Why Recruiters (Salespeople) Need to Think More Like Marketers
There is always a lot going on in our world of recruitment, it’s an industry that is constantly evolving. As of late, there has been a major focus on the similarities between recruitment and marketing. According to ICIMS, 86% of recruiters believe the recruitment industry is becoming more and more like marketing, and that’s unlikely to change any time soon. Due to these similarities, we recruiters need to think more like marketers in order to succeed in finding the perfect candidates and delivering excellent results.
Why It’s Important for Recruiters to Channel Their Inner Marketers
A recruiter's job is to find, screen and attract applicants for available positions for the hiring company. There are different ways of attracting candidates, and a variety of techniques are used depending on the type of person needed and the type of job that’s being hired for. Recruiters need to stand out from others, highlight the benefits of working for their client and ‘sell’ the role itself. As recruiters we also need to appeal to and engage clients or companies to hire for, which requires them to demonstrate their skills in how to best to ‘market’ and ‘sell’ their clients opportunities. This is something that marketers do on a daily basis, which is why recruiters can benefit from thinking like marketing professionals.
A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that a recruiter is merely finding people a job, but that’s not all, we are also ‘selling’ the job, the company and the workplace culture. With so many jobs out there, it’s just as important to sell the company and the opportunity as a whole. This is similar to how a marketer promotes a brand or company, as well as the product or service itself. The same way a marketer’s job is to gain a customer’s attention, a recruiter’s job is to gain a candidate’s attention.
The Marketing Techniques Recruiters Can Benefit from
As a recruiter, the aim is always to find the most suitable candidates for our clients. The goal is to do this accurately and as efficiently as possible. Recruitment is a competitive marketplace, and we need to utilise a variety of marketing techniques to deliver these results.
- Useful Engagement with target audiences (Valuable content & discussion - sharing valuable news / articles etc)
To have access to the widest pool of talent, recruiters must engage the passive candidates (candidates who are in the market – but might not necessarily be looking for a new role) as well as the active candidates (who are actively on the market – currently looking) and we use social media and networking to reach out to as wide an audience as possible to find the best people for the job. We do this by sharing useful and valuable content, engaging the best people in conversation about what we have to offer. This is marketing in action, as it involves us sharing information to ‘sell’ a company and job to all potential employees.
- Testimonials proving our value are an important indicator of your abilities and build trust in your product (you!)
The testimonials you get are a vital part of helping candidates decide whether to engage with you, to trust you with helping them find that new opportunity. So, it’s crucial for us to harvest these testimonials and showcase them as we deliver an excellent service. Your personal brand recognition helps people to know that you are reliable and trustworthy; people trust people and not brands and therefore we as recruiters should work hard to show our credentials.
- Listening to your audience (Understanding your Candidate’s and Client’s needs)
It’s also important for recruiters to get to know the type of candidate they want to attract on a much deeper level than is achievable by simply reading an array of CVs and cover letters. It requires excellent communication and deep listening skills to really understand the audience (in this case a client’s requirements or a candidate's needs). Similar to how a marketer needs to understand what drives their target audience, we as recruiters need to understand what exactly our candidate/client is looking for so we can deliver successfully. Understanding exactly what the candidate is looking for by deconstructing the ideal candidate, a recruiter has a better chance of sourcing individuals who are likely to be the right fit for the hiring company.
Recruiters, just like marketers, need to define their audience in a clear way. We need to provide valuable content to help our audience engage with us, so that we can get to know them better.
There are a lot of similarities between the way a marketer connects with customers, and the way recruiters should connect with candidates (or clients). Therefore it’s important for us to become more like a marketer, using the techniques that work in marketing and utilise them in our work to find the perfect candidates for our clients.