3 Top Challenges Recruitment Marketers Face

Recruitment marketers face challenges today that are similar to those faced by digital marketers. With nearly 9 of every 10 American adults on the internet, digital marketers have spent the last few years developing new ways to gain online users’ attention, such as increased use of video ads, rollover ads, banner ads, and Facebook sponsored ads, among others. But online marketing isn’t as easy as it used to be. It’s an ongoing struggle to sell brands using digital marketing technologies.
Similarly, it’s become a challenge for recruitment marketers to get the attention of top candidates for open positions. As a result, recruitment marketers must lean heavily on digital marketing strategies to reach the most qualified applicants. How do you find top-tier talent online? Where do you spend resources to attract them to your job openings? How do you make the best of your time and efficiency in attracting candidates?

Let’s have a look at three challenges faced by recruitment marketers today.

1. Market fragmentation:

   Recruitment marketers have a hard time knowing where to look for top-tier talent. Where are the top stars? Are they on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, or job board forums? Where do you begin the search? This is where advertising, data analytics, and ROI come together. HR recruiters must learn how to find candidates. Using a mix of technology smarts and advertising, and utilizing social media, paid ads, job boards, and/or aggregators can kick-start the search process.

3. Improving efficiency:

   Reviewing candidate applications, cover letter samples, and online profiles take up many hours for in-house recruiters. Finding ways to improve efficiency in the recruitment marketing process while avoiding duplication of effort should be a goal for all recruiters. New software platforms are available for recruiters. These tools can help an HR department cut down on bottlenecks and improve candidate targeting.

5. Developing analytics:

   Big data is increasingly important to all marketing forms, including recruitment. HR departments are amassing large amounts of data around a candidate’s job skills, performance levels, compensation, experience levels, and more. By crunching the data, recruitment marketers can get a better idea of the company’s strengths and weaknesses as an employer, the company’s viable products and services, and its relevance to top talent.

If they aren’t already, recruitment marketers must look at metrics including cost per hire, time to hire, applicant demographics, applicant sources, and other data to bring increased knowledge to a company’s recruitment efforts.

As the best candidates move online, so too should recruiters. In doing so, they must be mindful of the opportunities for strong digital marketing to candidates before jobs are posted. Many new tools and processes are emerging to help today’s HR professionals go online to search for and assess candidates. It’s time to expand in that direction.