Some of the biggest factors to play into the majority of today’s recruitment marketing trends is centered around improving the candidate experience, clearly and effectively communicating your company’s culture and values to the right candidates and building authenticity and transparency around your companies brand externally. Some ways companies can begin to address these factors is by utilizing new technology and platforms and integrating them into your hiring practices. Some trends to be considered in your recruitment marketing toolkit include social recruiting through TikTok, ambassadorship through influencer marketing, and ramping up your sponsored content.
I know what you’re thinking. Really? TikTok? Isn’t that just for making dance videos? Yes and no. When the app first launched it gained popularity through its dance challenges and fun filters, but as the app became more popular, users began sharing other diverse content. Gone are the days of just pure entertainment videos, now professionals from nearly every sector are sharing helpful “how-to” videos to educate and inspire the next generation of workers.
With over 1 billion active users worldwide and holding the position of being the most downloaded app of 2020 and 2021, TikTok is on the precipice of being the most influential social site in the world. If you are looking to hiring budding new talent, it would behoof you to consider TikTok in your hiring strategy. TikTok has already proved effective for brands such as Chipotle, which saw a 7% increase in applicants in August of 2021 after posting one recruitment video letting applicants know they were looking to hire 10,000 new employees. Hiring on TikTok may seem unusual, but we need to accept it is the future of recruitment, and now is the time to leverage it for your hiring strategy.
Ambassadorship has become a buzzword in the world of recruitment, and for good reason. Ambassadors use their own sphere of influence and their network to build interest in your brand. Ambassadors use social sites and even word of mouth to publicly generate engagement. In consumer marketing, brands typically see higher sales margins from brand ambassadorship programs compared to paid advertising. With authenticity and transparency being now such an essential component in appealing to new talent, ambassadors are a friendly, reliable, face those candidates can trust.
However, building an ambassadorship program internally can take up quite a bit of time and resources. That is why it is time to follow the lead of consumer brands and rely upon paid influencer marketing to get you started. Studies have shown that up to 86% of job seekers use social media in their job search and with so many voices and brands trying to differentiate themselves online, you need others to help you stand out from all the noise. Influencers build a genuine relationship with their follower’s, and when you collaborate with them, that relationship extends to your organization.
Most talent leaders know at this point that content is essential for employer branding efforts and that it allows your organization to control and positively changes the dialogue surrounding your company to ensure you attract the right talent. Posts, whether on your blog or on social media, allow you to reach beyond just your standard employee value proposition, and give you the opportunity to tell a comprehensive story while developing a unique voice for your brand. The candidate journey isn’t linear, you need to nurture and grow the relationship to move it from awareness to interest, and you need to have content that is effective at every stage of the journey.
However, nothing is worse than having your content get lost in the endless stream of nonstop posts and pages of information online. In order to get in front of the right audience, you need to pay to perform. Sponsored content is a type of native advertising that essentially allows you to pay another publisher to distribute, and in some cases even create, your content. According to HubSpot, marketers that sponsor content see a 50% higher brand lift than trying to distribute organically. The benefit of another publisher distributing your content is that they can promote to their network, which allows you to reach new candidates who may not have heard of you otherwise. Since those candidates already follow this 3rd party distributer, their likely to trust the information and take a greater interest.
At the end of the day, any recruitment marketing trends you may choose to utilize should be implemented in a very strategic way, so it not only seamlessly blends into your current employer brand efforts, but so it is highly targeted and makes sense for your individual hiring goals. When building a recruitment marketing strategy, everything needs to be planned and evaluated at an individual level, there is no size fits all. If you want quality results, you need a quality strategy.
Contact us to discuss this and all the ways we can help you attract, hire and retain talent.