Deliberate Multi-channel Recruitment Marketing

Hello, hello, everybody. And welcome back to a bite sized segment. I’m Jeff Pelliccio, the founder of allied insight, and we’re bringing you another weekly morsel that you can take back to your team, work at your own staffing agency and see some impact in your deliverables. This week, we are focusing in on the Multi Channel recruitment, marketing that which support a positive candidate experience.

I know, that’s a really big mouthful. But basically, you know, in this given climate that we’re in still very candidate centric, we’ve got the great resignation, we have a lot of things that are sort of, you know, creating a lot of pressure into the staffing space. And so I thought it was appropriate to really bring forward the conversation around recruitment, marketing, but add some layers of strategy to it. So that way, depending on where you are, whether you’re at that beginning stage, or more advanced, you can, you know, actually see this working within the structure that you have at your given staffing agency. So first, before we actually get into some of the strategic elements, we need to really make sure that we all understand what recruitment marketing is.

So just as a quick overview, marketing in general should be pushing forward your brand’s identity as well as you know, a little bit more context around who you are and what you stand for. And then from there, the marketing should then seep into supporting any of your corporate initiatives. So in staffing, obviously, we’ve got the client centric, where we’re really focusing on employers and hiring managers. And then you have your candidate specific, or in this case, recruitment marketing, where we’re focusing in on making sure that we can generate more applications for open wrecks, and and drive in pipeline to the recruiting team. So um, so yeah, that’s recruitment marketing in a nutshell, right.

One of the other elements that I brought into the title here is multi channel, and I just, I want to make sure that we understand the difference between multi channel and omni channel. So multi channel is where you kind of identify a handful of different areas that you can funnel your information out to, that has an audience that you’d like to participate in, in whatever the conversion strategy is that you have. These should be obviously individuals that would see your services benefit. And that you could, you know, they can obviously realize the potential and working with you and partnering with you to move their career forward.

An omni channel strategy would take that one step further. So that would start to look at the data points around the interactions that you’re having, and making adjustments or micro adjustments in order to facilitate stronger conversions, or even prop up different communications. So it kind of like takes that multi channel strategy and then like, adds to it a layer of sophistication, that would require certain technologies to be in place, as well as even certain strategic elements to have already been sort of worked out in the planning phase. So again, as we think of this, like, we really want to think of this sort of in like phases. So if you’ve never done a multi channel strategy, then I wouldn’t shoot for omni channel, right off the bat, I would typically start, you know, making sure that you’ve got the fundamentals in place for the recruitment marketing piece, and then move into what opportunities exist from a multi channel perspective. And then finally, as you continue to advance, you know, start to evolve into like an omni channel strategy, where you’re really focusing in on your technologies and what it is that you can do.

So let’s dig into developing a recruitment marketing strategy and sort of where it starts. If you’ve come in, and you’ve heard any of the sessions that I’ve done in the past, many of the times whenever I talk about bringing something up or starting to create a strategy, it usually incorporates other members of your team that can provide some insights and some real information as to what’s happening at the forefront. With that said, we would want to make sure that you have all of the necessary elements to drive in valuable candidates.

So with that said, I would bring in the head of your recruitment team, as well as also some senior members of the team. They’re going to be interfacing a lot more with the candidates, obviously. And they’ll also have a lot more credible feedback as far as the things that they’re dealing with. So they could they should be able to bring to you certain objections that they’re trying to overcome questions that the candidates have, maybe even issues that they’re experiencing as they go through your process. All of those elements are really valuable in sort of coming up in orchestrating what your communication needs to be.

At that point, once you kind of have the the frontline evaluation and the frontline perspective. Now you can start sort of looking to build out the components that will be resources not only to the audience, but also to the team itself. I like to start with the things that are the lowest hanging fruit and for that It’s going to be your marketing communications, so your MarCom at your staffing agency. When we start to address the mark on, that’s really where you start looking at a little bit more of your high frequency communication and this typically happens within social media. So as we look at what those defining elements are from that front line, so what are the objections? What are the obstacles that candidates are having? What are the questions or problems that they’re experiencing in their career journey?

We want to create campaigns that either facilitate a conversation or create some opportunity for education, and also invite collaboration, right? To sort of build that audience around your staffing agencies brand and be seen as being a potential solution. Yeah. So um, so first, where I would start, as I said, is I would start with your marketing communications, get those high frequency things in place, and start building out what those campaigns look like. At the same time, the next piece of low hanging fruit that you’d have would be something more along the lines of probably your articles or your blogs. In that space, you can typically create a handful of these articles in a given week, and start staging them up in order to be able to move the conversation forward to support not only what you’re doing from a marketing communications perspective, but you can also give these articles to your recruiting team. And they in turn, can can be delivering this through email communications, they could be delivering this through their own social media networks, and and have their pipelines also integrated into the campaign push.

Yeah. So now you start sort of getting that synergistic relationship between what’s happening from a marketing perspective, as well as what your frontline team is doing. In this case, recruiting versus sales. This strategy continues to develop on down the line. So as you look at your blogs, and as you look at your marketing communications, there should be some sort of conversion in mind, as I think about candidates, the likely conversions are things like, obviously, the job application itself, so on your website, you likely have a jobs feed. And if you don’t, you might want to consider having a jobs feed, it’s a great place to be able to send candidates from a recruitment marketing effort to a staged environment where it already exists, it already has a workflow, those things already go into all your systems and, and feed all of your existing sort of pipeline management that you already have in place for recruiting as well as sales. So if you don’t have jobs on your website, I would definitely circle that as being something that should be a focus for this year.

Outside of that, you can also look at doing other types of strategies that might bring more of those people into the space. And, and create a little bit more of a, like a career fair sort of concept, right? So like a Virtual Job Fair. Now, I know some of the job boards are like, Indeed has done these and things like that, but you might want to consider maybe housing some of these things internally, because you can. So um, you know, perhaps there’s a landing page, and you can use a form fill that creates a like an attestation sort of effect if you needed to be able to qualify something. So, you know, let’s say for instance, you’re in your, you’re you’re focusing in on something in the finance field, right, you’re a staffing agency and finance is one of your verticals, you know, you may want to make sure that they have certain credentialing or certain experience, you can ask that stuff in an attestation, and then use on page logic, in order to pivot them out to maybe scheduling an appointment that will start to allow you to maybe pivot away from the job boards, and then use your recruiting team to sell specific opportunities in a specific geographic location or specific vertical.

Again, this is something that would have to be carved out in the marketing strategy itself, the recruitment marketing strategy itself, but is certainly a viable means of being able to orchestrate reducing the size of the application while still qualifying members as they come through. So just food for thought. And what we’re really talking about here honestly, is protecting the candidate experience. You know, as you build out your campaigns and your communication and you’ve educated the population with regards to what resources you have and why your staffing agency is the the best provider or partner to help them in their journey. You do want to make sure that you’re keeping the candidate experience in mind.

So as many of us already know, you know, we’ve made alterations To our process, we’ve made alterations to our technology, especially over the most recent couple of years. And, you know, some of those things may have been done with the intention that they were temporary. And now they’re becoming, you know, more foundational elements within the ecosystem at your staffing agency. If you haven’t tested some of these things, now’s a great opportunity to do that. The idea, again, is you want to remove as much friction from that funnel as possible. Because in the time that you’re trying to build digital trust with these candidates who really don’t know who you are, may not have that, that connection to your brand. Anything that happens within that transition from the top of the funnel to an eventual conversion, where they get to speak to a recruiter could get them to fall out. So go through and make sure that you’re testing and anything that you’ve orchestrated, test it from beginning to end and make sure that that experience carries through. Were they prompted? Do they know that their submission went through successfully? Did they receive information to tell them what the next steps were? Did those next steps happen in the time that you specified that they would occur? Is your internal team trained to know that these are the requirements and here is what the new flow is? All of that stuff sort of comes together in order to create a more positive candidate experience. And will will result in less fallout in your funnel.

The last component of this strategy, because we’ve now spoken to what the what the recruitment marketing is, how multi channel could be beneficial. We’ve also developed the recruitment strategy, recruitment marketing strategy with the recruiters on your team. We’ve also protected the candidate experience. Now, how do we broadcast? How do we amplify and increase that audience to build awareness? Well, there’s a lot of different opportunities online in already existing social media platforms that might have groups that you can sort of hit. So you know, looking at, depending on your vertical will depend on whether you know whether or not your candidates live in this space, or get information from these spaces. But you do have things like LinkedIn groups and Facebook groups. You know, I’ve also seen, shockingly, I have seen some benefits to even using clubhouse from a candidate experience level.

It just depends on what your level of involvement is, and where it is, you already have a bit of presence, I would obviously look at those areas that you are more prevalent in first, before starting to migrate out into other areas, because you don’t want to stretch yourself too thin. But where else are these individuals sitting? Where are they going for more information, there may be a group with 1000, 10,000, 100,000 members of this exact audience that you’re looking for, I would encourage you to connect with those admins understand what the requirements are of being a member in that space, as a industry provider, as a service provider. You know, obviously abide by the rules, and then also see what information they need, that they’re lacking. You know, as an administrator of a group, I’m going to tell you that, like I monitor the groups that I’m in charge of, and I know exactly what it is that I’m missing and what I want to hear more of, or what I want to bring more to the members of.

And so with that, you know, take that as an opportunity to ask the question that other service providers are probably not asking, you’ll, you’ll be seen as a valued member of value in addition to the group, and maybe given a little bit more leeway as to like the different things that you can pursue with its members. Again, this is a really brief, I’m trying to keep these things nice and short, bite sized chunks, so you can have something actionable without having to listen to someone drone on for 45 minutes. But, you know, again, this is all about recruitment marketing. It’s about making sure that you’re leveraging your communication, leveraging what it is that your team knows internally, and also maximizing your opportunity with some of the given open areas that you have access to in these different groups.

If you’re working on recruitment, marketing, your staffing firm or you’re struggling to find candidates and you want some assistance or need some just some direction, feel free to go to our website, AlliedInsight.com and connect with us. I’ll be more than happy to jump on a call and see what we can do to give you a hand. Have a great day everyone and we’ll see you next week with another bite sized chunk. Have a good one. Bye bye