Enterprise Resource Planning Blogs by Members
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Former Member

When you think about it, recruiting is a bit like marketing. Both are looking to fill and nurture a pipeline – whether of leads or talent.  In recent years, the marketing community has moved away from a scattergun approach to advertising its wares, in favour of engaging prospects and building up a detailed picture of their wants, needs and propensity, in order to target them more precisely and reduce acquisition costs.

Recruiting, on the other hand, hasn’t changed substantially.  Sure, the advent of the internet means that job ads can be displayed on more – and more diverse – virtual boards that are the digital equivalent of a labour exchange.  But that only targets the relatively small proportion of candidates who are actively looking for work, either because they are unemployed or unhappy in their current situation.

As Will Staney revealed in the last SuccessFactors 20 Minute Master Class of the series, the talent your business needs might be out there right now, blithely going about their daily job of helping your competitors outperform you.  And as they’re reasonably happy and adequately compensated, they’re not frantically checking Monster every five minutes for a trapdoor escape. So how do you find passive candidates and convert them?

In marketing, the acronym AIDA describes the awareness, interest, desire and ultimately action that advertising should elicit. Social media has revolutionised the way marketers find, reach out to and engage prospects, and now it’s time for recruiters to adopt some of their techniques and lessons learned.

Awareness – How do you make candidates aware of your business? What is your outreach strategy? Which social tools or platforms should you use and what is your message?

Interest – How will you gain candidates’ interest? What is your content strategy? What proof points are available to back up your corporate reputation? How and where do you make this information available?

Desire – What makes your company a great place to work? How do you interact to make an emotional connection with prospective talent?

Action – What is your call to action and where do you place it?  Is it easy for candidates to connect and where would they expect to find you?

Take a wander down the corridor and go and speak to your marketing department about their social media strategy (and investigate how you can piggyback onto your company’s online brand presence).  Ask how they identify where their prospects hang out online and how they engage them with relevant, timely content.  Learn how they interact to build interest over weeks or months so that by the time a potential customer is ready to purchase, your brand is top-of-mind. And find out how Marketing uses analytics to measure the success of its campaigns and tweak them accordingly to get more bang for its budget. 

You might discover you have more in common than you think.

You can find out more about using social media to fill and accelerate your hiring pipeline and enhance the candidate experience at the SuccessFactors Talent management microsite.

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