Recruiting Looks a Lot Like Marketing

I stumbled on this great ERE article the other day and I was ecstatic to finally see someone in the HR space connecting the dots between HR and Marketing. I’ve been desperately trying to bridge the gap between the two at SHRM events for years now.

The truth is, it’s easy for me to spot the resemblance between my Internet Marketing background and Recruiting because I built ApplicantPro to be the fulcrum for the two – I allowed my online expertise to create a unique symbiosis between web optimization and streamlining hiring.

I can understand how it’s taken HR a few years to play catchup though because, unless you’re data obsessed like I am, you’re not necessarily going to make the leap from time-to-fill to Career Site conversion right off the bat. So, here’s a couple of tips to help you make the connection. Hopefully, I’ll explain them in a way that makes them easy to understand and tangible enough to incorporate into your recruiting strategy:

Figure Out What You Want to Track:

I’m suggesting that you start here because it’s really difficult (okay, nearly impossible) to create a recruiting or hiring plan without first pinpointing a starting point. This starting point usually involves metrics of some kind. Let’s use the example above, time-to-fill. In order to measure the amount of money you could save your company by getting someone hired in less time, you have to calculate the average length of time it takes to hire someone, and then be able to convert those numbers into dollar signs or more specifically, how much revenue your company loses by a position that sits empty for 30 days.

Research:

This is where your journey truly begins. There is SO much out there in the way of an optimized hiring approach. In fact, here’s a great blog post I published a while back about how to become an optimized hirer. It will help you know where to get started. The key is to take bites out of the elephant, not change everything at once. Perhaps you could dedicate one month to mobile recruiting, the next month to polishing your employer brand, and then another month tweaking your application process. Like I said, there’s plenty of information out there to steer you towards your goal and it’s likely that we have each step of the process detailed in one of our blog posts, or in our free, HRCI approved webinars.

Don’t allow comfort to chain you to outdated processes. Take a risk and learn something new. Chances are, you’ll not only become better at your job, but you’ll end up climbing your way to the top of the strategic ladder as well.