They have got the upper hand, with jobs being more abundant and all the offers coming in. Especially for candidates with a strong work experience background, they’ve probably been twice over courted by the same company, trying to meet their compensation and benefits expectations. Or even those who are still employed and being lured by other companies. Their current employers are looking for ways to offer more just to get them to stay on. So, if you’re a recruiter in this undoubtedly very competitive environment, you need to have an action plan to meet your own goals. You need to have a working and effective recruitment plan, a Recruitment Marketing Action Plan.

3+ SAMPLE Recruitment Marketing Action Plan

What IS a Recruitment Marketing Action Plan?  

Like every other industry, the recruitment business industry has its own set of targets to hurdle. That is, finding the right candidate to fit in a vacant position, completing the recruitment process within a given period, and in some cases, hiring as many as they can. This is where a recruitment marketing action plan comes in.

It is a strategic, proactive approach to get the company that you’re representing out there, in the employment space, and to make the company as visible and as attractive as possible to potential top job candidates. The recruitment marketing action plan is a document that contains steps to reach out to your target candidates and eventually turn them into signed-up employees! How to do that? Well, read on.

Recruitment Marketing Strategy Mix

With the competition as wide as the job market, as a recruiter, you should have some well-thought-of tricks to up your recruiting ante game. One of the best ways to do so is to make sure that your strategies adhere to a SMART goal method. Meaning, your strategies should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Especially relevant. Even though the time-old traditional ways of recruiting still work, the best way of going after your job candidates is to use recruitment channels or media where they are highly interested and actively engaging. Or at least, channels that immediately catch their attention. In this read, we’ve come up with some recruitment marketing strategy tips that could help you and your recruitment team catch those ideal candidates – that is, before that other recruitment agency does!

Get that Website Out There: The online world. Sounds broad and daunting, doesn’t it? It shouldn’t be, once you know where your target market is. The online and digital platforms are a good avenue for targeting your prospective candidates. Gone are the days of perusing newspapers for employment opportunities. Well, job ads still do exist, especially for skilled labor job vacancies. But 90% of employment hirings are posted online, either through recruitment websites or through social media and social networking newsfeeds, traffic platforms. So, the next best thing as a recruiter is to spend more time (maybe more budget) creating and developing your company’s presence in the online marketplace as the next best place to work for! When it comes to building an online presence through a website, if a recruitment agency is an internal department of a company, also known in human resources as the talent acquisition team, oftentimes the recruiting team works together with the marketing team in creating that website that’s appealing to customers, clients, partners, and even job seekers. The website should have that shout-out that calls for the company as being the greatest workplace on the planet. To do so, having a review and feedback section on the company’s website would be a great start. Aim for five-star reviews. To make it all the more credible, gather positive and glowing comments and recommendations both from current and past employees. If you are a third-party recruiter, optimize your online recruitment website by making sure that all the details of the company and the position are provided and can easily be accessed by the job seeker. Your website should be easy to navigate and should be user-friendly. Utilizing SEO marketing, search engine optimization marketing is also a good strategy. SEO marketing drives traffic to your recruitment page. It’s ensuring that your website is the top search when it comes to keyword search for employment.Go Mobile: Almost everyone is on the go. So, what better way to catch up than to go mobile, too? If you have your recruitment website up and running, it’s also the best strategy to make your website as mobile-friendly as friendly. Mobile-friendly means that the website is designed and accessed the same way as it is on a regular PC to a mobile phone. Whatever you see on a PC version is exactly what you’ll be seeing and using in a mobile phone version as well. Third-party recruitment companies even went as far as creating their mobile apps. When you have already established your audience and traffic, such as JobStreet and LinkedIn, creating a mobile app is the next best thing to do since you already have job seekers and job headhunters looking for a one-stop venue where they could search through job postings and job applicants, all in one place. It makes it more convenient for companies, not to mention saves them money, to utilize these job mobile apps to post their job hirings because of these recruitment companies’ established followers, audiences, or app users. The mobile app makes the recruitment and application process easy, too. For job seekers, they can apply for as many jobs as they want in one single avenue at any time. For headhunters, they can be able to filter through all of the applicants, their resumes, qualifications, and skills, as much as they want.Leveraging Social Media: Sounds like a cliche at this point, but yes, social media or social networking platforms are powerful channels when it comes to spreading the word. If you need to get the word out that the company that you’re representing is hiring, post it on social media. Also known as social media/network advertising, this type of paid advertising is very advantageous if you want to target advertising. For instance, Facebook ads work through user profiling. When you avail of Facebook ads, you have the option to filter out your target audience according to location, preference, age, gender, and so on. What Facebook will then do is to send out your job postings to these user audiences, ensuring that your ad will appear in their newsfeeds. But it doesn’t just stop there. You need to ensure that your social media content is interesting and appealing enough to make them want to click on that banner link and go for that apply button!Employ Influencers: Employing influencers, or brand ambassadors is a good strategy to promote a company and its workplace environment. What makes it a good strategy is that these influencers already have an established following. Same way as when celebrities promote product brands, their fans or followers tend to imitate, do, or follow whatever it is they’re doing or saying. So if a famous vlogger showed a video clip of the company, saying how great it is to be working for this company, and eventually saying the words “apply now”, you’d be sure to get good traffic of applicants straight to your hiring portal!

FAQs

Coming Up with a Recruitment Marketing Action Plan

Having a recruitment marketing action plan is proof that a company, a recruitment agency, or a talent acquisitions team is not just about all talk, but about actions as well. The action plan contains a series of steps taken to strategically position the company as the best employer there is. After all, that’s how recruiters send out the message to potential candidates: work for this company, and we promise you the working compensation and benefits that you’ve always wanted.

There’s always that haggling, of course, over salary rates and everything else in between. But that’s another story. The ultimate purpose of having a documented action plan is that you have a guide at the end of the day that pinpoints to you what you should do and what not to do when it comes to marketing recruitment strategies. Although there’s no strict format when it comes to creating a recruitment marketing action plan, still, to make it effective, the action plan should at least contain the following essential elements.

  • 1. Executive Summary

    Recruitment is an essential part of any kind of business trade. And in every business planning, recruiting good talents is always part of a business’s operation. The executive summary section explains the kind of the purpose of the company. It first gives an overview of what the company is all about, its operations, its products, goods, and services. Then it delves into the mission and vision of the recruitment marketing action plan or the goals and objectives of the action plan. Executive summaries oftentimes contain a mission and a vision statement. A mission statement states the reason or purpose of the business, in this case, for the action plan. A vision statement describes what the business hopes to achieve out of its recruitment action plan, usually in a given time frame.

  • 2. Market Analysis

    Successful recruitment agencies, or recruiters, don’t just dive into recruiting without understanding their target market. That is what a market analysis is all about. A marketing analysis takes a look at the current market trend when it comes to job employment, hiring, and qualified candidates. It also checks and looks into the profile of competing hiring agencies and their hiring process. More often, the purpose of a market analysis is to research the profile of the target market potential candidates, looking into its demographics. Doing a demographics classification is particularly helpful when you’re creating advertisements so that you’ll know how to attract and capture your target audience’s attention. Doing a SWOT analysis could also help the recruitment team understand where the hiring company stands in the current market. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats aspects of the hiring company. Strengths are what features of the hiring company stand out from other competing businesses. Weaknesses are those factors that limit a business’s success, or areas of a business that need further support. Opportunities are those factors that the company can leverage to boost its success, especially in terms of employment. And threats are those factors that could potentially harm or put at risk the business’s operation, especially when it comes to hiring.

  • 3. Action Plans

    Action plans are akin to market strategies. It’s all about positioning the hiring company in the right way. Action plans are created based upon goals and objectives and are time-bound. We have mentioned above some examples of recruiting marketing strategies that are very much effective and relevant in today’s market. In this section of the recruitment marketing action plans, each step is carefully itemized along with a deadline as to when the recruitment and hiring process should be completed. Businesses rely on how fast recruiters fill in vacant positions because, after all, those vacancies represent an integral part of a business’s operation, hence, the deadline should be set.

  • 4. Monitor Recruitment Progress

    To know if the recruitment marketing strategies are effective is to track and monitor its progress based on the given deadline. Tracking could be done on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Doing a tally of how many candidates have signed up for a job offer is a good start. If you’ve monitored that you’re still far from meeting the number of signed-up job candidates, then you need to make some revisions to your action plan and implement some more aggressive strategies. After all, at the end of the day, recruitment is also all about numbers.

FAQs

What are some of the benefits of having a recruitment marketing action plan?

More than just a roadmap of dos and don’ts when it comes to recruitment strategies, a recruitment marketing action plan sets the tone of urgency to accomplish the goals and objectives of the recruiting team, which are: to recruit and hire the right candidates for the right positions, and to recruit them at the soonest possible time. Another benefit is it identifies market strategies that allow the company to position itself appropriately and aggressively within the job market. Another is that it can enable proper planning on how to specifically target the right candidates for the vacant positions.

What are some important factors to consider when hiring or recruiting for job openings?

As a recruiter, you cannot just hire any random John Doe you come across. There’s a deeper thought process that goes into selecting the right candidates. Some of the factors that need to be considered when selecting the right candidate are educational background; work experience; personality and characteristics traits, if suitable for the job at hand; self-confidence; and/or specific skill set needed for the job.

What are some of the recruitment methods?

Recruitment methods vary from company to company, and from skill qualifications to job requirements. Recruitment methods over the years have to keep up with the times and be innovative when it comes to the search and selection process. Some of the popular recruitment methods being used are direct advertising (posting through social media, career sites, news media, publications, et cetera); talent pool database (where previous applicants who were not hired are kept on file, and whose records are pulled up when new positions are open); referrals, both internal or external; and/or through acquisition via internships or apprenticeships.

You have probably seen a lot of recruitment for-hire actions going through your social media feeds. Oftentimes, the appearances of these posts become all too many that it becomes a bit irksome at some point. But there are also times because of the way they created their recruitment ads that it appeared so enticing to a reader that you click on the banner ad link, leading you on to the website that’s telling you all about the job that made you think twice about your current job. Just the act of clicking on that ad shows how effective the recruitment marketing action plan was if it was able to get your interest and lead you through the next site! 

Want to find out more about how to do that? Download our recruitment marketing action plan templates, and start planning your way towards a successful recruitment activity!