One of the biggest hurdles you have to face as a recruiter today is that job seekers now behave much more like consumers. Job seekers have truly reinvented the wheel when it comes to searching for jobs. How they learn about new opportunities and decide whether or not to apply has all radically changed.
In the wake of the global pandemic, consumers have formed new preferences and habits around “shopping” online: whether that is for a chair that they saw on Instagram or a new vegan cheese substitute they saw on TikTok, they’re choosier about what products they invite into their home. They research how the chair was produced: Was it made from sustainable materials? How does the company that made the chair treat its employees? Or how about the new vegan cheese? How does it compare to similar substitutes? What is its environmental impact?
Consumers want answers to a vast range of questions before they even consider buying a product.
And it’s the same as applicants looking for a new job! They’ll want to know about your company culture, what leadership looks like at your company and, of course, what perks they can expect if they sign on.
Attracting talent to your company now means treating potential job seekers as consumers - and requires an evolution in recruiting.
You’ll want to invest in creating awareness and education about your company and jobs like brands promote themselves and their products. But recruiters can’t just become marketers. The good news? You don’t have to!
Let’s look at how you might engage with both active and passive job seekers to source talent for your open positions.
Engaging with active job seekers used to be as simple as writing a job post, uploading it to a job board and filtering through the plentiful applications of qualified candidates. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case anymore. Today, a simple job description rarely does the trick. Active job seekers want much more information. In addition to wanting to know the ins and outs of their job, they’ll want to know who they’ll be working with, what the company's DEI initiatives look like and maybe even what potential co-workers do for fun before they apply!
Engaging with passive job seekers, who may know nothing about your company or types of jobs, requires a more integrated approach to awareness and education.
For recruiters, this requires leading passive job seekers through the classic selling sequence of awareness, consideration and decision making to get them interested enough to apply or interview for your jobs.
But you can’t reach out to every potential candidate individually. This is where content comes to the rescue, specifically user-generated content, enabling you to answer the many questions in the minds of active and passive job seekers.
You may be wondering why user-generated content is the way to go. And believe us, we understand. It’s a fair question.
Why wouldn’t you just relegate the creation of your content to your marketing team? Or if you don’t have a team, hire a company to do it for you?
You can, but it won’t have the same impact as user-generated content.
Think about it.
Let’s say you wanted to try out that new vegan cheese or needed a new chair for your apartment. Would you go to the company that makes the product and ask them whether you should buy it?
No! Of course not. Because you know they have a stake in getting you to buy the cheese or purchase that fancy chair-- even if it is a little bit outside of your budget or doesn't quite suit your needs.
But who would you go to if you need advice? You’d go to someone who has experience with the product, someone who has tried it out, knows its strengths and weaknesses and doesn’t have anything to gain or lose based on whether you end up purchasing the product.
And as a job-seeker, wouldn’t you trust the word of an experienced employee over a hiring manager who is desperate to fill an empty position? Someone who may not even know what the job entails day in and day out?
Of course!
And that’s why you should enlist the employees of your company to help you make recruiting content.
They know better than anyone what makes the job worthwhile, what pushes them to get out of bed in the morning and what challenges they get to overcome all in a day’s work. Who better to share that perspective and tell potential applicants why your company is a great place to work?
User-generated content is the way forward for your recruiting efforts.
But what kind of user-generated content has the most impact?
Is it carefully edited photos taken by one of your employees? A job post written by someone who currently works in the position you're hiring for? Or what about a video showing you a day in the life of a worker at the office?
How can you make sure you create content that will make it to the eyes of job-seekers?
Stay tuned.