Getting Leadership Buy-In for Recruitment Marketing

There are a few questions we hear consistently after webinars or at conferences: “How do I get the budget for recruitment marketing?” “How do I get leadership to let me do this?” “What can I bring back to my team, boss or director to prove we need recruitment marketing technology?” In truth, the answer will be a little bit different for every organization. But we’ve seen a lot of recruitment marketing champions, especially some of our customers, succeed in making great cases for recruitment marketing strategy and technology. Outline the need In the current hiring landscape, this is an easy case to make. Candidates are driving the need for change in talent acquisition, researching employers through more touchpoints and channels than ever before and seeking a connection with the brand, not just the job. Candidates expect a personalized experience, strong peer reviews, a relevant, proactive employer brand and authentic content that demonstrates culture. Talent acquisition teams need to have an arsenal of marketing tactics and expertise in order to attract, engage, nurture and convert top talent! Even further, they need to be able to see the data that proves success in every stage of that recruiting funnel, especially how recruitment marketing drives more quality hires faster. Making the case: Executives make decisions based on ROI. One of the best ways to make the case for recruitment marketing is to point to how much you’re spending on recruitment advertising and the data you’re seeing on how it delivers leads, applicants and ultimately hires. For most organizations, traditional recruitment advertising (aka job board postings) isn’t delivering much value anymore by itself. That’s why a more comprehensive recruitment marketing approach (including email nurture, content, social, digital, etc.) is delivering better results. With the right technology to track all your recruitment marketing tactics, it will help your team understand what your dollars are buying you - and that’s a need every organization has. In addition, you can make a good case based on what your competition is doing. Who are the top brands you compete with for talent? Who are the top brands you want to compete with? Taking a look at these organizations’ career sites, candidate experiences, employer brands, social media accounts and more can help you gauge where they might be winning relationships with the talent you want. Have a plan Mapping your recruitment marketing plan to your business goals for the year (or two) will help give leadership a sense of how you envision execution and success long-term. It ties tactics and strategies to specific objectives you need to hit, and it will keep your team honest in trying to reach those goals. The key here is to know that a recruitment marketing strategy needs to be nimble; it’s about experimenting with messaging, channels and more in order to influence candidates and build relationships. Recruitment marketing isn’t a buzzword, it’s a discipline that talent acquisition needs to own. It’s important to prove to your leadership that you’re not shooting in the dark with random trends to see what sticks -- rather, you’re thinking through how new marketing-inspired strategies can help you build a solid employer brand and strong pipeline of interested candidate leads to help you convert more hires. Making the case: First, you definitely have to understand your top business goals and hiring objectives. Then, take a look at the case studies of other organizations already succeeding in recruitment marketing, like Bright House Networks (now part of Charter Communications) or CH2M. Where did they start? What specific tactics did they implement to see the quickest wins? What can you do first with your existing budget to prove the need for more?  If leadership is especially leery, a phased approach to start out small can help your case by getting small wins first. Finally, it’s essential to talk to your Marketing team. While recruitment marketing is a discipline that should live under Talent Acquisition, working with Marketing to start will give you more internal stakeholders and a good foundation for messaging and content. Justify the budget The good news is, you don’t immediately need more budget to start recruitment marketing! Shaunda Zilich, Global Employment Brand Leader at GE, started with zero dollars for recruitment marketing and ended up strengthening GE’s employer brand by getting creative, utilizing internal advocates and shifting the company’s focus from job to brand. If you’re already at that point and looking to gain budget for your discipline in order to add technology like a Recruitment Marketing Platform, it’s essential to see where you’re already spending your money and what might not be working. Quick cuts in job board spend, LinkedIn licenses or agency costs could be a way to reallocate money to use on in-house recruitment marketing. If you don’t currently know what’s working and what’s not, you already have another huge justification point to invest in technology that can track all your tactics in one centralized solution! Making the case: 74% of interested leads drop off your application process before finishing. This means that they visited your career site or job ad, but never actually applied, so you don’t know who they are! Without technology in place to capture these leads, you’re essentially wasting 74% of your recruiting budget. Plus, think through how to make the most of your current budget by looking to other organizations who have reallocated spend to buy technology versus increasing budget. With SmashFly, a Fortune 500 company saved more than $600,000 on LinkedIn, decreasing its licenses from 31 down to 11, because they are able to now source quality candidates from their own talent network database rather than relying on third-party sites. Prove results Leaders have to know what to expect from their investments -- it’s all results-based. You have to be able to tell a story that will demonstrate the financial or efficiency impact of your decisions on recruitment marketing. This is especially hard when you’re starting out in recruitment marketing and might not yet have those numbers to back you up. Find a way to test out small initiatives on your own, get some early results, and then prove you are ready to take the next step.   Making the case: Start with a small change that can have big impact, like rewriting job descriptions to focus on the candidate (which takes no money!). At SmashFly, we rewrote all the job descriptions because that is the moment of truth for a candidate – it will be the final push toward the decision to apply or not. In two months since, we’ve seen a 290+% increase in our talent network opt-ins. If you bring a small initiative like this to your leadership, it makes the case on its own for candidate-focused content like videos, employee testimonials, social media, a newsletter and more. To help justify investing your time and strategy on recruitment marketing, look to case studies or presentations from organizations or talent acquisition leaders in your industry to show your leadership the kinds of results they can expect you to deliver. For more on building the case for a recruitment marketing strategy and technology, download the Buyer’s Guide to Recruitment Marketing Platforms.

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Elyse Mayer is the Content Manager at SmashFly, where she owns everything content marketing and social media. She spent 5 years in digital marketing and content marketing agencies before joining the recruitment marketing technology world, where she thrives on helping talent acquisition leaders and recruiters excel in marketing best practices to bolster their recruitment marketing strategies and improve the candidate experience.