In our last webinar we discussed the emergence of the new breed of HR pros: the HR-Marketer Hybrid.
This mixed breed was born when talent acquisition professionals adopted social recruiting and began deepening their skills. They not only became stronger ambassadors for social recruiting within their organizations, but as a byproduct, they also developed crucial marketing skills necessary to support social media campaigns.
Our last webinar guest speaker, Rayanne Thorn, is a perfect example. As a recruiter-turned-marketer-turned-radio-personality, Rayanne shared during the how her move into marketing started with early experiments in social recruiting. View the webinar recording and slides here.
Below we highlight from the webinar three reasons why recruiters should think more like marketers and start getting more traction from all their hiring campaigns.
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1. HR-Marketers Reach More Qualified Talent, Faster.
When first dabbling in social recruiting over seven years ago, Rayanne said she had to develop herself as a resource. She had asked herself, “How do I use social recruitment as a new way to bring people in?”
This ability to put oneself in the audience perspective is a marketer’s natural state. From subject lines to CTAs (calls-to-action), or in the HR world, job titles and job descriptions, copy is king. Recruiters should emulate a marketer’s capacity to thrive within the limits of their medium, always striving for the quickest, clearest, and sharpest way to get a message across and elicit a response—click here, subscribe, learn more about this job post. Rayanne discussed why the hook is so important in our webinar.
Rayanne also recommended to think of your audience when developing a distribution strategy:
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- Think about which specific group you are targeting for a position. Where do they hang out online and at what times? What platform are they more likely to use, Instagram or Facebook?
- Then think beyond the candidate and consider your employees: If you were looking for a carbon copy of a specific employee, where is his/her online community? When and where would you find like-minded individuals?
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5 tips on how to improve audience engagement #TMJEdu pic.twitter.com/whtuAJjdmf
— Skyler (@SkylerNakashima) March 25, 2015
2. HR-Marketers Know How to Ask for More Money
“We spend so much time thinking about money. So when a position is left open for a protracted amount of time, think of the vital nature of that role you are trying to fill. It’s not just about the money your spending, but it’s about the money that’s NOT coming in.” – Rayanne Thorn
Rayanne referenced a recent CareerBuilder Survey which studied the cost of the skills gap and found:
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- $14K lost for every job open for three months or more
- 1 in 6 companies report that number as $25K
- 1 in 4 have experienced losses in revenue as a result of not being able to fill open positions
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Beyond the cost of protracted vacancies to your bottom line, don’t forget to account for the impact on your workforce and company morale. Unhappy employees breed turnover which leads to more vacancies. Tame the vicious cycle by being proactive rather than reactive. Avoiding costly consequences like turnover is one of the best ways to pitch for more investment in your recruitment program.
Your marketing team when you ask to post career content on your corporate site. #tmjedu pic.twitter.com/IfZUbOeaWh
— Audra Knight (@media2knight) March 25, 2015
3. HR-Marketers Know “Marketing Speak” and Can Forge Strategic Partnerships More Easily
When preparing to speak with your marketing department, you must first know what they care about. Here are few questions you should be prepared to answer:
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- What is your strategy?
- Who’s responsible for any external communication?
- How will you know if it’s working? ROI
- Budget?
- What is the call-to-action?
- What if something goes wrong?
- How will this affect our brand?
Access the webinar to learn how to answer some of these tough questions.
What Marketers Don’t Know…that HR Must Prove
Alas, marketers are not the ultimate HR pro. There are a few aspects of recruitment that your marketing department may never know, but should.
Marketers care about traffic and engagement. Number of visits and number of clicks are mainstay metrics in the marketer’s toolkit. But what they don’t know is that, depending on the amount of open jobs, job seeker traffic can account for a large portion of your website traffic.
In addition, many of our clients report that employer branding content—such as posts that share company culture, team building event photos, inspirational job seeker quotes—largely outperform other social content, such as product-focused posts, company news, industry news, and curated content.
An HR pro that can find this data, prove the demand for social recruiting content, and show the dual ROI of these efforts from both a hiring and branding perspective is truly the next evolution of social recruiters and tomorrow’s HR leader.
Connect with Rayanne Thorn @ray_anne
