How Recruitment Marketers Can Use Data to Boost Success

“The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.” – Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web.

It’s a strange thing to see ourselves living in such a competitive world where there are so many job openings and so many candidates. But, even with all these options, you might find recruitment is made harder. There is simply too much noise and clutter to cut through. Having said that, we are seeing an interesting trend with market-savvy recruitment marketers. They are using data insights to stand apart from the crowd and tap into the rich spots of the market.

These recruitment marketers are taking this path because they have realized that the traditional InMail message you sent to candidates via LinkedIn is less than likely to pique their interest. Think about it, in this day and age, the candidates we see want more than just a job or a call to hire. They want a synergy of culture, values and a passion for the job that rivals their own. It’s more about building a career than just getting another job. As we mentioned earlier, jobs are like drops of water in the ocean, there is plenty to go around. In this blog, we ponder the query of data insights, the role it plays in recruitment marketing and how to implement it better for the ideal results.

Table of Contents

Move Away from the Bland Message

Traditional recruitment tactics aren’t obsolete. That is not what we are saying. Rather we are saying that, in this modern market, it is hard to accurately catch the talent you need with the usual tactics. Let’s say that as a recruitment marketer you send out a cold call email with a bland blanket message. You will likely get some hits off of it. But, it is also likely that the message will be ignored or deleted by most of your target market. We wouldn’t consider that efficient use of time, effort or resources.

So, that brings us to the question of how recruiters can send hyper-individualized communications to candidates or job seekers? It always seemingly comes back to data. When a recruitment marketer understands the insights at their fingertips, they are in a position to better deliver the required results. One of how you could go about it is automation.

There are tons of articles online and research that show how prevalent automation has become in the recruitment industry. Automation software is used as an intuitive tool where users can extract critical information on candidate profiles, preferences, online behaviors and so on. It does the heavy lifting for us! What you essentially have to do is use the automation tools to read into what the candidate is looking for and use that. For example, if they download a PDF from your site on “How to immigrate to Canada.” You can tailor the communication to include a specific link to a relevant webinar or company blog to get them interested and invested.

A good example of automation technology is Bumsa Talent Solutions itself, we use automation technology like Tracker and Cloud Call to help our recruiters keep an eye on candidate profiles, help with screening, getting in touch with them, and accounting for minutes spoken, shortlisting them and so much more. This is not even mentioning the digital marketing services that we provide to our clients.

Another great example is Credibled, which is an automated reference checking web application platform. It takes the traditionally tedious reference checking process and turns it into something elegant and streamlined so both client and candidate can breeze through the process without wasting time. These are the kinds of tools that recruitment marketers have at their disposal.

It's not enough to see the data. As a recruitment marketer you need to understand what it means.

How Do You Evaluate True Content Strength?

When dealing with metrics and measurements as a recruitment marketer, it is very easy to fall into the trap of ‘vanity readings’. Here is what we mean by that. Let’s say that you send out an email or a piece of communication. For the sake of argument, you put all of your current openings into a single newsletter and sent it to a whole bunch of candidates via an automated database.

Now, if a candidate had accidentally gone into the email while they just so happened to be scrolling through their daily feed, they might exit immediately and hit delete. The statistics might see that as interest-based purely on the click-through. This can give you a plumped-up reading that isn’t a true reflection of what your target audience wants.

What recruitment marketers need to do is plug into the power of lead scoring. This basically means that they have to assign an imaginary but relevant score to each candidate they speak with, based on the interaction. So, if they give a score of 8, this means the candidate seemed very interested. If it was a score of 2, it might not even be worth pursuing because the candidate was disengaged from the interaction. Using intuition in tandem with automation technology is the key to successfully evaluating the strength of your messaging and efforts.

“The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.” – Bill Gates, Co-founder of Microsoft

Not Every Strategy Will Work

No one wants to be pessimistic about their marketing strategy or efforts, but the truth of the matter is, that not all your communications will hit the mark, no matter what you do. Perfection is something we chase at the end of the day, it’s not a given, so why expect it of your content? However, when professionals have data and marketing automation on their side, they stand a much better chance of success.

Automation tools make sure that you land in the right person’s inbox at the right time, with the right content. They also help you understand what is working and what is not. This means you can tweak the approach as you go. So, there you have it, data is the key to success. The more you know, the better positioned you are to reach your end goal as far as recruitment marketers are concerned.