Advice for Employers and Recruiters
Recruiting Can’t Be Strategic Until It Shifts to a Marketing Approach: Here’s How [white paper]
Anna Peters
The following are excerpts from “Recruiting Can’t Be Strategic Until It Shifts to a Marketing Approach: Here’s How”, written by talent strategy guru Dr. John Sullivan. Distributed to College Recruiter readers with permission from Dr. Sullivan.
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Recruiting must become like corporate marketing
There is currently little doubt among strategic recruiting leaders that recruiting must become more like corporate marketing. That’s because, among the hierarchy of business functions, marketing receives much stronger executive support and multiple times more funding than recruiting. If you’re curious why the corporate marketing approach is so much more strategic and impactful, it is because it emphasizes data-driven decision-making, market segmentation, powerful branding and being customer-centric.
When recruiting adopts a marketing approach, significant changes happen in employer branding, prospect attrition, and selling candidates. This, in turn, generates many benefits. They include a reduction in low impact recruiting efforts, while it simultaneously allows a firm to recruit top quality hires and innovators that it couldn’t attract using standard approaches. In fact, I estimate that this shift to a data-driven marketing approach could at some firms produce up to a 50% improvement in recruiting results.
1. A shift to data-driven decision-making
During the last century, corporate marketing and recruiting both made decisions based on historical practices and intuitive, creative hunches. However, with the digital age, marketing shifted to a data-based decision model, while recruiting has not. This shift requires recruiting leaders to begin making decisions on employer branding, recruitment advertising and job posting placement based solely on hard data.
The first step requires a firm to measure and quantify its quality of hire (i.e., the on-the-job performance of new-hires) in order to determine what works and what doesn’t. With this quality of hire measure, recruiting can eliminate actions that don’t positively impact its quality of hire. Recruiting must also adopt A/B testing in order to continually refine its current messaging.
2. Segmenting of your recruiting targets based on market research
A foundational element of corporate marketing is using market research to fully understand the many different segments of customers. That is because marketing is a lot like fishing, in that you must change your bait for each category of fish that you’re trying to catch.
In direct contrast, recruiting has a bad habit of “lumping” its standard targets together, as well as its diversity recruiting target groups together as if everyone was the same. Recruiting must begin to rely exclusively on market research to identify the distinct segments of your recruiting targets. And then to conduct further marketing research to learn the unique recruiting “attraction factors,” the turn off factors and the communications channels, methods and sources that are most effective for actually reaching each segment.
In order to maximize effectiveness, the recruiting messages to each segment must be customized and then updated when new market research data is received. Key market segments that must not be ignored include top performers, innovators and the currently employed that are not actively looking for a job.
About Dr. John Sullivan: Dr. John Sullivan is an internationally known HR thought-leader from the Silicon Valley. He specializes in strategic talent management solutions. He is a prolific author with over 900 articles and 10 books covering all areas of Talent Management. His ideas have appeared in every major business source including the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, HBR, the Financial Times and more. Fast Company called him the “Michael Jordan of Hiring”, Staffing.org called him “the father of HR metrics” and SHRM called him “One of the industries most respected strategists”. Dr. Sullivan is currently a Professor of Management at San Francisco State. Most importantly, he wants to hear and respond to your most pressing questions about advanced talent strategies. His articles can be found all over the Internet and on his popular website www.drjohnsullivan.com and on www.ERE.Net. He lives in Pacifica, California.
