Social Media, blogs, videos, gated content, and whitepapers. While recruitment marketing trends and statistics highlight these as valuable means of content distribution or channels in your recruitment marketing and employer branding strategy, it's essential to understand that these vehicles for content, messaging, narrative, and branding are not tools.
Tools in recruitment marketing and employer branding frameworks are not playgrounds where job seekers can engage with who you are as an employer and the value proposition of your career opportunities. Instead, these devices or platforms help you build a suitable playground for the right job seeker.
Think of it another way: Recruitment marketing and employer branding tools help you build the right content to best engage with the right job seeker at the right time. Whether it's your ATS (applicant tracking system), reporting and metric review programs, or systems that allow you to track every step of the applicant's journey, today's recruitment teams have a variety of tools at their disposal to help them source the right candidates in a faster, more efficient, and cost-effective manner.
With this in mind, let's examine five tools to level up your recruitment marketing game to help you remain sleek, agile, and competitive.
Google Analytics
Any recruitment or talent acquisition team will tell you part of what hampers the metrics, reporting, sourcing, and other critical data necessary to understand better how candidates find a given employer or make them engage in submitting a resume or application. This is where Google Analytics may be one of the more potent tools in a talent director's arsenal to understand better where applicants come from and identify inefficiencies in this sourcing to leverage resources better to shore up those inefficiencies.
With a centralized reporting dashboard, easily generated reports, and the ability for multiple users to collaborate, Google Analytics can help you better understand:
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How, when, and through what searches candidates are finding your career website, blog, or other digital content.
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The strengths and weaknesses of your SEO principles to drive better searchability and more robust search returns.
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Better insights on where to allocate your content budget based on how candidates find you.
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Integrations with your ATS for a more complete, 360-degree view of the candidate's journey and application process from that initial click to the final submission of application materials.
Google Analytics will give you increased visibility regarding the entryway for the job seeker. Still, this wealth of data and information will help you tell a more convincing story regarding how well your recruitment content works and identify areas of collaboration and insight-sharing within your organization.
URL tracking codes
It's one thing to see a report that spells out how many clicks a job posting receives during a 30 or 60-day window. Yes, that can be instructive in understanding if job seekers are at least engaging with your job posting content. But it's another proposition to identify with 100 percent certainty from what source an application originated.
Like any sound recruitment strategy, your jobs are likely posted, cross-posted, or distributed on several websites, platforms, or even with third-party recruitment partners. Whether with Indeed, Facebook, Linkedin, or Glassdoor, understanding from which source you received an application (without relying on a candidate to self-disclose, which can sometimes amount to anecdotal evidence) is a nebulous or even impossible task.
URL tracking and conversion codes provide a more in-depth and multi-dimensional understanding of where a given application came from. These small codes (often called tags) are embedded into your ATS or on the backend of each job posting and essentially act as GPS to track where an application originated. Not only does this provide better insight into which of your content and job posting distribution channels are producing the most significant number or the highest-quality applications, but it also helps you best allocate resources in the future to capitalize on the most influential drivers of applicants.
Social media integrations
Yes, we just spent a couple of sentences at the beginning of this blog painting social media as something other than a recruitment tool, but stick with me for a moment. While social media itself should not be viewed as a recruitment tool, the ability to integrate a social media component into your ATS, CRM, or other workflow platform does quality as a tool in that it helps you share recruitment content and job postings and amplify your message to the greatest degrees possible.
The same applies to social media integrations on your website, blog, YouTube channel, or other places where you house content and engage with potential candidates. In addition, social media management platforms like HootSuite, Sendible, or SocialPliot, where you can compose, publish, edit, and engage with your social content from one centralized, dynamic dashboard, are also essential tools in reducing lead time and additional work for your recruitment team.
Reporting/tracking platforms
Recruitment is really about the organization and your ability to multi-task, execute a variety of concurrent or related actions, and maintain consistency and cohesion across several messaging or content platforms to ensure your dream candidate is engaging with the same information no matter where he/she comes in contact with your employer.
As such, reporting, tracking, and scheduling platforms are critical for today's top talent acquisition professionals in keeping as many plates spinning in the same direction and with the same velocity as possible.
While various pricey, sophisticated, and complex reporting and data-sharing tools exist, it's important to remember that sometimes, the simplest applications can cut through the most noise. This is where Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheets are your best friend. Easy to use, inexpensive, and fairly ubiquitous in today's business environment, Excel and Google Sheets give you the power to organize, collaborate, and share critical KPIs across various individuals for a more holistic look at your recruitment process and progress.
In terms of tracking content production, distribution, and more concrete recruitment efforts, platforms like Monday allow multiple users to interface at any given time on which tasks or actions demand the highest priority, who has ownership of these actions, and what the subsequent steps or activities should be to ensure the best ROI.
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