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Competition for talent is getting fiercer every year. Recruiters need a new approach that goes beyond job-boards and recruiting agencies—something that uses cutting-edge technology to target passive job candidates.

Remember the good old days, when you could post a job ad, get an immediate influx of responses, and then take your time choosing the best fit? When even highly-qualified applicants were happy just to find a decent job? Yeah, those days are over.

Today, job seekers are like consumers. They make carefully researched decisions at their own pace, knowing all the while that they have all of the leverage and can be as a particular as they want about what they’re looking for in a place of employment. In most industries, there’s a shortage of qualified job hunters—with active job seekers making up only 20% of the market at any given time.

Despite what many in the recruitment industry would have you think, hiring processes can’t stay the same forever. Traditional methods are becoming less effective by the day. This is why recruiters need to take a page out of marketing’s playbook and start making their processes leaner, faster, and smarter. One potential path forward here—one of the most exciting paths forward, if you ask me—is RMA, or recruitment marketing automation.

In traditional marketing, automation is already becoming a fact of life. As of a year ago, nearly 50% of businesses (and more than half of B2B businesses) were utilizing some kind of automation in their marketing, since then, that number has almost certainly increased. This has taken many forms, but some of the most popular include simple tasks like scheduling social media campaigns and setting advertising budgets in advance. Dig a little deeper, and you find emerging technology like RPA (robotic process automation) filling in technological gaps between marketers and their chosen platforms.

These aren’t the kinds of processes that make people’s jobs redundant or their positions obsolete—on the contrary, they represent a path forward for giving humans the time and energy to concentrate on the tasks they’re best at putting their powers of creativity to use and creating cool, splashy campaigns that stick in their target audience’s brains. Recently, public attitudes towards AI and automation have come to reflect this reality. A study by the Adobe Digital Insights team found that marketers were increasingly associating automation and AI with positive words and phrases like “time-saving” and “big data analytics.”

We don’t have numbers on hand, but based on the time my colleagues and I have spent talking to thousands of HR departments over the last few years, we can say anecdotally that this is much less the case in the world of recruitment. Interest in automation-based solutions has been lagging behind traditional marketing, and that needs to change to ASAP. As SmartRecruiters’ CEO Jerome Ternynck said in a recent press release, “to win the war for talent, we need more effective ways to find and engage prospective candidates – in a compliant way and at scale.” He couldn’t be more right.

From my perspective, the key to engagement is to meet your candidates were they are. This means that instead of limiting yourself to the 20% of candidates who spend time on job boards, you expand your attraction campaigns to Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, and anywhere else on the web where your next great hire might already be spending time. To do this, recruiters are going to have to think a lot more like marketers. This means developing an employer brand that functions in parallel with your corporate brand—something that lets you position yourself specifically as a desirable place of employment. It also means using new tools, like RMA, AI, RPA, and other technology to disseminate that employer brand in a time-efficient, scalable way.

What I see as the best path forward for recruitment marketing involves exactly these technologies. In a perfectly optimized world, recruiters would skip the job boards entirely. They would use AI technology to identify the best web channels for reaching their target personas and determine the appropriate range for their advertising budget depending on the size, scope, and characteristics of their audience. Then, on the same platform, they could schedule their ads across whatever channels they wanted, tracking their dollars spent, impressions, clicks, and conversions as they went: not quite “set and forget,” but not something that requires the constant daily attention and micromanagement that these tasks would otherwise need.

Recruiters could even use RPA integration to help collect reporting data from niche channels that wouldn’t otherwise offer much in the way of KPIs. This way, they develop real employer brand gravity, and they can begin to generate a stream of qualified applicants right to their corporate careers page.

Source: hrtechnologist

Industry: Recruitment news