Recruitment Marketing Maturity Model and How It Impacts Your Success
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Recruitment Marketing Maturity Model and How It Impacts Your Success Author George LaRocque, Founder and Principal Analyst, #HRWINS Sponsored by: Talemetry © 2018 LAROCQUE, LLC Recruitment Marketing Maturity Model and How It Impacts Your Success Recruitment Marketing Maturity Model and How It Impacts Your Success © 2018 LAROCQUE, LLC Recruitment Marketing Maturity Model and How It Impacts Your Success Recruitment marketing has emerged from non-existent to both a fundamental driver of strategy and a core discipline for the modern recruiting organization over a relatively short period of time. Driven by considerable and persistent changes in the recruiting landscape, employers have rapidly adopted new recruitment marketing strategies and processes, while implementing myriad new technologies to support them. But organizations have struggled to keep pace with new capabilities and shifting internal and external expectations. With each shift in consumer and candidate behavior, employers are introduced to new tactics and technical capabilities that exacerbate a lack of alignment between strategies with resources and initiatives that will promise to have the biggest business impact. As an employer, understanding the maturity and effectiveness of individual recruitment marketing resources is paramount for success. And while there is no one-size-fits-all approach, a structured framework for recruitment marketing maturity and efficiency enables recruiting organizations to connect business goals and recruitment marketing strategies with core processes and capabilities that will prioritize investments and drive performance both now and in the future. George LaRocque Principal Analyst and Founder, HRWins George LaRocque George 1 © 2018 LAROCQUE, LLC Recruitment Marketing Maturity Model and How It Impacts Your Success The Rapid Evolution of Recruitment Marketing There are two key things driving the rapid evolution of recruitment marketing. The macro trends impacting all companies and the evolving demands of candidates who more regularly interact online with corporations. Talent is more important to companies today than ever. Globally, the economy has continued shifting focus to information over production. The continued rise of the “knowledge economy” has put more stress on finding and retaining the right people with the right skills. Simultaneously, years of economic growth have resulted in increased hiring demand across the board. Half of employers will increase their headcount this year, according to a recent Hays study. While the demand for talent increases, the supply of available talent isn’t following suit. We are experiencing record low unemployment. Employers looking to hire must attract and engage candidates that are currently employed—otherwise they’re fishing in an ever-shrinking pond If supply and demand issues aren’t enough to challenge global employers, the pace of innovation and business transformation has increased the difficulty in finding the right people. Skills high in demand today didn’t exist just a few years ago. Bitcoin, blockchain, data science, and machine learning top the lists of essential skills in rapidly emerging jobs. But the skills gap isn’t just in tech. While most employers’ hiring processes are focused on quantifying and qualifying “hard skills,” “soft skills” are seen as an area high in demand for the future. Our need for people with new, emerging skills has outpaced the supply. 75% of employers say they are experiencing a skills shortage according to the same Hays study. These macro trends are having an impact on our ability to find and engage new candidates in recruiting. The average time-to-hire nearly tripled from 19 days in 2000 to 52 days in 2015, according to Deloitte. And according to Fortune, the problem has worsened in 2018, now that ‘employers are filling jobs at the slowest rate in three years.’ Further, the Talent Board reports that only 40% of employers even bother to respond or communicate with candidates. While time-to-hire has increased since 2000, employers have struggled to adapt to a tidal wave of disruption related to the job market and recruiting. Recruitment Marketing Milestones George LaRocque George Figure 1: Recruitment Marketing Milestones 2 © 2018 LAROCQUE, LLC Recruitment Marketing Maturity Model and How It Impacts Your Success Job Seekers have become savvy While the changes have been vast for recruiting technology. Employers are consumers of web interactions. As jobseekers and corporations, there is now realizing that striving for a strong with every other part of our lives, the one constituent that either gets candidate experience is not mutually job seeker’s experience has overlooked, takes the brunt of the exclusive of a strong recruiter transitioned to be largely online. The challenge, or both: the recruiter. experience. 46% of employers listed initial impressions that job seekers get Through increasing difficulty finding “developing/improving the internal of prospective employers, if not candidates and the resulting talent acquisition function” as a top directly from a colleague already onslaught of technologies applied priority, according to Lighthouse employed, is generally based on the over time to address these challenges Research & Advisory. Recruiters need interactions they have on the Internet. and support these trends, systems that are simple to use, Discovery of the employer happens expectations of recruiters haven’t provide portability of data from through Google search, job boards, changed—find and hire better people, myriad sources internally and or social networks. Research from the faster. If candidates are consumers, externally, and integrate well. If company’s website, review sites, and we can easily see the analogies to recruiters are stewards of the personal networks, and job pages are the customer experience, then candidate experience, they need all factored into a candidate’s decision recruiters are part sales person, good tools. to consider an employer. And it can setting expectations for the customer even extend well throughout the experience, and part customer Given the pace of change, and interview process with video success advocate, responsible for the expectations for better candidate and interviews, assessments, simulations, performance of the enterprise recruiter experiences, it’s no wonder and more. Jobseekers are consumers, throughout the process. While it’s that the industry has rapidly adopted and their expectations of the job easy to blame the recruiter for the marketing capabilities that draw from seeking experience online is no candidate’s experience, good or bad, modern business-to-business (B2B) different than their expectations in we should first understand that and business-to-consumer (B2C) every other aspect of their travels on recruiters have been tasked with marketing. The rapid adoption of the Internet—it needs to be simple navigating internal and external recruitment marketing strategies, and personalized. To say this is a changing trends. Externally, tactics, and technologies has both candidate’s market is an recruiters are faced with the increased pushed the recruiting profession understatement. As candidates expectation of candidates and forward, while simultaneously discover your organization and changing technical landscapes as the illuminating skills gaps related to engage, they are having a brand sources and methods of finding recruitment marketing in even the experience. Deliver a positive candidates have changed rapidly. most sophisticated recruiting experience and you have made a Internally, many large enterprise environments. potential customer and/or candidate employers are implementing as many for life. Deliver a negative experience as 24 different HR technology George LaRocque George and you’ve created a detractor in the systems, according to HRWins market—not just for your jobs, but for surveys over the last two years. The your products and services, too. good news for recruiters is that there is a renaissance of sorts around 3 © 2018 LAROCQUE, LLC Recruitment Marketing Maturity Model and How It Impacts Your Success Getting Ahead of Ourselves Having a framework to self-identify where an employer stands with regard to recruitment marketing processes and maturity may be the single most important thing an employer can do right now. This self-assessment, like any, will illuminate short-and long-term opportunities and challenges, and help identify where to prioritize and invest, both from a resource and financial perspective . While the recruitment marketing technology category has emerged rapidly, and employers have had an increasing appetite for tech that will help them find and engage better candidates faster, the technology has outpaced the recruiting team’s ability to develop the skills and expertise needed as modern marketers to make the most of it. Simply put, making the decision to buy, or even implement, recruitment marketing technology is the first step on a long road to mastery. The recruiting function has evolved from being largely dependent on processing the inbound flow of candidates who entered the process via a fairly small number of sources, including newspaper ads, employee referrals, employment agencies, state/government run employment centers, and more to a complex matrix of sources. Print newspaper ads have been replaced by myriad of online sources like job boards, marketplaces, talent databases, social media, direct sourcing of candidates and so on. What once was a department and role