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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The big question is – should you pause or pivot your recruitment marketing?

What do I mean by pivot? Pivoting means keeping one foot in contact with the ground and using your other foot to move around to find a new angle or gain an advantage over your defender. 

While you might have seen good examples of recruitment advertising and marketing messages, you will no doubt have seen some bad ones from brands that have ignored the current situation completely.

There have also been brands putting a stop to recruitment, marketing and sales altogether because they don’t want to be seen as opportunistic. But, your messaging should be about selling responsibly. Don’t risk putting your brand reputation in jeopardy by being tone-deaf to internal and external factors. Equally, don’t pause on your activities at the risk of losing out on significant opportunities.

There have been a number of studies going back to the Great Depression that prove the advantages of maintaining or increasing advertising and marketing budgets during a weaker economy. Employers and advertisers that maintained or grew their marketing increased their sales and market share during the recession and afterwards.

Review your recruitment marketing strategy

If you are recruiting, are you using the same templates, or have you added tailored messaging specific to the current situation? What’s changed in your organisation? (Are you onboarding people virtually, do you have delayed start dates?) What is still relevant and what needs to change?

Review your existing plan and take time to consider what needs to change. Do you need to look at new channels? Do you need to amp up your social media marketing to stay visible and communicate updates to your current and future talent? How do your current recruitment marketing messages need to be adjusted to suit the new online environment?

Has your ideal candidate changed?

With a number of new candidates entering the talent market with a variety of skillsets, have you thought about who you’re targeting? Do you need to look at targeting candidates from other industries? Is your core industry struggling, meaning you may face heavy competition in the future when stability returns? And if so, what is the balance between reaching out to candidates in your industry specifically and other industries generally?

For the benefit of our world economy, we need businesses to survive and people to have opportunity. Don’t feel guilty about continuing growing your talent pipeline, especially if you have the potential to support candidates looking for employment. There’s no reason why you can’t reach out to talent in your industry and expand your search to the industries too.  

Also, considering the short-term situation is changing so quickly, being able to pivot is essential. 

Messaging and content

When tailoring your messaging, consider the current “normal”. People are working from home, homeschooling their kids, unable to visit family members. Offices are working remotely, normal socialising is out, and people are bored and looking for entertainment. Combine that with current stressors, there’s a lot of uncertainty. 

So take this into consideration and understand your messaging needs to reflect that. Reassess your content, tone, and positioning. 

Are there any opportunities for you to become a thought leader in your niche or distinguish yourself as an employer of choice when everyone else is pausing? 

Your homework is to action the above points and I’ll return next week to share Part 2 with you. I’ll share more information about deciding if you need to take an acquisition vs retention strategy with your marketing. 

Tanya Williams is the pink-loving, sparkly Chief of Everything at Digital Conversations. She wears many hats; entrepreneur, best-selling author, digital trainer, and she is a Social Amplification Specialist with over 20 years’ marketing experience. She works with recruiters to uncover the hidden gold in their existing assets, find ways to leverage every moment of your digital marketing without increasing your marketing budget and amplify your internal champions to increase your visibility. Her goal is to make the hero in your industry sector.  She has a simple, no-tech-talk approach and thrives working with established recruitment companies to tap into the opportunities they might miss, using practical & relevant tactics to drive business outcomes.

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