Update your recruitment marketing strategy for 2021 and beyond

It’s hard to believe 2020 is drawing to a close. And what a year it’s been. Full of twists, turns, tragedies but perhaps most critically when it comes to recruitment, a year of change.

And one big change has been from a candidate-led to a client-led job market. Which means, if you haven’t already, you need to urgently adapt your recruitment marketing strategy and focus more of your messaging on client acquisition.

If it’s all about the clients right now, why should I care about the candidates?

1. Reputation – candidates talk and they aren’t shy about posting their poor candidate experiences on social media, some of which in the past have been been picked up by the media (all press is not good press).
2. Business development – guess who the next hiring manager you’re pitching candidates to could be?

We ran a live Twitter Q&A throughout the first few months of the (first) lockdown which we branded as a Recruitment Marketing Coronavirus Clinic, and what to do with candidate applications was one of the questions that came up more than once.  Our key takeaway was to be useful, thank them for their application, let them know if there aren’t any current vacancies and point them towards any resources you may have on your website.

 

The new normal or a better normal?

‘The new normal‘ has been one of the key phrases of 2020, and we jumped right on board the band wagon with our ebook looking at what recruitment will look like after COVID-19, how much has changed, and what changes are here to stay. These insights were garnered from a virtual roundtable with thought leaders and suppliers to the recruitment industry (including ourselves) discussing their opinions on the state of the recruitment industry with particular focus on the effects of COVID-19.

So, which predictions have panned out? In our latest ebook, ‘Recruitment marketing: setting the scene for 2021‘, we look at the changes we have seen to recruitment marketing in 2020 and what your recruitment marketing strategy for 2021 should look like if we want a ‘better normal’.

 

Return, reset, restart

We love alliteration. We can’t help it. And return, reset, restart really sums up for us the current phase in the recruitment industry. What do we mean by that?

1. Recruiters are returning to the office (lockdown permitting)
2. Recruitment marketers are resetting their marketing plans
3. Businesses have restarted hiring

 

Planning your recruitment marketing strategy

Recruitment tends to be a ‘full speed ahead’ industry, it’s all or nothing. So when recruitment marketing is ‘turned back on’ it’s very much go, go go. But if you want your activity to be truly successful you need to stop and plan. You need to ask yourself:

• Why will this be valuable to my business?
• What’s the objective?
• How are you going to ensure you hit that target?
• What tools do you need?
• What channels are best?
• What’s the competition doing?

There’s a lot that goes into planning a successful recruitment marketing strategy: everything you do as part of your recruitment marketing process needs to have a purpose and needs to deliver the right results. By carefully planning and outlining what you want to achieve and why, you’ll be setting yourself up for the best possible success.

 

Planning your social media recruitment strategy

Social media is a vital part of a recruitment firm’s marketing function. Whether you build social media into an overall marketing plan or build out a separate social media strategy, it’s important to ensure your goals are aligned.

So, what are the key steps to building a killer recruitment social media strategy?

• Social media auditing
• Competitor analysis
• Goal setting and alignment
• Developing personas
• Content planning
• Measurement and analytics

 

Measuring your recruitment marketing success

How do you know how to spend your time or money unless you measure what works.  Recruiters often spend the bulk of their budget on online job listings because it is easy to track the number of applications and make a quick decision on sites to keep and those to ditch. But where are the candidates you place coming from? And more importantly in the current market, where are your clients coming from?

 

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