“Every hiring manager wants pipelines, fat pipelines full of passive candidates”
– John Vlastelica | Talent Connect 2019
(3 min. 15 sec. read)
One of my favorite industry leaders made this statement back in 2019. And I think we can all agree that the statement has not become any less true in 2022.
If it was an easy task achieving great pipelines every recruiter would be swimming in a pool of candidates. Sadly, this is not the case for most organizations.
If you can relate to this issue read on. If not, then you are one lucky banana (read: you are doing things right!).
The task of building a pipeline is in the whole organization’s best interest.
In the ideal world, building a pipeline would therefore be a joint venture between marketing, recruiting, HR and departments.
But we don’t live in an ideal world, do we?
The fact is that the task is most often put on an already swamped recruitment team, as the common perception is that building a candidate pipeline should be a recruiter’s job.
Though the hard truth is that while joggling outbound, screening, interviews and much more starting the process simply seems overwhelming to most.
Fear not! By implementing a couple of rather straightforward recruitment marketing ideas the goal might not be as far away as you might think.
The task of building a pipeline is in the whole organization’s best interest. In the ideal world, building a pipeline would therefore be a joint venture between marketing, recruitment and HR. But we don’t live in an ideal world, do we?
1. Define your recruitment needs and goals
Knowing your upcoming recruitment needs should help you define which direction your recruitment marketing strategy should go in.
Are you having numerous upcoming job postings within a certain department? Then you should probably create a recruitment campaign targeted towards a specific audience with the KPI of getting qualified job applicants.
Are you on the other hand pretty set when it comes to your recruitment needs, maybe a campaign that has a broader audience where the goal is to expand your employer brand, is more suited for you.
Here you could evaluate the performance of the campaign by looking at views on your EB video, clicks on your campaign ad or something third.
The challenge here is that you can’t fully measure the real impact solely through quantitative KPIs.
Our favorite way to measure the impact is through qualitative methods.
Be aware of the engagement. Read your comment threats. How are people responding? What do candidates tell you in interviews? This is where you’ll notice the real impact!
2. Start levering paid and organic marketing.
Now that you have defined your target audience and KPI’s that you are gonna evaluate your campaign after, it is time to decide where the campaign should run.
While LinkedIn is great when targeting experienced hires, Instagram might be the way to go when you are communicating to students and young professionals.
Therefore, when choosing where to best invest your bucks in paid marketing be aware of where the audience is active.
The same goes for your organic marketing campaigns.
Be aware of which content performs well on each channel and keep on twitching the tone of voice until it suits the audience.
What works on Instagram when talking to gen z’s and millennials might not work on LinkedIn where your audience mainly consists of generation X.
But which content should I post? – you might ask.
3. Repurpose your content as much as possible
Content at scale. Something very few companies are taking advantage of. Maybe you have never heard of it, but trust me if you try it out, you will regret that you didn’t got started sooner.
Let’s say that you are hosting a webinar. Afterward, you can use different bits of the webinar and turn it into short video clips for LinkedIn, quoted and linked to in blog content, convert them into short videos for your career page, and much more.
The main reason for implementing a content at scale strategy is time.
Instead of having to come up with new ideas and new content all the time, repurpose valuable content that is already available.
Therefore, starting today, every time you have a piece of content I want you to think of how you can reuse this piece on another media.
This gives you the possibility to make one piece of content go much further in the least time-consuming way possible.
4. Start utilizing the brilliant minds within your company
The hard fact is that brilliant people want to work with equally brilliant people.
Great, you must have some pretty smart people within your company, right?
Well, start helping them establish themself as thought leaders within their field.
Candidates aren’t just following companies they are in fact more frequently following other people.
Therefore, by leveraging internal thought leaders you can help drive your company’s reputation forward while sharing valuable recruitment content to attract, engage, and nurture top talent.
You develop internal thought leaders by encouraging department leaders and other colleagues in creating thought content and post it on their personal LinkedIn or get them to help with the company blog.
