COVID-19 has fundamentally changed the business landscape and forced many organisations to put their hiring on hold. But that doesn’t mean recruitment marketing strategies should go on hold too.

This is a critical time to nurture talent to ensure that when your organisation is ready to hire, you have a pipeline of suitable talent so you can make quicker and more effective hiring decisions. Recruitment marketing tactics, like nurturing talent pools, help keep star candidates engaged so that when you’re ready to start recruiting again, you have a rich talent pipeline to draw from.

In this article, I’ll discuss how to utilise your recruitment marketing strategy to its fullest potential, including:

• Leveraging expression of interest forms to identify top talent
• Creating nurture campaigns to establish relationships with top talent
• Curating personalised and relevant content to send to candidates.

1. Expression of Interest forms

A great career site is one thing – but does it convert visitors into applicants? And where can people go if there are no roles currently being advertised?

If your website doesn’t have a strong CTA, people will click away. It doesn’t matter if you have great content, a strong employer brand story and engaging videos: if people have nowhere to input their details and express interest in your organisation, you’ll lose them.

Expression of Interest (EOI) capture forms placed prominently on your career site encourages visitors to take the next step. They allow you to capture the details of people interested in working for your company – even if you have no open roles for them to apply for. EOI forms are an invaluable tool to capture those people who are engaged with your organisation and willing to self-select in to be considered for future opportunities.

2. Nurture campaigns

Recruitment marketing allows you to proactively tap into talent and build robust talent pipelines, even when you’re not hiring. Nurture campaigns are a great way to keep interested talent and ‘silver medalist’ candidates (people who weren’t quite right for a role – but may be suited for other upcoming openings, or after a time when they gain more skills and experience), engaged.

Recruitment marketing technology takes the manual ‘busy work’ out of nurture campaigns, allowing hiring teams to pre-set and automate personalised nurture flows that can be customised to each job category or target talent segment. Targeted nurture campaigns can perform actions based on real-time triggers – for example sending out relevant job alerts, recruiter outreach emails, interesting content and more to maintain candidate regular candidate touchpoints.

Keeping talent pools warm with relevant content is especially important when you’re not actively hiring – think of it as ‘what to say when you have nothing new to say.’ Taking the time to nurture these people now will pay-off when you’re ready to start hiring again: you’ll have access to a pool of pre-vetted, engaged talent that is ready to work for you.

3. Curated content

 When it comes to candidate engagement, content is king. If you regularly deliver personalised, relevant content to candidates, they’ll keep coming back for more. This is where recruiters should ‘think like a marketer’ and take a magnifying glass to their current career site content to find out what is resonating with visitors, then find ways to optimise their approach to drive ROI.

Here are three things to consider when developing a content strategy that keeps people engaged when you’re not hiring:

• Content and collateral needs to be relevant and timely – and you need to have an understanding of what converts. Identify your target audiences and craft personalised content to these audiences. Have you segmented your key talent personas and delivered content specifically targeted to each segment? Different segments may consume different types of content, and on different platforms. Some may prefer emails and blog posts, while others like to watch videos and interact on social platforms.
• Create videos: Video is the #1 consumed resource on the Internet and allows companies to easily highlight their unique selling points: social responsibility, career development opportunities, and culture. But that doesn’t mean you have to spend thousands on videos for your career site. In fact, the most authentic videos are often shot on a smartphone by recruiters or employees. This kind of off the cuff, informal content is valuable to jobseekers because it captures what it’s really like to work at your organisation.
• Don’t be afraid of Social Media: encouraging employees to share photos and stories of their work day on social media is an invaluable source of authentic employer branding. Candidates trust a company’s employees three times more than the company itself to provide credible information on what it’s like to work there. For example, Salesforce has the #SalesforceOhana hashtag, (which translates to ‘Salesforce family) where employees can share snapshots of their daily roles at the company.

The time to start thinking about your post-COVID recruiting strategy is now. The organisations that are making the most of this opportunity to re-evaluate and optimise their recruitment marketing strategy are the ones that will come out the other side stronger than ever.

Marion Robinson is responsible for spearheading global growth for PageUp in all its forms. She provides strategic direction across PageUp’s client advocacy, partner alliance, marketing and brand-building programs, ensuring total alignment between them so as to deliver on the PageUp growth strategy. Leveraging a wealth of experience in client management roles across a range of industries including Banking, Human Resources and IT, Marion understands the daily people challenges of our clients first-hand. Her experience ranges from sales and marketing, change management, consulting and people development.

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“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” ― Fred Rogers.

Jobs for Australia is a Not-For-Profit organisation of volunteers from the Talent Acquisition & Human Resources industry located across Australia that have been affected by COVID-19.

With many industries facing recruitment freezes or having to stand down staff due to the Coronavirus, countless Talent Acquisition and Human Resources Professionals were also let go from their positions.

Keen to utilise their skills and experience to support job seekers and empower them with skills to improve their job search, Jobs for Australia was born. People & Culture Author Justine Figo, The Recruitment Events Company Director Andrea Kirby and self-confessed ‘HR Tech Geek’ Rich Lewis-Jones developed Jobs for Australia as a Not-for-Profit organisation aimed at keeping HR & Talent Acquisition Professionals connected, engaged and actively helping job seekers with:

• their resume
• their LinkedIn profile
• interview preparation
• personal Branding (where appropriate).

“Jobs for Australia is not a job board. We focus on supporting job seekers by providing guidance on their Resume, connecting them to the job market via job boards, interview preparation and advice on employers that are hiring or other initiatives and services that are available to them,” said Andrea Kirby, Director of the Recruitment Events Company.

Pavi Iyer was let go of her position as Talent Acquisition Manager in the first week of April due to the economic impact of COVID-19 on the business.

“The concept of Jobs for Australia came from the HR & Talent community because we’re connected to the companies that are still hiring and we have the skills and experience to support people that have lost their jobs. I wanted to get more involved in helping the community and didn’t want to just sit and do nothing. Volunteering with Jobs for Australia lets me put my skills to work helping job seekers around Australia improve their chances of finding work’, said Pavi.

Jobs for Australia launched on 15^th April this year and currently, over 40 volunteers are working with job seekers to help them prepare for their job search journey.

Andrea, it must have been challenging for Recruitment Events Co. to temporarily stop face–to–face events. Are you running any virtual events in the meantime, or are you delaying all events to see what the situation is like in July?
We’ve been running a series of webinars on either recruitment topics or on personal subjects like Emotions or Career development. Our May series can be found here.

We’re planning an online conference for July and monitoring the situation. We’re still planning RecFest for November and are looking to run smaller events from August.

It’s certainly created more options for us as an event company and while the last few months have been challenging, we’re really excited about what we can do event-wise for the future.

Tell us about what it‘s been like working with Justine and Rich, and how the idea for Jobs For Australia (J4A) came about.

The idea of J4A came about when someone in our network linked us (Justine and I) together. HR was looking for options for the staff they needed to either make redundant or deploy. Our Talent Acquisition (TA) community either had jobs to fill or were losing theirs.

After a few discussions, we decided that we would ask the TA people if they would coach people that were impacted by Covid-19. HR people could refer their people to us.  If there were recruitment needs, we could match them.

I had seen the brilliant Jobs for Lebanon and was connected to Rich Lewis-Jones so Justine and I approached him and we put this together. It has been built into what it is now by our amazing team of volunteers. They have put together coaching resources for us to use, video sessions for job seekers and built the SmartRecruiters platform to work for what we need. There are 35 amazing Talent Acquisition professionals doing amazing things every day. They have given me inspiration and energy through this time. I adore them.

Can you extrapolate on how J4A is distinct from a job board? What kind of resources and support do you provide to candidates and employers? 

We are a coaching service first and foremost. We give job seekers coaching on their CV, LinkedIn profile, interview tips etc. We are not advertising jobs. Employers are reaching out to let us know they have jobs and we have a list for the team to reference and introduce people to but it’s not formalised. Often, we find ourselves helping job seekers reference the job market through the job boards. We have partnerships with SEEK, Indeed, Adzuna. We provide links to all other job boards and also flexible work platforms, like Work180.

The TA team at LinkedIn have offered to run a ‘Rock your profile’ session with job seekers and we’re in discussion with both Indeed and SEEK for training for our team and for our job seekers.

We’re talking with WePloy about also assisting the coaching of people signed up to their site and referring our people to the jobs they have.

It’s been an amazing community effort. The TA community is an amazing one!

What’s been the response so far from candidates and employers who have connected with J4A?

We have had some really nice success stories of people never getting through the CV stage and are now at interviews and popping back for some interview training. I think the confidence levels going up in not only our job seekers but our TA volunteers who are also out of work has been the most rewarding. We all need connection at this time. Our little team are supporting each other as they in turn support people out of work. It’s given us all purpose and direction at a time when it’s not been business as usual for any of us.

We think we will take this forward as an ongoing initiative and start to offer support to job seekers as part of the TA community giving back. It’s a global movement now that was started by Roy Baladi and Jobs for Lebanon. There are now chapters in Ireland and Europe. I have always loved being part of the TA community and now it is the most rewarding time to be part of it.

Volunteers from Jobs for Australia, including  Rebecca Powell shared their experience working for J4A.

I’ve been in Talent Acquisition and Recruitment for more than 13 years. I recently found myself joining the ranks of the unemployed, though in my case it was due to a company merger rather than the pandemic, but the timing was no less unfortunate.

I’m a member of RL100 and attended a number of the Reconverse events for internal TA specialists over the past 12 months. I even had the opportunity to speak at one of the events last year so when Andrea Kirby reached out to a few of us asking if we’d be interested in being involved with JFA I jumped at the chance.

I’m in the fortunate position that I was given a redundancy payout so I have time on my side but there are many others out there who can’t afford to be out of work. I had been looking for ways to volunteer within my local community and JFA is risk-free because I can do it from the comfort of my own home!

I know from personal experience just how hard it is to write a CV and build a personal brand and that’s in spite of all my experience in TA/recruitment. I have a mentor who has been a huge support and guide for me in these times and I wanted to be able to pay that forward. So many people out there have been thrust into a situation they never expected and it can be so daunting knowing where to start. Being able to help them to take those first steps may seem simple but the positive impact on the recipient cannot be overstated. 

What‘s been the most meaningful result you‘ve seen so far for an employer or candidate who‘s connected with J4A?

It’s still early days for J4A but already we’ve had candidates coming back and telling their volunteer coaches that they’ve finally had a response to their CV for the first time or they’ve secured an interview.

In one case someone quite accomplished and experienced who had been struggling to get beyond a first interview actually was able to smash two interviews simply by applying the advice his JFA volunteer had given him. It’s those simple wins that can mean so much and I’m confident that we’ve got bigger victories just around the corner.

At the end of the day, J4A is about empowering the job seeker so when they tell us that our advice has helped them to make a positive change to their circumstances that’s a pretty special feeling. These are real people with real struggles and it’s humbling as well as hugely uplifting to know we’re helping.

Jobs for Australia volunteer, Vidhita Jain also shared information about her career path and how she came to volunteer for Jobs For Australia.

I’m a qualified Talent Acquisition Partner with over 14 years of international recruitment experience in India, UK (London), USA and now Australia. My experience has been gained in onsite, agency and in-house environments business partnering with companies across Retail, Professional Services and Consulting, Government, Accounting & Finance, BFSI, Technology, IT, Sales & Marketing.

Andrea Kirby floated a message on the WhatsApp TA community which I instantly replied too, I just knew this is what I want to do to help my community and what better way than using my own skills and experience. I jumped on to this opportunity and decided to contribute as much time to it as possible and help as many people affected as possible.

What‘s been the most meaningful result you‘ve seen so far for an employer or candidate who‘s connected with J4A?  

I’ve been kindly told that I have a unique and holistic coaching style and I’m pleased to say I work this way with people whether they’re looking for interview techniques, help with tough conversations, or practical guidance to take the next step, whatever that looks like. This has been by far the most satisfying role I have played in my entire career.

Volunteer Pavi Iyer shares her experience, from HR generalist roles to TA. 

Over the last 10 years, I’ve worked my way from HR generalist roles to setting up TA functions. Having worked across complex functions and greenfield roles, I’ve loved working in TA and being able to be part of someone’s career pathways in some way.

When I found myself unemployed, I was looking for some way to meaningfully fill my time that would also hone my skills. When Andrea approached me about an idea that would see us helping people displaced by Covid-19, I jumped at the chance. It was everything that I was looking for in terms of helping others within our community, making a difference in their situations and learning from others in the team. It provided an outlet for our creative sides to develop and be able to set up a small TA function of our own.

What‘s been the most meaningful result you‘ve seen so far for an employer or candidate who‘s connected with J4A?

For me, it was realising we’ve helped people that would otherwise not have access to similar avenues of coaching or support. For me, the most meaningful candidate was someone who had found himself unemployed for the first time in 30 years. He required assistance with his CV, was not aware of LinkedIn and hadn’t interviewed for a job in just as long a time. Having helped and coached him in these areas, and to see the impact these small pieces of advice had on his confidence and how grateful he was, it was heart-warming and enlightening to experience.

For more information visit jobsforaustralia.com

Media enquiries: Renae Peattie at hello@jobsforaustralia.com

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