Recruiting = Marketing + Sales

Amybeth Hale, our industry's Research Goddess, has a great post on:

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PR, MARKETING, AND ADVERTISING, AND WHY RECRUITERS SHOULD CARE

I am very passionate on this subject so I added some of my thoughts to this blog post.

RECRUITING = MARKETING + SALES

I strongly believe RECRUITING = MARKETING + SALES.

Most of recruiting is the SALES side which is directly working with candidates: Resume databases, ATS resumes, networking, referrals, career fairs, etc.

The marketing side can be incredibly wasteful and a poor use of time, except in rare cases that have a high ROI. (Just like marketing a product) My view is that recruiters often shift into marketing, especially social media marketing, when they want to use their creativity and mix up their work. I think there are a few tasks that create an easy ROI (mainly ATS published job postings and SEO). Much of the other marketing is often hard to have a better ROI than working with resumes directly.

ASPECTS OF MARKETING WITHIN RECRUITING

I believe the the marketing side of recruiting falls into goals within recruiting:

Marketing = Education + Free Demand Generation + Paid Demand Generation + Branding

Branding:

The goal here is to attract more appropriate candidates, than would otherwise would come to the company.

More appropriate candidates can be defined by: a) Higher quality, b) better match to the company culture, c) people that respect the work environment or organization's goal.

Education:

The goal here is to education possible applicants so they select a company over a competitor -- or they understand important aspects of unique job types.

Free Demand Generation:

This is the most obvious part of marketing that should always be applied since it has a very high ROI and has low risk.

This includes:

1. Job Openings in ATS published on the company's career portal
2. Job Search engines picking up ATS job postings
3. SEO traffic
4. Email Nurture Campaign to previously applied candidates
5. Articles (content)

Paid Demand Generation:

These are often used most cautiously because of the expenses involved.

This includes:

1. Paid Job Postings
2. Brand and pure Advertising (RAAs)
3. Paid Leads for CRM campaigns
4. Social Media

I put social media marketing in this category because from what I have seen, to scale the results from this method, it requires equally scaling labor -- which is important to fully factor into recruiting plans.

I'm a big believer in measuring marketing efforts against ROI metrics. Paid demand generation is often used when Time-to-Fill is too long or not enough resumes are causing a problem in the recruiting pipeline.

The best ROI here is often when a recruiting department finds a specific category of positions are stalling to fill because of a lack of quality or quantity of resumes.

SALES via Semantic Search for Recruiting:

FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm the CEO of TalentSpring, which I consider a leader in semantic search for recruiting. We aggregate resumes and candidates on the open web and use our matching technology to take employers to the best candidates.

Semantic Search for recruiting doesn't require any marketing. Employers go directly to the best resumes without labor or costs. This is my best of all worlds. It includes resume database for active candidates. It includes leads to candidates on the open web for high quality passive candidates.

This can often be the lowest labor and cheapest because resume databases are low cost when they can work for a range of job positions.

PR:

I'll define PR as media outlets that could cover a company. From my experiences with my company, I have found that a company will get media coverage from time to time. However, it isn't something that a company can scale when they want. Once in a while, a company like Google or Zappos will have the ability to have a big impact with PR. However, unless the company can create that kind of attention, then this can't be a big part of a recruiting strategy to scale to deliver wide coverage of results.

Metrics:

Metrics are a great way to track a recruiting departments to make decisions. Specifically:

1. Quality
2. Costs
3. Time-to-Fill
4. Quantity of Fills (for the Head of Staffing)

When it comes to planning strategies for recruiting, it is important to calculate metrics.  Implementing Free Demand Generation is a no-lose situation and should almost always be performed.

Here are example scenarios:

Semantic Search ROI:

• Labor: High Number of positions able to be filled per recruiter per year
• Costs: Low costs per fill. (Resume databases, free internet, semantic search product)

Organic (No costs):

• Labor: Number of positions able to be filled per recruiter per year. (Maybe lower fills-per-year than other methods)
• Costs: Zero

Paid Demand Generation:

• Labor: Number of positions able to be filled per recruiter per year
• Costs: Hard costs per fill. (Job postings, etc.)

This Semantic Search on Recruiting whitepaper gives details on improving metrics (Quality, Time-to-Fill, Costs) with that method.