Hacking your Candidate Funnel – A Summary for the Time Poor

Over the last few weeks I’ve written a number of blogs focused around your digital marketing efforts. As we are all so time poor, I thought a shorter summary would be beneficial to readers. For those wanting more, there are four blogs on this topic – one, two, three, and four – with some examples of how to apply the tactics.
The key takeaway from this series of blogs was that you should be researching and experimenting with your marketing. The vast majority of us are complacent and relying on templates, and not analysing the data. The data will ensure you are maximising your return on your marketing spend.
So what did we cover in these blogs?

Content Personalisation

Personalising your content through each contact point will increase engagement with those you are approaching. Speak with your own employees and candidates to ensure your content is on target, and experiment with these approaches. Humans now have an attention span less than that of a goldfish, so even your subject heading is important.

Career Site Drop Off and Bounce Rates

Understanding user behaviour across your career site is hugely important but often overlooked. You need to better understand what your drop off and bounce rates are to improve candidate engagement and experience. You’ve invested a lot of money into your career site, make sure it’s working for you.
[Tweet “Understanding the impact of good content is just as important as understanding what good content is”]
The importance of the consistent brand messaging and experience from landing on your career site to completing an application goes a long way to converting candidates to applicants. Make sure your technology is not deterring people from applying.

Product Market Fit

Developing candidate personas is just as important as having an EVP (sorry @billboorman another puppy just died). Marketers use personas to understand who their target audience is. Recruiters need to do the same to increase their conversion rates of higher quality candidates.
Referring back to content personalisation, it is critical to ensure your messaging is consistent and appealing to your target audience. You should be researching and experimenting with your job advertisements (word choice, tone, language, colours, images, videos), and the channels you are using to source and attract candidates.

SEO, SEM, CRO

This is more than just keywords. There’s an argument here to move your career site to sit entirely on its own. This would allow for better backend infrastructure to be in place to assist with your digital infrastructure efforts. If you have the ability to, maximise job vacancy landing pages not just your career site for digital marketing.
[Tweet “Understanding #SEO #SEM & #CRO is the only way to get meaningful feedback on your content”]
SEM and CRO allows for awesome targeting and experimentation of advertising content.
In a survey of over 15M applicants only 8.6% actually only followed through with an application. Think about that for a minute as you wonder why more quality candidates are not applying to your business.

The Wrap-up

We’ve covered a lot in the last few weeks in terms of digital marketing for your recruitment efforts. I consider it to be the best way to demonstrate return on investment due to the fact that there is an abundance of data.
Of course there are your more traditional marketing efforts which also play an integral part of your recruitment marketing strategy. We’ll cover these tactics in some upcoming blogs.
If you’ve got some great examples or case studies you’d like to share with the ATC readers we’d love to hear from you.
Check out parts one, two, three, and four.
Image: Shutterstock


We hope you’ve found this series useful. For more insight like this and more, grab a ticket to ATC2018. Early bird tickets available now, don’t miss out!

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