In our competitive market, it’s those companies who take their talent marketing seriously that will lead the way forward and show the rest of the industry how it’s done.
Although we’ve come a long way in accepting that marketing is just as much a part of recruitment as sales is, we still seem to be making mistakes when hiring our Internal Recruitment Marketers and continue to massively underestimate the impact this hire can make to business in terms of lost revenue and production.
Let’s look at why the key role of an Internal Recruitment Marketer can be so challenging and what you can do to make sure you get this important hire right.
Hire someone with experience first; a graduate second
Marketing is one of the most diverse areas of a business, and to cover every area you would probably need 3-5 marketers covering their own discipline, but nobody has time (or budget) for that!
Therefore, for your first hire you need recruit someone who’s a strong generalist that doesn’t want to specialise just yet. Most importantly, you want someone who’s a doer: They understand your business goals, know how to translate these goals into marketing objectives, and are willing to put in the hard graft to get there.
Think about it, if you want someone who is able to take business objectives and translate them into a marketing strategy, does this sound like a job for your admin assistant or someone fresh out of university? Nope!
Appreciate the complexities of ‘Talent’ marketing
Another reason that hiring an inexperienced marketer for this role often fails is that your target audience as a Mining Contractor is far from straight forward, we tend to totally underestimate how difficult it can be to manage as a marketer.
In what is perceived as a skills shortage in Mining, I’ve learned just how important 'persona marketing' is to talent pooling. This is because our marketing audience isn’t just candidates we’re looking to reach (our B2C audience), but clients and prospects too (our B2B audience).
Most businesses are either selling to consumers (B2C) or to other businesses (B2B), meaning they only need one marketing strategy.
However, Mining Contractors needs to run two different strategies at the same time:
Company X markets to Target Customer Y= a B2B traditional marketing strategy
AND
Company X markets to Target Candidate Z = a B2C traditional marketing strategy
This is bloody tough even for the most advanced and experienced marketers, as you’re effectively managing two strategies and numerous personas at the same time!
Align your marketer’s goals with your recruiters’ targets
Whilst your internal recruitment team are used to focusing their strategy around activity KPIs (making 30 calls per day, for example), marketers are used to focusing on results (e.g. how many candidates clicked their job ads rather than how many job ads they’ve posted).
To get the best out of your marketer you need to show them where to focus their time and energy so that they’ll be able to help your company make more of the ‘right’ hires which will increase your production and make more money!
They’ll have time on their hands that your recruiters don’t have, and they can use it to do things like retarget people on Facebook, set up a wider CRM email campaign, or build a landing page to drive social marketing to create a new talent pool of candidates.
Teaming your recruitment marketer up with your recruiters to directly support their challenges is much more productive (and more enjoyable to a results-driven marketer too) and has the potential to double the return into your company. It’s just that right now, your marketer needs to have a little bit more experience under their belt or a little more guidance as to where to focus their talent to really unleashed the growth engine potential within your business.
It’s hard for leaders and business owners to allow up to 3 months to set the foundations of talent marketing strategy, we want to see results now!
If you give it time, come out of your PC Shell and be as bloody disruptive as you can be in this scarce market, you will see the results in time.
Next thing is to make sure you have created the culture to retain these people…
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