The Missing Element to Your Recruitment Strategy 

One of the biggest challenges companies face is recruiting and retaining employees. COVID-19 fundamentally changed the workforce shifting employee values and, in some cases, motivating employees to abandon their jobs for a different career path altogether. The great resignation caused employers to stretch their benefit packages to remain competitive — ultimately resulting in unsustainable overhead and layoffs. Today, trends such as “silent quitting” are emerging, which is ultimately causing a decrease in the quality of customer service and even the ability to provide some services. 

There is by no means a silver bullet that will fix the dynamic challenges the workforce is facing today. But there is an essential piece to the puzzle that many organizations are missing, which is ensuring marketing has a seat at the HR table. 

In 2021, one of our long-term health care clients asked us to rethink their approach to HR marketing. Like how Jump approaches most marketing problems, we took a step back, researched the market dynamics and audited the current approach. We identified where the organization stood in context with its competitors, researched what employees cared about and identified where the organization was losing candidates in the recruitment journey among other things.  

As a result, we developed personas and articulated the employer value proposition, built an always-on marketing campaign to establish brand awareness and help build reputation, revamped the application process and website experience to simplify the journey, and targeted campaigns to meet candidates where they are. While none of these deliverables are necessarily revolutionary in the marketing space, they are often simple strategies that are forgotten when it comes to recruitment and retention. And when put into action have game-changing results. 

We no longer live in a world where we can simply post a job on a job board and candidates come running or expect a paycheck and typical benefits to be enough to keep employees motivated and loyal. It is critical that companies stop working in silos and bring marketing and communications teams in so that best-in-class HR marketing strategies can be implemented. Here are a few examples of what your HR/Marketing teams should be bringing forward for your organization: 

  1. An employee value proposition to better employees that are the right fit for your organization and a brand promise that considers the employee experience and is something employees can believe in and rally around 
  1. Research-based personas for prospective and current employees 
  1. Journey maps of recruitment and onboarding practices to identify gaps and opportunities in the candidate experience 
  1. Website and content audit to showcase key differentiators, inspire action from applicants and ensure a seamless experience 
  1. Campaigns that leverage persona-based messaging and targeting capabilities across an omnichannel experience 
  1. Up-to-date database that helps fuel targeting opportunities  
  1. Always-on brand presence across key channels to ensure the brand is top-of-mind, engaging and helps build perceptions around the employer brand 
  1. Holistic reporting that demonstrates the ROI of recruitment marketing for the organization 

If you are interested in learning more about optimizing your recruitment efforts, give us a shout. We’d love to have a seat at your HR table.