Digital marketing for talent acquisition - Defining the building blocks.

Now that we have our business customer and marketing strategy in place (as elaborated in the previous post) we will commence developing the building blocks for our digital marketing strategy.

List down the hiring objective you intend to achieve with your digital resources. These could be (and more):

1. Increase applicants for a job.

2. Improve employer branding.

3. Reduce the cost of hiring.

4. Institutionalize digital networks & digital databases.

First things first let's start with defining all your organization's digital assets. This should include all our digital assets such as

1. Candidate email database

2. Employee email database,

3. Alumni email database,

4. Facebook page

5. LinkedIn page,

6. Twitter,

7. Website pages,

8. Blogs and Articles..

One of the challenges you might face is that these resources tend to be scattered throughout an organization and rest with different departments, e.g employee email database might be available with your HR team whereas the owner for the channels like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn could be the communications or the marketing department.

Present and past (Alumni) employee mail id will be useful to generate followers on social media. Few of these will accept your invite while others might ignore but this strategy can give a quick start. Your present and past employee are most likely to relate to the content you would be uploading. Further, the candidates you are sourcing, in all probability, will be available within their network. A share or like from them will further push your presence to your desired audience. Both Facebook and LinkedIn allow to customize your audience and upload emails. Similarly, candidates who have applied in your organization will also be willing to be part of your network to keep themselves updated with the occurrences in your organization. It is as much a need of your employees, alumni and candidates to stay in your network as is of yours and hence the relationship is symbiotic.

At this stage let's have a look at the overview of our digital marketing design.

Facebook: Facebook is everybody's favorite social networking site. The audience here is for casual networking and to have fun. Nobody uses Facebook for job searches but are receptive to Job opportunities.

Facebook is a saturated space with all kinds of marketers trying to get your audience’s attention. It is next to impossible to grow organically. Facebook ads are a great way to improve your reach. With Facebook ads, you can target specific demographics working in a specific organization and having specific designations. Facebook audience is receptive to job opportunities and responds to good Facebook ads. You can improve your reach by Facebook's feature to customize audience. Here you can upload your database emails as a custom list and Facebook will run its advertisements on the list.

Facebook ads are one of the best ad platforms. A good campaign will get a lot of Follows, likes, and comments. The best way to engage your audience is to regularly update your page with new content this could be job opportunities, industry articles etc. It is advisable to have at least two posts every day. Images and Videos get the most views and like hence upload your job opportunities with well-designed image posts. You need an image that makes them stop in their tracks, followed by irresistible content, Copy and call to action. Facebook provides some fancy analytics to help you understand if your posts are working, keep a track of these. You can also engage your audience with unique content and articles.

There are Applications such as Buffer, Hootsuite that help you manage all your social media marketing/optimization from a single dashboard. It allows you to share content to multiple social media. You can also schedule posts when you are offline. You can view analytics and customize your content strategy.  

LinkedIn: Linkedin is one of the favorite sites for recruiters to go to. Most recruiters are well versed with this media. You can improve your network by uploading your contact email list (Candidates, present employees, Alumni list) to LinkedIn via your email ID. Once uploaded, invite your contact and they should respond accordingly. Regularly share unique content, job postings and industry updates on LinkedIn to improve your engagement. As you get your likes, comments, shares do respond to all of these to maintain connect with your audience. LinkedIn allows you to upload job descriptions with the call to action available on the top of the page. It gives you the flexibility to either apply on the website itself or have resume emailed to the email specified by the recruiter. If you have a global presence Linkedin allows you multiple skins specific to geographic location and audience.  Again Linkedin allows multiple analytics to support your strategy.

Linkedin is a serious platform with people networking for business and knowledge objectives. The design of your posts should be informative, leads to a clear call to action and leads to an informative landing page. Job descriptions posted on LinkedIn should be well written and designed. I would advise the JD carries the images of the management team, Information on the company aside from the standard role content. The JD should be linked to the landing page.

YouTube: This is one of the least used media by recruiters largely because of the cost and inconvenience of developing the video. But YouTube is great medium as the content here can be used as fodder for your social media. Further, it is becoming easier these days to develop a video considering most of the YouTube videos are either created on DSLR cameras or even via your friendly mobile camera. It is not necessary to only upload videos these days you can create animations on applications like videoscribe or put a voice-over on a slideshow. You can also be strip off the video recording and the audio track can we used as a podcast. This again can be used as fodder for content on other social media. Commit to uploading at least one videos every week. YouTube typically also requires SEO marketing something we will cover in the future parts.

Google PPC (Google Adwords): This by far is the strongest way to reach your target audience. It is important to realize that Google Adword would work only when your audience is showing intent i.e. Google ads reflect on searches done by individuals. Your ad will reach your audience only if your audience is searching for a particular keyword. Be very particular about the keywords being used. The best thing is Google does most of your heavy lifting. As you set up your free Google Adwords account you can develop your campaign. You can start by defining your keywords with the help of the recommendation provided in the dropdown in the Google Search Box. As you use these keywords Google will help you suggest other keywords similar to your original one. You can restrict your campaign to specific Geography also. Candidates only in a particular zip code or location will be able to see your ad. Further, Google can also help you develop your banner by scanning your website and giving you suggestions. You can define your budget e.g $50 per day and leave it to Google on how much to spend per click to maximize clicks. Google AdWords is a vast subject and would require further exploration. It is a very competitive space with keywords being bided upon. Google Adword is very user-friendly self-service and can help you reach your audience. Google Analytics further helps you to understand the dynamics of the traffic reaching your website or your landing page and the impact of your Google ad.

Twitter: Although this platform is not as active in India as other platforms but can be used to improve your reach and positively impact employer brand image.

Twitter is a very active platform with multiple tweets happening simultaneously. You will need to build a large number of follower quickly. Aside from enrolling your existing active employees on your account, you can also find competitors who have followers that you desire, You can follow them few will then follow you in return. This is a gradual process.

Twitter needs a lot of active tweets. Regularly job postings and links to articles will be needed. Considering Twitter works on short Tweets one can always share short tweets from your articles rather than sharing the entire article. Throughout the process always share the link to your landing page. You should always setup auto-reply for every follower it brings you back to your audience's mindset.

  

Blogs and articles: There are multiple sites which provide you with blogging services and space to write your article. You can regularly upload industry level content on this blog or write articles of interest to your audience. This would become fodder for your LinkedIn and Facebook. You can also go ahead and Link your blogs and articles to bloggers of similar interest. This will help you gather traffic to your blog. Your blog needs to carry a link to your landing page and move the traffic to the desired result.

Website: mostly all organizations today have a website and a career page. It is important to do an SEO audit to check if your website is optimized for different search engines. There are many websites that provide this service. A good looking website does not mean it is optimized. Next, you should have different Google tags linked to your website to help you with analytics. Typically the homepage of a website is targeted to a broad audience and not specific to your hiring audience. It is advised to have a dedicated landing page for hiring. Such a Landing page can be optimized with a hiring perspective.  Candidates on the net have a very limited span of attention if they do not get the required information in the initial two to three minutes as they can easily lose interest. The landing page should carry all the information about the organization, its services and the role he wants to apply for. On the page itself, there should be space for the candidate to apply. Your landing page has to be designed as one window solution to your candidate.

So let's quickly tie all this up. You want to reach out to the candidate audience available on the different social media platform. You need to start by developing follower on your desired social media, every social media has its own unique way of doing this. Your existing list of contacts (Candidates, Employees and past employees) is a great place to start. With your audience in place, you need to engage them. Simply posting jobs will not help engage the audience. Include articles and industry news part of your engagement arsenal. Generally, the engagement level with image and video content tends to be higher than written and linked content. At this stage, you should use content developed for YouTube, blogs, and podcast as fodder for your social media uploads. Blogs, YouTube, and podcast themselves will also generate some traffic. One common thread that runs through all your content and posts is a standard link for a call to action that links to your career web page or a dedicated landing page. As candidates arrive on the landing page some of them would move ahead and apply for the role others might bounce off. Google Analytics would help here as it will give you insights on at which stage the candidates generally bounce off. Candidates applying for a role need to be contacted for the next stage of assessment. All the candidates applying should populate a central database. This database will be fed back to social media platforms so that we have the least disparity of audiences amongst different Media. Further, this database will also be used for Whatsapp, SMS and telecalling campaigns. Too often, marketers get stuck at CTR, CPC or lead conversion to optimize their Campaigns. They tweak their visuals to get more clicks, test some colored borders and spend a lot of time optimizing things that will have no impact on the bottom line. Hence keep a track of your source of hiring. ROI occurs only once we successfully close an open role.