Attracting talent used to be more cut and dried than it is now. If you were looking for talent, you would put an ad in the (actually physical) paper, or you’d depend on the word of mouth of suppliers and employees to get your request out there. Then along came the Internet, and it changed absolutely everything. Suddenly, there were job boards and search engines, social media and career sites, ratings sites, not to mention online ads.
Today, employers looking to hire are faced with lots of candidates and lots of ways to reach them. Employers have far more choices and more channels, but we all know from personal experience that not every channel is the same — otherwise, we’d all be using the same ones.
What do you use Facebook for? What about Twitter? Do you need a Pinterest board to reach those over-the-road truck drivers? Each channel serves its own purpose.
But it’s much more than that — when you focus on jobs, it gets more complicated. Veterinarians, engineers, and airline assistants are all very different jobs with very different skill sets. One strategy for reaching job candidates may not work for all careers or all the different levels within a career. And some professions are more active on specific channels than others, so it’s even more difficult to come up with a strategy. How can you determine which channels are appropriate for your candidate audiences?
Events? Channel. Referrals? Channel. Social? Channel. Review sites? You get the idea.
My first not-so-secret is source tracking by owned channels so you can tell where your engagement comes from. This includes low-intent engagement like social interaction all the way to high-intent engagement like clicking on the Apply button. Not sure where to start? Talk to your recruiting operations team who holds the keys to your ATS and career site to get the data.
To find out how industry leaders tackle this problem, I recently chatted with employer brand leaders at Delta Air Lines, T-Mobile, Banfield Pet Hospital and the consulting firm Proactive Talent to get their take. Here are a few of their secrets.
Driving applications vs. telling the best possible story
James Ellis, Podcaster and Lead Employer Brand Consultant, Proactive Talent
There are two ways to approach this question: Which channels will drive applications, and which channels will allow us to tell the best possible story?
The answer depends on which direction you lean. If you are living in a transactional world, where your goal is to herd candidates toward the Apply button to stuff the top of your funnel like a turkey in mid-November, look at where your candidates are and push, push, push.
Or, if you understand that we live in a “volunteer” world (when there are more jobs than people, and people don’t take jobs but volunteer to join your mission), your goal is to tell the most compelling story, to deliver the most interesting and sticky reason “why.” Once you have them hooked, the means of application is a formality.
So can you tell your story on Twitter? Do it. Can you deliver a meaningful “why” on WhatsApp? Do it. Video…