The current recruitment market is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Digital and tech skills are in high demand, but there aren’t enough candidates to fill the roles. Therefore, employers need to sell themselves more than ever before. In order to be successful and compete against the big players in tech, scaling tech businesses need to adapt their recruitment approach to focus on raising brand awareness and excitement around your current vacancies.
This means tech recruitment and the role of recruiters is becoming much more like marketing. Recruiters have to sell a business to a candidate more than ever. Focusing on its unique selling points and strengths to convince tech candidates to take the role over another in the same that marketing professionals promote products and services. When positions are equal in terms of salary, development opportunities and the role itself, employer branding will differentiate one employer from the next. As the tech recruitment landscape becomes saturated, the attitude to recruiting needs to change. Recruiters can no longer assume that candidates will want to work for them and be desperate to take the role as in previous years. In a candidate-driven market, recruiters need to work harder to promote their open positions, which means tech recruitment is becoming more and more like marketing.
Recruitment marketing is no new concept, but in the current market, it has to work harder than ever. With more roles available to tech talent than ever, your recruitment marketing efforts have to step up a level if you’re going to stand out to top candidates and tempt them to join your organisation.
However, recruitment marketing isn’t always as well respected as marketing in many organisations, even though it’s just as important. Part of this reason is that people think that the employer brand and recruitment marketing strategy is the responsibility of the recruitment, HR or talent teams. This means it’s not always as well promoted as it deserves.
We’re investigating how you can market your employer brand properly and embrace the new marketing-Esque recruitment style that will help you appeal to top talent.
Make your employer brand part of the discovery process
The truth is, unless you’re one of the biggest players in tech, candidates probably haven’t heard of your brand, and that’s probably not the reason they found you. The brand doesn’t necessarily exist at the discovery phase, and it certainly doesn’t influence whether candidates find your roles or not. Most candidates find out about opportunities through tech recruiters, job adverts on job boards or social media, they then go through the hiring process, and a decision is made. The employer brand may influence the decision if a candidate is choosing between multiple opportunities, but it doesn’t often play a role in discovering opportunities.
If you want to amplify your employer brand’s reach, you need to ensure your tech recruiters are ready to promote it. If your tech recruitment team are the people reaching out to candidates for initial conversations, they need to express enthusiasm for your employer brand right away. This should be the point that candidates learn about your business, your values, your overall mission and the culture they can expect. All recruiters should be getting candidates with similar mindsets excited about the employer brand from the first time they speak to them, and this doesn’t mean saying it’s a “social office” and has a “great culture”. Every employer will claim to have a great company culture, so instead, look at your recruitment marketing materials and Employee Value Proposition (EVP) to discover what truly makes your workplace unique.
Similarly, you need to ensure your job adverts promote your employer brand as much as possible. Don’t just talk about the role, but mention the culture, what’s driving your startup and other emotional drivers that could capture the attention of skilled, like-minded candidates.
Prioritise the right touchpoints
If you need to hire tech talent urgently, there’s no use in overhauling your EVP or building a new careers site. These are bigger projects that will help your overall recruitment strategy but will take longer to implement. They won’t affect applications instantly. If your recruiters are stretched and need support, it won’t help. Instead, your hiring teams need to think like marketers once again. Think about where candidates spend time and where they’re most likely to discover your open vacancies or employer branding.
Marketers work on touchpoints, and it’s reported it takes around 8 to make a sale. If you’re looking to entice talent, you need to mirror these marketing touchpoints thinking of the applicant journey and how they find jobs. Marketing touchpoints are methods and modes of communication between a company and customer; they could be online ads, emails or face to face discussions. Therefore, you need to ensure that you’re using the proper channels and all of these reflect your employer brand, whether it’s a recruiter having an initial chat or an email update.
If you wish to see tech recruitment success in 2022, you need to consider where your employer brand is visible and how you can communicate it at every possible touchpoint. This will help you to remain top of mind for candidates and stand a better chance of receiving applications.
Look at the data
One reason marketing is so ahead of recruitment marketing is its use of data. It makes no sense that companies are willing to use the same tools and tactics for advertising jobs as they are their product or service, but they’re less inclined to look at the data and learn from it. Recruitment marketing seems scared to fail. It’s as though a budget is set, and you have to hire someone, no exceptions. However, marketing is about trial and error. It’s about experimenting to understand what works and what doesn’t. Some messaging and visuals resonate with an audience; others don’t. If you don’t try, you’ll never know.
Data can provide insight and learn from any mistakes or successes. It can help you determine the best online platforms to aid tech recruitment, where tech talent is located, how you should utilise your budgets in future, and so much more. You can measure the candidate experience to understand where candidates are dropping out of the recruitment process and perfect your tech recruiting. An insight-driven approach to recruitment marketing in tech recruitment could ensure a greater level of success and a more significant amount of creativity to help your brand stand out.
Get specific
If you have people trying to sell roles, you need to educate them about the end result. Regardless of whether you’re relying on an RPO provider or in-house talent team, tech recruitment in 2022 will require an in-depth knowledge of your employer brand and what your workplace can offer. Generic messaging will attract generic talent. Therefore, you need to ensure your EVP is specific and detailed and that your recruitment marketers, recruiters and interview panels know the details inside out. The quality and depth of your employer brand messaging will determine the quality of hire and their suitability for your business. Much like advertising a product, there are thousands of job vacancies currently out there, and your messaging needs to stand out if you’re going to get attention. A marketing tagline has to be catchy and creative. If all products sounded the same, there would be little to no variation for customers to base their choice upon. The same goes for your recruitment marketing. If you sound the same as every other tech business out there, why should tech candidates choose you?
It’s clear that as employer branding becomes the differentiating factor for candidates and the tech recruitment landscape becomes more hectic than ever, the attitude to recruiting needs to change. Recruiters can no longer assume that candidates will want to work for them but need to work harder to promote these roles. Tech recruitment is becoming more and more like marketing for an employer.
It means mindsets need to alter, and so do attitudes to work. However, it’s exciting and means that recruitment marketing can really come to the fore in 2022.
Talent Works specialise in helping scaling tech businesses to build engaging employer brands and innovative recruitment marketing campaigns. As a strategic recruitment partner, our dedicated teams help some of the most exciting tech scaleups to refine their tech recruitment strategy.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you, contact us.
