Doing More With Less

So for awhile now we have been banging on about “Recruitment is Marketing” and the move to adopt Marketing techniques into your candidate attraction strategy.  Heck, we are even running a conference around this theme. But how can you do this when you are running on a shoe-string budget? We don’t all have the luxury of multi million dollar marketing budgets, or teams of social media workers, and many already feel you’re stretched as far as you can go with no time for innovation.
So we got our ATC Think Tank together (ok that’s me, Jenni and Lucy), to put together some things you can start to do now to promote your employment brand on a low budget, but for a big effect:

• Enlist internal and external influencers to share job posts, and articles about the company (even write articles).
• Encourage sociability! Create opportunities for your staff to be social both internally and externally and encourage them to share their experiences, thoughts and ideas.
• Run a video competition for your employees: “Why I love working at company X”.  The winning entry gets their video on Youtube and/or your career page, and a small prize.
• Use your creativity and tell stories – think about what story makes your organisation unique, and most importantly, how can that story make your candidates the hero? You can read Jonathan Crossfield’s tips here.
• Use the resources available to you:  LinkedIn encourages you to write posts, so do it.  Get your colleagues to do it too, and share them.
• If you dream of having a social media for recruitment team, why not create your own. Try running some social media training classes and empower your colleagues to tell their stories.
• Candidate care – not hard to do, but sadly not done enough. The basics of course, are to respond to everyone, but you can also do things like send a candidate survey to all applicants, asking for feedback on their recruitment experience with your company.  You could then even ask them for referrals.

These ideas are just the tip of a huge idea iceberg. Keren Phillips from Weirdly took up this challenge of small budget ideas to improve your sourcing, and shares her fantastic tips here. I’ve included an insightful blog by Mas Bianci, who reminds you to ramp up your candidate management when times are learn, rather than ramp down, and Lucy Fisher highlights what can go wrong if you don’t have a sound off-boarding process, thanks to the movie Office Space.
We also had the chance to chat to Jonathan Crossfield, content marketing expert and upcoming speaker at ATC2015, who discussed how storytelling can transform your recruitment marketing – on any budget. I highly recommend you read Jonathan’s interview, and start thinking of ways you can improve your recruitment marketing today.
Just a reminder that Simon Townsend from Allegis Global Solutions and Kevin Wheeler will be presenting their free webinar on mentoring this Thursday the 23rd of April. They will be discussing the changing way people are bridging divides with knowledge sharing, and peer to peer mentoring. You register for the discussion here.
-Trevor
 

—- How You Can Do More With Less —-

 

Interview With Jonathan Crossfield – Want To Do More For Less? Tell Stories.
Mas Bianchi – Candidate Management When Times Are Lean : Ramp Up Not Down
Karen Phillips – Cheap Recruitment Sourcing Ideas: How To Achieve Rock-God Attraction With A Street-Performer Budget
Lucy Fisher – When Trying To Do More With Less, Don’t Forget Milton
Michele Ellner – Video Interviewing Delivers Big for Small Teams & Budgets
 

ATC Events is calling on HR professionals in Australia and New Zealand to participate in our 2015 study on Cost-Per-Hire. This study will look at how Acquisition Functions in our region  measure and report on their Cost-Per-Hire data, in relation to permanent hires. Information collected in the survey will be compiled into a report which we will share in June.