing Platform to automate delivering the content, and created an editorial calendar so that you can communicate timing of various campaigns to your hiring managers and stakeholders. Feels good, right? Well, now comes the hard part: conversion. Building ongoing, long-term relationships with candidates is all for the purpose of ultimately converting them into qualified applicants. Engagement can be tricky as every recruiter knows. It s one thing to get a candidate s e-mail address, and another thing to get that candidate to respond to an e-mail. Not to mention later apply for a job posting. But if you ve successfully defined your audience and developed content that will keep them interested and engaged (and your company top of mind), you re ready to open the doors to your database and start seeing the real payout in adopting inbound marketing best practices to talent acquisition and recruiting. Here s how to convert candidates into applicants and new hires. THE ADVENT OF TALENT NETWORK FORMS As an industry, many organizations focus on the application as their only conversion point with candidates. But what about the candidates that are not ready to apply? The major problem here is that on average 60% of candidates drop-off of the apply process, leaving the employers with a wasted opportunity to connect with these candidates.* *http://blog.smashfly.com/2015/01/26/the-new-candidate-experience-journey-infographic/ Copyright 2015 All rights reserved worldwide..com 9

Many organizations are now leveraging Talent Network forms as a way to convert candidates prior to the application process both in the apply flow and on their career sites. By requiring just a name, e-mail address and information on the kinds of roles, or maybe an optional link to a LinkedIn profile, candidates are more likely to engage while giving enough information to employers to begin nurturing these leads and building the relationships required to turn passive visitors into active candidates. The more information you require, the less likely passive candidates will be to fill out a form, so the key to generating more leads is to ask for as little information up-front as absolutely required. A rule of thumb: for every field or click required for any website visitor, there will be about a 50% drop off. Similarly, the bounce rate for career landing pages is around 85%.* In these cases, if you haven t captured a candidate before the application process, you haven t captured them at all. This is why it s important to clearly demonstrate what value you re offering the candidate in exchange for their information and why this content should be relevant and targeted to specific personas, as we ve already discussed. LANDING PAGES AND LEAD NURTURING If you re reading this, you re already familiar with how landing pages work (assuming no one ships out a pirated copy of an HR ebook, which is probably a safe bet). Whether clicking on a banner ad, e-mail or blog post, the web page you arrived at to download this resource is what marketers call a landing page. These landing pages are a crucial component of any inbound marketing strategy, as these destinations are where candidate or lead information is first captured into your CRM and where leads first enter the marketing funnel. Unlike a company career site, which should serve as a repository for general information and the hub from which the spokes of an integrated inbound marketing campaign ideally emanate, landing pages should clearly and quickly promote a targeted value proposition or segment-specific content with the goal of converting readers into leads. These lead capture forms should require the minimum amount of information you need upfront to qualify a candidate and filter which leads should advance to the next step of the funnel. This is the recruiting equivalent of dispositioning resumes against minimum stated qualifications. Landing page forms can be designed so that at least one of the required fields, such as years of experience, current company size or number of direct reports, can be used to quickly screen out any unqualified leads at the beginning of the lead generation and segmentation process. *http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/standard-metrics-revisited-3-bounce-rate/ Copyright 2015 All rights reserved worldwide..com 10

There are some great recruitment marketing solutions available that make creating these landing pages quick and easy, enabling recruiters to create fully branded, segment-specific landing pages that attract and convert the right candidates faster. Make sure the tool you choose also optimizes the landing pages for search engines and for viewing on mobile devices. Before you begin building your landing pages, it s important to define your call to action (CTA) what you intend prospects to do. CALLS TO ACTION THAT CONVERT Let s go back to the example of targeting software engineers in San Francisco. You re going to offer them access to a featured post from a department-specific blog that describes how your development team coded a new product release, and the specific contributions of individual programmers to pushing your product roadmap forward. The featured post is your offer in other words, your call to action (CTA) is an offer to download the featured post. To get a response to your CTA, your landing page should clearly articulate why programmers would want to access this collateral, what new information or professional insights a visitor will get when they download this asset and how it will change their professional life or career development for the better. In addition, the best CTAs are not mere links to your form, but buttons or images that entice prospects to click through. Conversion optimization is key to any inbound marketing activity; while you can lead a candidate to an ATS or career site, you can t necessarily make them apply. But there are a few techniques for improving your chances and ensuring that you re fishing for talent in the right places. RUSH HOUR: DRIVING AND CONVERTING CANDIDATE TRAFFIC Creating awesome landing pages with compelling CTAs is great, but now you ve got to switch your focus to the top of the funnel and drive traffic to the landing pages you ve created. All job searches, passive or active, almost always start with search engines. Search engines like Google serve as most people s primary entry point to the internet. Copyright 2015 All rights reserved worldwide..com 11

Consider the fact that the most searched for term across the world on Google is Facebook, and you ll see that even for social media, almost all online user behavior (not to mention impressions and traffic) is influenced by search results. Employerrelated content is no different which is why search plays such a crucial role in any successful recruitment marketing strategy. There are three primary ways to drive qualified visitors to your online content. These include search engine optimization (better known as SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising (such as Google AdWords or retargeting) and social media. Generating the traffic you need to keep your candidate funnel full and your talent network engaged means investing the time and resources required to capture candidates from all three of these channels. PIPELINE ACCELERATION We re not going to lie to you: as you ve probably figured out, setting the stage for a successful recruitment marketing strategy can take some work. The good news is that once you ve created the funnel for generating traffic and converting those visitors into candidates through targeted traffic and segment-specific content, you ll be able to make recruitment marketing an automated, scalable and fully sustainable part of your integrated talent attraction process. The key comes down to what marketers call delight, and what recruiters commonly refer to as candidate experience. Like user experience on the consumer marketing side, exceeding expectations by providing personalized, positive interactions and clear, consistent communications across multiple touch points in the process will prove crucial to delivering a world-class candidate experience. This is what some are calling the consumerization of the candidate experience. And it s only by providing a world-class candidate experience that you can ever hope for your recruitment marketing efforts to yield truly world-class candidates. Even when a social follower fails to convert into a candidate in your CRM or is disqualified further down the applicant selection process, you ll still realize that recruiting ROI is inexorably intertwined with providing a positive candidate experience. One of the oldest aphorisms in recruiting is that the hiring process doesn t stop at onboarding; similarly, in recruitment marketing, the lead generation process doesn t stop when a qualified visitor converts into a captured lead. Copyright 2015 All rights reserved worldwide..com 12

MEASURING RECRUITMENT MARKETING SUCCESS Recruitment marketing obviously requires more than just sweat equity: getting the right systems and processes in place means allocating a portion of your recruiting budget to creating campaigns across various channels and seeing how these efforts pay off. Unfortunately, just like there s no silver bullet for recruitment marketing success, there s no one-size-fits-all approach for benchmarking, measuring or analyzing inbound marketing ROI. Recruiters, unfortunately, have a much more daunting challenge than their Marketing counterparts in building a business case, considering that you re generating leads for prospective hires over an extended period of time and dynamic hiring demand, not simply generating new customers and revenue for your company. But as organizations increasingly invest in the products, services and capabilities required to compete for top talent today and tomorrow it s important to invest a percentage of your recruiting budget to building an engaged talent community of prospective leads for an in-demand skillset or hard-to-fill candidate profile. In many cases, the total costs of building an integrated recruitment marketing program, including integrating a Recruitment Marketing Platform with your existing ATS, can be less than the agency fee for filling a single job with a third party candidate. Make one hire, and chances are, you ll have no trouble building a business case for recruitment marketing and a use case for increasing your initial investment. When building benchmarks or deciding which metrics to measure, here are 7 important questions you ll want to ask: How much traffic is coming to my career site and landing pages, and where is that traffic coming from? What kind of conversion rates am I seeing on my landing pages? Where do drop-offs occur, and why? What is the overall quality of leads generated, and how well do they align with the profile of the segment I m targeting? How many marketing touch points does it take for a visitor to convert to a candidate, and for a candidate to convert to an applicant? When do conversions most commonly occur? What kind of open rate and click-throughs do our e-mails generate? What factors seem to be driving users to unsubscribe? How effective are our nurturing efforts at converting opt-ins into qualified applicants? Copyright 2015 All rights reserved worldwide..com 13

How much am I spending on each lead? How do these compare to other sources of hire or recruitment advertising spend? How are our recruitment marketing efforts impacting referrals? Is retention or internal mobility impacted? This list is by no means exhaustive, but should represent the kind of questions a bestin-class Recruitment Marketing Platform can help answer. The data generated by each stage of the recruitment marketing process, as described above, can provide new insights and information around your recruiting efficacy and provide meaningful metrics and actionable insights unprecedented than more traditional HR technology and recruiting systems. Recruitment Marketing Platforms can not only more effectively measure recruiting results, but also tie those outcomes to bigger business initiatives and impact on the bottom line. While it s far easier to simply post a job ad or send a tweet with the #jobs hashtag and pray the right candidate just happens to see your message and apply, the truth is that this strategy simply doesn t scale. But with the right approach to applying the fundamentals of inbound marketing to recruiting and hiring, and by partnering with the right platform to manage, measure and maximize these integrated talent acquisition initiatives, you ll have what it takes to survive and thrive in the new world of modern recruiting. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Matt Charney is the Executive Editor for. Matt oversees editorial strategy and content marketing for s portfolio of online properties. Prior to joining Blogs, Matt served in marketing leadership roles at leading HR technology companies like Talemetry, CornerstoneOnDemand & Monster.com. Matt began his career as a corporate recruiter for such companies as Walt Disney and Warner Bros. Copyright 2015 All rights reserved worldwide..com 14

MEET OUR SPONSOR: SMASHFLY TECHNOLOGIES SmashFly partners with talent acquisition teams as they execute Inbound Marketing tactics to convert more qualified candidates in their recruiting strategies. The SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Platform helps corporate recruiting organizations and Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) companies centralize their recruiting operations while providing real-time analytics across all of their initiatives to improve overall recruitment results. The SmashFly Platform connects what are often disparate technologies into a single all-in-one software solution that includes Global Job Distribution, Social, CRM, Web Sourcing, Marketing Automation, Mobile, Career Sites, Landing Pages, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Employee Referrals and Talent Network Building. All with the actionable Analytics necessary to tell what's working and not working for better candidate engagement across the entire recruitment strategy.