For more insights on recruitment marketing best practices employed by the world’s leading organizations, get a free download of SmashFly’s Recruitment Marketing Report Card for the 2015 Fortune 500.
This September, SmashFly researched and evaluated every 2015 Fortune 500 organization’s career site 13 unique recruitment marketing practices. The research itself was pretty illuminating (see a snapshot here in the Report Card Infographic), especially as more organizations aggressively invest in better ways to attract, engage and convert candidate leads into applicants.
While I highly encourage you to check out all 13 practices in the report card and use the data to benchmark your recruitment marketing strategy, I want to focus on four best practices I consider crucial to how organizations find and attract the right talent to their organizations.
This will be a four-part series highlighting each integral best practice and how to use it in your recruitment marketing strategy. Up first: Employee Stories.
Employee Stories
Companies are increasingly trying to provide more transparency in their recruitment marketing strategies by leveraging employees and their unique stories in their messaging and on their career sites. Within the 2015 Fortune 500 companies, SmashFly found that 57% used employee stories on their career sites through either text or video. That’s a tremendous stat and probably one of the most encouraging findings in our report. However, that’s only Step 1. Step 2 is utilizing these stories better throughout the candidate experience journey.
As you look through career sites, employee stories are typically grouped together on their own page. A candidate interested in learning more will go to the employee stories page on the site and be able to consume content across various employee types and disciplines. This is great, but the problem is that candidates have to proactively find and choose to consume this content on their own. How can we get better at delivering this content directly to the candidate in their journey?
Employee stories are the best content we own in talent acquisition, and any good content marketer understands that great content should be repurposed four to five different times in your marketing program. So what can we do to repurpose, extend and highlight our employee stories? Here are a few ideas:
- Job Descriptions: Most candidates that come to the career site will view or search a job. However, very few will complete an application ― 74% drop off based on the most recent SmashFly data. So how do we make job descriptions more compelling? We include our videos and stories in the job description. Only 1% of job descriptions today include a video or image on career sites (found in our 2015 Fortune 500 research), so there’s a huge opportunity to stand out and deliver employee stories at the point that candidates decide to apply for a job position.
- Landing Pages: Most organizations are leveraging landing pages to deliver relevant content to specific job families and skills (think engineering page for engineering candidates). But while most only include sparse copy and targeted jobs, the most successful ones deliver employee stories and videos, highlighting “Why Work Here as a [CANDIDATE TYPE]?” and focusing on the compelling reasons targeted to that audience.
- Email Nurture Campaigns: Our research didn’t dive into email nurturing for the 2015 Fortune 500 companies, but this is another area to better leverage your customer stories. Say an engineering candidate joins your Talent Network: What content are you going to deliver to them? First, you should send a “thank you for joining” email and set expectations for what they will receive. But an even better next step? A great video on your engineering team and the interesting projects they are working on.
- Sourcer/Recruiter Talking Points: Whether in email or in phone calls, your recruiters and sourcers should know your employee stories and use them when talking with candidates. Create messaging for your team to use during these interactions and measure the success of when this messaging is used vs. more generic messaging. I assure you that employee stories will provide better interactions.
Most organizations put a lot of work into creating great employee story videos, but then they regulate them to a page that most candidates don’t see. As employers, let’s proactively get these employee stories in front of candidates at each and every touch point in their journey. This will help give candidates a clear picture of what it is like to work at your organization, providing a better, more personalized candidate experience as they decide on their next career opportunity. In turn, we ensure that we convert more candidates into applicants across our strategy.
Smashfly is a client of TalentCulture and has sponsored this post.
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