What does success in a recruitment campaign look like?
This is a very important question to figure out before you start your campaign.
What is success in a recruitment campaign?
To make sense about successful recruitment campaign we first need to separate the campaign from the selection process. Often times these two are seen as if they were the same side of the coin.
Recruitment campaign is marketing, communication and advertising pressed into a specific timeframe making it a campaign.
The selection process is what happens when talent acquisition starts to process the applications to select which applicants are invited further into the selection process.
A successful recruitment campaign means the marketing, communication and advertising succeeded in delivering their part in this project of signing an employment contract with a person or with people who match the hiring criteria.
Read or listen to: “How to measure success in hiring?”
Why is it important to define the goals and objectives for the campaign?
This is simple. Unless you know what success looks like in your campaign, you are probably unable to recognize any signs of probable success or lack of success during and at the end of the campaign.
Fortunately, these days we are talking about online marketing that is 100% measurable. Whichever marketing objectives are assigned to the campaign, they can be tracked and traced with analytics.
What is the difference between a recruitment campaign and recruitment process?
I know you are thinking now: “Why is she asking and answering such an obvious question?”
I agree with you. The difference is so obvious it is like black to white or red to green or paper to rock.
Yet, very often when a recruitment process fails, the fingers are pointed at the marketing campaign. Sometimes quite rightly, but often times because it is easier to blame marketing than other factors that hurt our hearts more.
So that’s why I’m going to state the difference:
Recruitment marketing campaign is to the vacancy the same as a promotional campaign is to a good deal on sale for a temporary period.
Recruitment marketing campaign is to the vacancy the same as a promotional campaign is to a good deal on sale for a temporary period.
When the campaign is the same as the promotional activity, the selection process is the same as the buying process to the consumer.
The role of the marketing part is to generate attention and awareness, get people to click on the advert and create the desire to buy.
Does the marketing part guarantee 100% sales? Of course it doesn’t!
What guarantees 100% sales is an outstanding offer for a higher than expected quality easily accessible without any barriers to start and finish the purchase process.
Read or listen to: “Goals, objectives and metrics in hiring” >>
How to measure success in a recruitment campaign?
#1 Setting measurable objectives
First you need to set measurable objectives to your recruitment marketing campaign. This is important if you don’t know for sure what success looks like in a recruitment marketing campaign.
What you can measure is what marketing can do.
For example:
- Generated traffic from an ad to the job post.
- Time spent on the job post (= landing page).
- Returning traffic to the job post.
- Clicks to the apply now -call to action on the job post.
- Clicks to other content links on the job post or in the campaign.
- Bounce rate from the job post (if on your own website).
- Quality of applicants in relation to what was called for in the job post and other campaign content.
#2 Tracking goals through the campaign for optimization purposes
Data-driven marketing means we use data, as in read analytics already during the marketing campaign to track and trace how the marketing works. This is the only way to take action if there are any red lights.
#3 Analyzing campaign data against the set objectives once the campaign is over
After the end of the recruitment marketing campaign, you want to pull all your available data and make an analysis of how the entire campaign worked.
Bear in mind, there are a lot of data available. That’s why your set measurable objectives are so golden here. The only data you really need to worry about is the data giving you information about the objectives you set for this campaign.
Marketing is so great because we can truly track everything. If your campaign met your marketing objectives, the campaign itself was a success in marketing terms.
If your recruitment fails, but marketing worked, what else is there to detect?
If the recruitment process failed, yet marketing worked, then you need to analyze other influencing factors to understand what is hindering your hiring success.
The most typical factors for hiring failure are:
- The advertising campaign was not directed to the final landing page and the candidate was lost somewhere in between.
- The recruitment system was not user friendly. Leaving an application seemed too much of work.
- The application period was too short. There wasn’t enough time to notice the vacancy, prepare a good application and leave it by deadline.
- The hiring criteria changed on the way. What was called for in the job post was different than the actual selection criteria.
- The selection process took way too long. Applicants logged out half way to competing processes.
- The company has negative reputation as an employer and a place of work.
- The company is generally not that attractive and the asking is out of proportion.
#51 If the campaign did not kill your hiring success, what did?
Did this happen to you?
You finally got the opportunity to do a proper marketing campaign to support the recruitment process.
You thought everything went well in the campaign!
The hiring manager disagreed. They said they did not get any more applications than usual, yet paid a lot more for the campaign.
Now you feel like you failed, but don’t really know how to stand up your ground. You’re afraid you’ll never get another opportunity like this again. At least, not at this place of work.
In this week’s episode of Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast we’re going to talk about what are the typical events that kill hiring success and when the marketing part is to blame and when not.
Episode-length: 40:47 min
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