When recruitment meets marketing
(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.