If you build it, they might not come. Let's let that sink in.
The truth is, programmatic job advertising is the biggest portion of your recruiting budget. To make the most of it, you may have overhauled, among other things, your career website. That's great, and important. However, if the goal for 2020 is to maintain the status quo, your earlier efforts may be for naught.
Rather than propel you to win the talent war, a failing media strategy may cause you fall behind in the talent wars and actually put your hiring plans at risk.
Upcoming job advertising trends
It's important to be aware of, and be on the cusp of, this year's job advertising trends. With 2019 coming to an end, it's time to explore and understand recruitment marketing channels you may not be thinking of. After all, strategic media planning can help you reallocate your hiring budget to better performing strategies while streamlining and simplifying the talent acquisition process overall.
It starts with leveraging your media, with the goal of driving candidates into your employer branding experience. That includes passive, quality job seekers who need proactive nurturing. Once you drive them into the funnel, you can re-market to them so they take action.
The role of technology
Enter the importance of a sound media strategy. You need to talk to the right people in the right way. Technology is extremely important at this stage since it empowers you with portable, relevant data that can be applied to your career website and beyond. It lets you zero in on right-fit talent when you re-market, to including for niche markets with the goal of attracting quality talent.
Of course, as essential as quality tech is, you need a partner who goes beyond that. One who knows your employer brand inside and out. One who will dig deep and find innovative ways to meet people where they're at even when there's no technology involved.
Say you've identified a local church as a treasure trove of talent. Your media partner needs to be willing to try new things, and to encourage you to do the same. That may mean putting an ad in that church bulletin, later working tech-powered media magic alongside.
Examining a real-life success story
Our client, Ecolab, comes to mind as a case in point. As the global leader in water, hygiene and energy technology and services, it needed to bring its media into the modern day. While it once featured rigid, inflexible media contracts with a lack of analytics to shape its hiring strategy, Ecolab switched to Workday and enlisted Experience Cloud to achieve flexible, automated media optimization. By using programmatic media to inform decision-making, its recruiters had more bandwidth, its budget was transparent and efficiently allocated, and its globalized contracts were centralized and decided upon based on performance.
When it came to its brand recognition, Ecolab could be called the biggest name you've never heard of. Given issues of perception, job seekers were not necessarily aware of the company, nor did they think of applying to the cross-section of jobs that needed to be filled. That was a problem.
So, we helped shape and effectively tell its brand story while rethinking its career site. Now, Ecolab tells its story through employees eyes, offers personalization, and utilizes enhanced job descriptions to boost awareness and obtain valuable data from potential candidates. Then, it serves them automated, relevant content to engage, nurture and convert targeted audiences, effectively dropping them further into the funnel so hiring is an attainable goal.
