How handy would it be to be able to track a candidate from their first click? Candidates are savvy – they know what they want and will often interact with an employer after extensive initial research. Automation software can enable you to track candidate behavior and reach out to them at the right moment, with visually appealing and relevant content. This can be done the hard way, manually, but it will always be more time-consuming than automated marketing, which streamlines processes, saving you both time and money. Email marketing, for example, is one of the most successful tried-and-tested automated marketing tactics. A profitable way to target the right audience, it can increase traffic to your careers site and drive engagement with your employer brand.
Why should we pay attention to the recent purchase of Marketo?
Marketo specialize in marketing automation software, which they claim will ‘find and engage the right customers’ as well as ‘help them learn what they want to know about your products as they begin their journey’. In May 2016, the company was purchased for £1.8 billion. The high value investment into this technology indicates that marketing automation is not only here to stay, but here to make a big impact.
So how could automated marketing be integrated into your recruitment strategy?
The world of technology is evolving hour by hour; why should recruitment stay in the dark ages?
If we are recruiting for niche, highly technical positions, surely our recruitment marketing strategy should follow suit?
Here are 5 ways automated marketing could work within recruitment:
1. To tighten the focus of campaigns through tracking data
A highly useful way of checking whether your campaign is having the desired effect. This data can come in the form of; what actions are taken on receiving emails and the age and demographics of people visiting your landing page on social media.
2. Through social media automation
Are you good at consistently sharing vacancies across your company’s social media accounts? If not, an automated system will simply authorise your company’s Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and share your latest roles with your followers to attract candidates.
3. To improve the candidate experience
Let’s face it, it’s time-consuming and demoralising trawling through every unsuccessful candidate and manually replying by email. With an automated system, you are able to quickly select and group unsuccessful applications and send out a pre-populated response, providing candidates with a prompt, informative reply.
4. By utilising various platforms to share information
If you have specific data about the candidates searching for jobs, use SMS to let them know about vacancies in their field. The majority of the population use our mobile phones throughout the day and are never far from them, so this is surely one of the most efficient ways of posting vacancies to a highly relevant segment of your audience. This should also increase traffic to your site, as with automated software you can schedule regular messages that you may not have the time to do manually.
5. To consolidate records
Sometimes, managing a large recruitment project can include the stress and wasted time of manually sending out interview invitations. With an automated system, this can all be done with the click of a button. Replies are easy to see and it is a quick way of assessing and recording which candidates you should follow up with, as well as which were successful or unsuccessful.
Conclusion
Manual methods of recruitment marketing will form the backbone of any recruitment strategy, but there are clearly some benefits to be had from using an automated system. Who can dispute with saving time and money by streamlining processes?
Automation allows you to specifically target segments of your audience and candidates, which can surely only lead to more successful placements.