The recruitment marketing plan is a key component of any successful hiring process. While most plans focus on the advertisement of open positions, and some on employer branding, they often miss the mark by being too internally focused. Truly successful recruitment marketing efforts need external insight to really understand the behaviour of their target talent demographics. This means doing some external research on a regular basis so your message and your channels resonate with the talent group you are trying to attract. Talent behaviour is how and why an individual looks for employment opportunities. It’s how they go about a job search and what their motivations are. Too truly build a picture of your target talent persona, you need to ask yourself these questions and conduct the following research externally to find the real answer so you aren’t making any assumptions.
- Where do they look for job postings?
- What are they looking for in an employer?
- Why are they leaving (or considering leaving) their current employer?
- Are they using social media channels to job search? If so, which ones?
- How serious are your target job seekers? Are they actively looking or are they just waiting for something to come up that sparks their interest?
- What motivates them?
Align Your Recruitment Marketing Plan With Talent Personas
The best way to ensure recruitment marketing efforts are aligned with job seeker behaviour is to develop accurate talent personas. A talent persona is a fictional representation of your ideal hire for a specific role or job family. The persona is based on as much real data as possible, obtained from surveys, discussions, and observations, along with educated projections about experience, goals, motivations, behaviours, interests, aspirations, etc. Personas are intended to help you understand your candidates better and should be used every time you create content for candidates. For example, a social media content calendar that aligns with your talent personas can be a very effective way to reach the right candidates, even before they realize they want to be considered for a position with your organization!
Why Talent Behaviour Matters
Understanding the behaviour of job seekers helps your recruitment team identify, target, and attract the right talent in the right place and at the right time. As with any type of marketing, the more you understand your target audience’s needs, habits, pain points, interests, etc. the more effectively you can connect with them. You’ll have a better idea of the kinds of jobs that are in demand, where talent is looking for jobs, and what candidates want in a job.
All of this information can help you better align your recruiting efforts with candidate needs and interests to get your open positions in front of the best qualified candidates. Including job seeker behaviour in the recruitment marketing plan tightens your focus to improve the quality of new hires, resulting in greater employee satisfaction, an improved ENPS (Employee Net Promoter Score), and reduced turnover.
Talent Behaviour Changes Over Time!
Talent behaviour can and does change over time and organizations must keep a pulse on market changes and respond quickly to stay relevant. Attracting the talent you want means being in the right place at the right time, with the right message. By examining external research from the hiring industry, labor trends and patterns, new hire surveys, and internal recruitment metrics including sources or platforms used and conversion rates, the recruitment team can track patterns and success rates which can be used to hone the recruitment marketing plan for maximum ROI.
Internal and external factors such as demographics, labor market, life changes, and even new social media platforms or job boards can all influence how, when, why, and where talent seeks out new employment opportunities. It’s important for a recruitment team to monitor and adapt to these changing behaviours in order to always be accessible to their targeted talent.
Does job seeker behaviour factor in to your recruitment marketing plan?
If not, contact Blu Ivy Group to discuss how to improve your recruitment efforts by focusing on the talent you want to attract.