(This article was first published in the Jul-Aug 2014 edition of Aurora.)

I remember a comment made by a business owner on giving a job ad in a newspaper: “Once I put the ad in, there will be queues of applicants in our office.” As conceited as this sounds, this is exactly what happened.

However, whether this meant that the advertising was effective depends on how you define effective. If by effective you mean hiring ‘any’ person for the job, then it was very effective. Yet, effective in the true sense means hiring the right person with the right experience and salary expectations – and that is a different story. Recruitment is sometimes taken lightly because of the belief that there are a lot of unemployed people out there dying to find a job. This is not altogether wrong; there are indeed a lot of people dying to find a job. The question is: do you want these people? And if your answer is no – because you are looking for the right person for the job – this is where recruitment marketing comes into play, a term that covers a range of activities and includes advertising, spreading the word and developing an HR brand for your company. This article will examine developments and best practices in recruitment marketing.

Using social media to acquire talent

In a normally performing company, HR gaps are filled by the best people in an affordable (read: without necessarily placing an expensive job ad in a newspaper) way. When it comes to spreading the message, social media is an obvious choice. If a company can use social media to engage customers, why not use it to engage prospective employees? It is the affordability and viral reach of social media that led to it being adopted by businesses all over the world. Furthermore, social media has a natural affinity with recruitment because it facilitates connections and networking not just among people who know each other but also among friends of friends. This means that companies can reach out to a much larger pool of prospective employees via the company’s current employees who usually help by spreading the word about the position in their own networks and that the quality of prospecting from this pool is potentially much better than mass advertising.

Success stories in recruitment marketing

HR branding on customised portals: The career portal, Rozee.pk offers a number of services to companies looking for talented employees. One of the major services is a customised career portal for individual employers that is powered by Rozee’s own online application management system (i.e. applicants can complete a full job application on the website instead of emailing a CV and covering letter to the employer). More importantly, each company’s career portal can be designed according to the company’s brand identity. Providing a customised look to a recruitment portal which gels with the company’s website should be considered a long term advantage in terms of building an HR brand. Today, many leading employers in Pakistan, such as Metro Pakistan, Mobilink, TCS, the UN and Warid have their career portals powered by Rozee.pk, thus developing their HR brand as a long term asset.

DAWN’s Careers pages: Almost all newspapers have a careers page, particularly on Sundays, and all are trying to monetise that space as much as possible. However, DAWN does it a bit differently. While the newspaper earns revenue from space sold as classified or display advertisements, it also allocates space to career counselling by providing short yet highly focused content by HR experts such as Leon Menezes and Rahila Narejo. This space could have been monetised in the form of further advertising or sponsored content, but DAWN’s decision to use the space for career counselling has led to the development of a comprehensive recruitment marketing platform – one that stands out with both companies and individuals looking for jobs.

Telenor’s Khuddar Pakistan: Telenor has always been an innovation driven company and has regularly won awards for being the most preferred graduate employer in the telecom industry (2007), the best place to work (2010) and the most preferred employer (2009 and 2012). In 2009, Telenor launched an awareness and accessibility programme called Khuddar Pakistan. Under this initiative, the company hired 22 people with disabilities (according to Telenor’s website, 16 of them still work for the company); it facilitated the hiring process by creating an accessible career webpage and testing system.

Additionally, Telenor renovated several offices to facilitate employees with disabilities and gave them an equal opportunity in the workplace. The company also held conferences on the subject of hiring persons with disabilities and highlighted the issue through the local media. This programme was an exciting confluence of HR branding and corporate social responsibility and was marketed by a focused advertising campaign. Thus, the company was able to use what was essentially a CSR initiative to nurture and promote its already solid HR brand.

Headhunting and social media: Established recruitment and headhunting companies such as HRS International and Hasnain Tanveer Associates are using social media, particularly Facebook and LinkedIn. Individual recruiting agents who either work as employees of these HR companies or on a freelance basis develop their own relationships with a variety of people through social media networks. These individual networks are vast and diverse and therefore extremely useful when it comes to recruiting a more talented workforce.

Hiring fresh graduates: Gone are the days when entry level candidates were shunned because of their lack of experience. Some companies have embraced the concept of hiring entry level candidates who are untainted by another company’s culture. Companies such as P&G are frontrunners in terms of university recruitment and their programmes focus on internships and management training. Among the different activities they conduct are campus recruitment drives and the increased use of creatively designed competitions to scout for smart, well-rounded, budding talent across different functions. Another recruitment marketing programme that targets fresh graduates is Teach for Pakistan, an organisation that is part of a global network which aims to spread quality primary level education. Teach for Pakistan hires university graduates, who are otherwise being sought by the mainstream corporate sector, and expects them to teach in under resourced schools for a period of two years. During that time these ‘fellows’ (as they are known) not only get valuable work experience which is recognised by several foreign and local employers and universities, they also get access to internationally recognised teaching and leadership training. At the end of the two years, fellows get access to professional opportunities within Teach for Pakistan’s Employer Partners network, which includes some of the best companies in Pakistan.

Alert: Recruitment cons

With recruitment activities being outsourced to third parties, disadvantages have also manifested themselves. Some unscrupulous HR firms announce a job opening, ostensibly on behalf of their client (a large or small employer), after which applicants are shortlisted. These shortlisted applicants are then charged a small fee for processing after which nothing happens. Earning even small amounts from each of the hundreds of eager yet unsuspecting jobseekers is very easy. Social media is replete with such postings and discerning between these and the authentic ones is very hard. Job portals and newspapers have put measures in place to keep these con artists at bay (this includes doing background checks on smaller HR and recruitment firms); but social media remains unchecked and unregulated.

Muhammad Talha Salam is a faculty member at FAST School of Management Lahore. talha.salam@nu.edu.pk