Looking for the best way to elevate your recruitment and overall talent management strategy?

Consider uniting recruiting with marketing.

Your marketing department should never operate independently of the team you have in charge of recruitment and talent management because the two are inherently intertwined. This is an idea more large companies are recognizing when it comes to their own strategies for sourcing the best talent.

If you’re not seeing the logical connection between marketing and recruiting, consider this:

• Marketing is focused on understanding the trends and movements within the market and it’s also all about honing in on concepts of supply and demand. These are pivotal elements to recruiting as well. For example, is it an employees’ market if they have a particular skill? If so, how is the demand impacted by the supply? What are other employers doing in terms of recruiting talent and what are employees looking for in a company and a position. All of these are factors that can be uncovered through market research
• Consider employer branding, a topic we’ve covered quite a bit. Building a brand in the external sense is the responsibility of most marketing teams, so it makes logical sense they would be the best resource in order to build a brand for potential employees as well. Many of the same tactics and tools used to attract a loyal client base can also be used to elevate your employer brand.
• Segmenting audiences and developing communication materials and strategies are a primary function of a marketing team in an external sense. Strong communication and an understanding of the audience also play an important role in the recruitment process, so consider involving marketing in this aspect.

With all of the above in mind, we put together a list of ways you can tie together your company’s marketing strategies with your recruitment strategies:

• Know who you’re targeting. Just as you need to know and segment your audience to market your goods or services to customers, you need to do the same when marketing to potential employees. Know the skills you’re seeking and the type of employee you’re after before you ever start the actual recruitment process so you can tailor and streamline your efforts for maximum effectiveness.
• Treat your candidates just like you would treat your clients. As we’ve discussed in previous posts, how you treat your employee candidates is going to reflect on your entire organization and significantly impact your employer brand. When you treat candidates well, regardless of whether or not they get the job, you elevate your employer brand.
• Use diverse channels and delivery methods to reach potential candidates. When your company has a particular message to disseminate to the public, such as the introduction of a new product, they’re not likely to stick with just one channel to advertise, right? The same should hold true of your recruitment-based marketing. Go through multiple communication avenues to get recruitment messages out there and tailor your message depending on the channel you’re utilizing.
• Conduct research. Every marketing department or professional knows there’s no value in continuing to use tactics that aren’t working and the same should apply to your recruiting strategy. Don’t keep using the same tired methods and hoping for a different result. Collect data on what’s working and what’s not working and use this data to keep making changes and updates to how you recruit.
• Be clear in your message. This is one of the primary things to remember when it comes to bringing together marketing and recruiting. You can’t effectively market a product, or your company in general, if you’re unclear on your own message. The same standard applies to the talent search. Start by having a defined understanding of your company’s goals and objectives and then move on to an understanding of what you’re seeking in a candidate before you begin marketing your company or a position.

Marketing and recruitment have a natural link to one another. By either moving or expanding recruitment to the marketing department, you have the potential to build a robust employer brand and tap into new sources of talent.

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