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Want to save time, improve the candidate experience and fill your talent pool with more relevant candidates? Then get started with recruitment marketing automation. It will minimize the time required of your recruitment (marketing) team and optimize your recruitment results. In this blog you will find 4 practical steps and numerous examples so you can get started with recruitment marketing automation yourself.

What is recruitment marketing automation?

Recruitment marketing automation is - very simply put - as much automated a way of recruitment marketing as possible. With marketing automation, you ensure that all facets of your employer branding and recruitment marketing are seamlessly connected and largely automated with each other.

With recruitment marketing automation you improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your recruitment marketing, offer a better candidate experience and make it easier to fill your talent pool with candidates who are interesting for your organization. This in turn will reduce your time-to-hire and cost-per-hire.

Want to learn more about recruitment marketing automation? Read our blog "What is recruitment marketing automation?" for more explanation and real-world examples.

Getting started with recruitment marketing automation yourself

Step 1: Map the candidate journey

You start by creating an overview. In what ways do you as an employer get past a candidate? This is different for each employer and sometimes even for each target group. Often these elements at least recur:

  • Employer branding content that ensures awareness and spreads your employer story;
  • Job marketing, such as using job boards and social media campaigns, to bring your job openings to the right audience;
  • Your application process, where you interact intensively with candidates in interviews, emails and apps.

Step 2: Connect the different parts of the candidate journey

The candidate journey - simply put - consists of 3 stages:

  • Awareness: candidates encounter your employer brand for the first time and start to remember it.
  • Consideration: candidates become interested in your organization and see you as an attractive employer.
  • Conversion: candidates take action and contact you or apply for one of your jobs.

At each stage, you offer different content to your target audience. To get the most out of your recruitment marketing and automations, it is important that these different components become one. By connecting all the touchpoints together, you will create a logical and relevant candidate journey with the final destination being the hiring process.

To connect the separate candidate journey components, start by setting up storylines. The message in the initial phase of the candidate journey connects logically to the next phase and so you build on to the subsequent phases. In this way you create a single story instead of separate messages and content.

For example, you can start in the awareness phase with a general work-at-home video and offer more depth in the consideration phase, for example by bringing a successful project to the candidate's attention. Finally, you tell the candidate (in the conversion phase) that you have a vacancy and encourage candidates to respond. In this way you guide talent through the funnel as it were.

Each element in your storyline has its own landing page on your work-at-home site. In the awareness phase you can refer to your homepage, while in the conversion phase you link logically to the vacancy page. This way you connect your website visitors to the various elements of your storyline.

You can reinforce this effect with retargeting ads. You can approach the visitors of your work-at-home site again with relevant content and refer them to the website again, so that you remain top-of-mind and candidates become increasingly enthusiastic about you as an employer.

Next, you can add lead generation to your campaigns and/or work-at-home site, so that you get in touch with talent in an accessible way. Because not many candidates apply the traditional way anymore. The interest you have generated, you want to use and nurture. This can be done by giving candidates who are not yet ready to apply an easy way to make contact, for example via Skype. By the way, that nurturing also applies to candidates you reject now. They may be interesting in the future - if they have moved on or if you have another vacancy. With re-activation methods, you keep in touch with your 'silver medalists' (as these candidates are called) and your talent pool is continuously filled with relevant candidates.

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Step 3: Automate

Now is the time to set up automations. With automations you minimize the efforts for the recruitment (marketing) team, while at the same time improving the candidate experience. Win-win!

The possibilities for automations in recruitment marketing are huge and are increasing due to technological developments. We highlight 6 options for automations for you:

  • Always be visible to your target audience without worry. With the right tooling, you can plan your employer branding campaigns up to a year in advance, including content changes. So set & forget! This way you can be sure that you have a continuous presence and plant a seed in the minds of talent, so that they think of you first when considering a switch.
  • Automatically promote vacancies, for example by automatic forwarding to job boards and the automated activation of vacancy campaigns on the various social media networks. Of course you decide how far you want to go with this type of automation. Do you want the system to do the work fully automatically or do you want to decide for yourself how and what? It's all possible. You set it up properly once and then you don't have to spend much time on it anymore.
  • If you're one of the lucky ones who still receives a lot of applications, you can automate the pre-selection process with screening questions or assessments. By asking about relevant experience, skills or certifications at the very first stage and automatically processing the answers, recruiters can immediately see which candidates are the most interesting and only need to pick up the quality applications.
  • Speak to more candidates by offering them an accessible way to contact you, for example with a whatsapp pop-up on your work-at-home site. This automates your sourcing, as it were, because candidates now come to you instead of the other way around. In addition, you also speak to candidates who are not yet ready to take the big step of applying and you make the process more equal.
  • With automations you can easily maintain contact with talent. Automate lead nurturing campaigns via, for example, Whatsapp or e-mail and ensure that you build on the relationship with talent. You can think of the automated sending of a 'behind the scenes' video about the department in which the candidate has shown interest, so that you keep the contact warm and further enthuse the candidate. With lead nurturing you create a talent pool with engaged candidates that you can draw from for future vacancies. That shortens your time-to-hire considerably!
  • Re-activate silver medalists (candidates you have previously rejected, but are still interesting to your organization at a later date) by making automated contact with them. This also creates a strong talent pool. Keep the AVG guidelines in mind when doing this, though. Ask explicit permission from candidates to keep their data, so you can approach them again for future vacancies.

Step 4: Evaluate and optimize your process on an ongoing basis

The job market is changeable, candidates change in their behavior and the longer you run your automations, you learn from what you do. That is why we advise you to always take a critical look at your process and the results.

It is smart to take a step back every 2 to 3 months and analyze your results in order to learn from them. If you use a fixed KPI framework, you can easily compare figures and quickly gain new insights from your data.

The results of recruitment marketing automation don't lie

Stedin generates an average of 60 applications per month for challenging IT jobs. QuaRijn recruits 300 new healthcare employees in one year. At Dura Vermeer, they are using recruitment marketing automation to fill their 230 vacancies within the foreseeable future. 

"We want Dura Vermeer to stay top of mind for the target audience, at the right time, through the right channels. MrWork helps us both set up a tightly-knit strategy and make execution smooth and scalable. If you look at our figures, you see that the automated campaigns from the MrWork platform contribute to the final application in 85% of cases."

Robine de Graaf, Manager of Online Media at Dura Vermeer

All thanks to the use of recruitment marketing automation. So it definitely pays to get started with these steps and make recruitment marketing automation part of your recruitment marketing strategy.

Sparring together on how to successfully deploy recruitment marketing automation for your organization? Schedule a demo and together we'll work through these 4 steps to custom integrate recruitment marketing automation into your way of working!

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