Staffing agencies have been around since the early 1900s. Today’s staffing and recruiting companies are known to be a terrific source of both active and passive candidates. But to truly stand out from the crowd, they must be well positioned in the recruiting landscape and capable of consistently providing quality candidates for their clients.
In the past few years, the staffing industry has changed dramatically. Candidate expectations and job hunting methods have shifted to be more like consumer behavior. They want to research a company to know that they are working for a quality employer with a solid reputation. So how can a staffing agency present itself as an employer of choice? With the help of recruitment marketing.
What is Recruitment Marketing?
According to Wikipedia, recruitment Marketing is the inbound strategy an employer uses to attract, engage, and nurture talent. In simpler terms, it’s everything it takes to get the right candidates to apply to your client’s open jobs. It includes your employer value proposition, career site, employer branding, job advertising, distribution channels, and social recruiting efforts. Let’s dig into each of these a little deeper.
Creating Your Employer Value Proposition
Your employer value proposition (EVP) is the reason why a candidate would choose your recruiters over others. Ask yourself, in a crowded, candidate-driven market, how does your company stand out? Having a precise answer to this question is the foundation of your EVP.
This could include your longevity in the industry, the strength of your benefits package, or the specific niche your firm specializes in.
Analyzing Your Career Site
Your career site or portal is your staffing company’s virtual front door. The catch is it needs to serve two purposes, attracting new clients, and attracting top talent for those clients. Let’s start with attracting candidates. When analyzing your career page from the candidate view, ask yourself, is your career site job seeker centric?
A good practice is to go through your site, the same way a candidate would and look for snags. According to LinkedIn, a whopping 60% of candidates will abandon an application that is too long or complicated.
To address the client’s view, repeat the same process. Are your features and benefits easy to see? Is the process for contacting and contracting you simple and direct?
Creating Strong Branding
Recruiting becomes more and more like marketing every day, and with this parallel, modern candidates tend to search for career opportunities in much the same way consumers make a purchase. This is where branding comes in. You can consider it as the story you tell that shows potential employees what working for your company could be like and potential clients what working with your agency could be like.
To achieve this, staffing agencies must use recruitment marketing strategies. These strategies involve creating a robust online presence through social media, your career page, and other media outlets to help attract your ideal candidate and client.
Job Advertising
With your branding and branding guidelines in place, it’s time to take a hard look at your job advertising. This is the place that a large chunk of your recruiting budget will go, and it can also be one of the most costly mistakes if not done correctly. This means using data-driven decisions to determine the most effective channels for both you and your clients. Ads should be mobile optimized and use one tap apply or simplified application processes since these days nearly 70% of all job applications are filled out on mobile devices.
Distribution Channels
Utilizing the right recruitment marketing channels will help you to meet the candidate where they are, capture their attention, and streamline the recruiting process. Recent data shows that 79% of job seekers use social media when conducting their job search. Let’s take a look at the social channels that have proven successful when incorporated into a staffing firm’s recruitment marketing strategy.
- Facebook
Facebook boasts a whopping 2.934 billion active users. - TikTok
This is the newest of the social channels with 1 billion active users. - LinkedIn
Used almost exclusively for job searching, LinkedIn has a total of 310 million active users.
- Twitter
Around 238 million users are fans of the Tweet
Social Job Sharing
The average Facebook user has 338 friends on the platform and an additional 31,000 people in their extended network and 35% of the user’s audience see each post. The stats are similar for Linkedin and Twitter with the average Linkedin user having 400 first-degree connections and an average of 9,000 second-degree connections, 100% of which see user content. For Twitter, the average user has 707 followers, and again, 100% of the audience can see user posts. If each job post was shared to all three platforms it totals out to an average of 20,557 people seeing your open job.
When you utilize effective social job sharing as part of your recruitment marketing strategy it allows you to effectively turn your entire workforce into recruiting agents. Furthermore, studies show that employee voice is trusted as much as 3 times more than company voice when it comes to choosing an employer to work for.
Get Started With Recruitment Marketing Today
There are a lot of pieces that go into creating the right recruitment marketing strategies to increase staffing agency sales. The process entails performing market research, building frameworks, selecting the right tools, choosing the ideal channels, and finally, putting it all together.
But, when you partner with Work4 you’re getting the added value of more than 10 years of experience and data points, plus access to exclusive audiences and proprietary targeting. If you’re ready to see more of your client’s open jobs filled and fuller talent pools across the board, schedule a call with one of our experts to discuss your hiring needs.
