In the world of recruitment today, many organisations are looking much deeper into their recruitment strategy and asking – is this fit for the future? Many of the partner functions like marketing, sales and customer success, have learned that their clients go through a complex set of decisions in the lead up to buying a product or service. Customer success has realised that throughout the life cycle of them being a customer, there are more complex decisions on whether to continue using the same or moving to another provider. Is it time for recruitment functions to realise the same?
Thanks to Google, information is much more readily available today than ever before. Customers have become empowered by this information and can make informed decisions. Along with this, competitors are becoming smarter and smarter in acquiring your customers through marketing and sales.
The same is happening to talent attraction. Organisations have realised that changing career is often a complex decision. By looking at talent attraction as a funnel, you can ensure a potential employee receives all the information they need to make a complex decision.
To be able to deliver the correct information, or content to people at the right time we need consider the funnel and what content people need at each stage of the funnel.
The funnel
A talent attraction funnel has four key stages:
- Awareness – Becoming aware of your brand and the jobs available
- Education – Learning about your business and the mutual value that can be added
- Consideration – Considering the facts of the job and whether their desires are met by the opportunity
- Decision – Apply / Accept offer…or not!
Content for each stage
Now we know the different stages of the funnel we need to deliver content to people to help the progress to the decision stage. Providing the right content will help them learn much more about your company and will help them answer some of the below questions:
- What is the company culture?
- Will I add value to the company?
- What value will the company add to my career or personal life?
- Do I believe in the value of the services offered by the company?
- Do they look after their people?
- Will I fit in with the team?
Awareness stage
During the awareness stage, you can take a total addressable market view. Hence, your plan should be to present your brand and opportunities to everyone of interest. For example, if you were a local accountancy firm, you would want everyone working in the accountancy sector to see your brand and to be offered the opportunity to engage with it. This is the top of the funnel and you can approach the market in various ways:
- Social media
- Direct email
- Blog
- Newsletter – Digital or offline
- Sector specific events
- And the list goes on
Education
The education phase is where you have the opportunity to educate your audience in the different facets of your organisation and how you would add value to their career. Two of the most effective and engaging ways of doing this are storytelling and person to person engagement:
- Day in the life of stories
- Employee success stories
- Career progress stories
- Graduate stories
- Apprenticeship stories
- Stories about social responsibility
- Opportunities to engage with your employees at events, by phone or on social media
Consideration
As a person is considering employment with your company, they will be asking themselves lots of questions like the ones at the start of this section. Our job as recruitment marketers is to answer these questions truthfully through engaging content. As a result, we attract the right decision from the right people and, if the answers we provide through content are not what the candidate wants to hear, then they are not likely to be right for your business.
Decision
The is the easiest part, you have influenced the right decisions from the right people by engaging them with honest content. Now you need to continue the engagement as they progress through your recruitment and onboarding processes so that you retain the integrity of the stories you have told.
Funnel Intelligence
For the funnel to be truly successful, you want to understand where each person is in the funnel so that you can deliver relevant content. You can do some of this manually through link tracking with services like Mail Chimp and Bit.ly. And, if you would like to know the methods I use, then connect with me on LinkedIn.
