How to build recruitment marketing that appeals to all demographics

April 26, 2021

 

iCIMS Staff

5 min read

In today’s competitive hiring market, is your business still using the Field of Dreams approach to talent acquisition: Post it and they will come?

As jobs begin to open up and employers find themselves scrambling to fill empty positions, businesses need to do more than just post a job opening on their career site and pray it attracts top talent. Recruitment marketing software needs to be built for hiring in a digital age, ensuring you’re appealing to a wide swath of candidates across generations and backgrounds.

Much like the movie baseball team that came together in that Iowa cornfield, businesses need to build a winning lineup of tools to improve recruitment processes – including quality, speed, and cost of hire – that drives top talent into their recruitment funnel.

Go the distance: Hiring great talent starts with recruitment marketing

Companies that compete for niche talent with in-demand skills need a targeted hiring strategy. Recruitment marketing is a business resource that, when integrated into existing talent platforms, can significantly affect business results.

Recruitment marketing tech can make it easier for you to win talent today and help progress candidates through the entire hiring process – in a way that’s trackable and more efficient.

Tech-savvy employers increasingly recognize the need to measure recruitment marketing activities. By understanding candidate journey data, you can determine if your strategies produce the results you need— attracting and hiring the right talent. Whether by integrating recruiting software with your HCM or using configurable dashboards and reporting of recruiting analytics platform, insights can help you build your talent acquisition strategy to meet your DEI goals.

Building a diverse team makes good business sense

Businesses are under more pressure than ever to transform and find ways to innovate and hire more diverse candidates. But building a team that includes a range of demographics isn’t just the right thing to do – it also makes good business sense.

According to one study, diverse teams are more innovative and generate 45% more revenue. Organizations that rank highest in gender diversity are also 27% more profitable, another study found. Bottom line: Diverse teams just outperform less diverse teams. Talk about a home run.

Where to begin? Start at the top by putting the right tools in place that let you adapt to a more virtual environment and attract and engage a wide range of candidates. When you ensure your talent attraction tools focus on hiring the best talent—regardless of gender, race, or orientation—then you organically create a diverse workforce.

Career sites give you home field advantage

Posting job openings on LinkedIn and social media is fine, but you’ve got to play by their rules. By creating your own branded career site, you have the power and freedom to design, build, and shine to attract candidates and celebrate your unique culture and work environment.

Career site software makes it easy to generate branded career sites for your organization and integrate any data sent through the career site with your existing hiring infrastructure. Some of the best career site software is included as part of a talent acquisition platform, which may include solutions like candidate relationship management software, applicant tracking systems (ATS), and offer management tools.

This spring, iCIMS released new DEI pages to its career site template library that allow organizations to highlight content like annual diversity reports and DEI hiring statistics, as well as offer guidance on where to add inclusive messaging and imagery. These additions give recruiters new ways to accelerate virtual hiring and innovations that help deliver on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Videos bring authenticity to company culture, mission, and values

You can hire a copywriter to craft pages of eloquent content that wax on about your dynamic work culture and all the reasons why it’s a great place to work. But wouldn’t it be better to hear that coming from one of your employees?

Adding a video feature to your site lets you shine a spotlight on your company culture, mission, and values that comes directly from employees. It gives potential candidates an authentic look into what it’s like to work for your company and a glimpse into the workplace that feels real. In fact, applications increase 34% when video testimonials are used in job descriptions.

Using employee generated content to tell your organization’s story will help you knock it out of the park.

Go from local to global with a strong ATS

When asked, 88% of HR leaders said they hadn’t effectively increased diverse representation in 2020. The wrong applicant tracking software may be part of the issue.

When your ATS doesn’t support a far-reaching search, your efforts are naturally limited. Not only does this limit the number of eligible applicants, but you also reduce the opportunity to reach a more diverse talent pool. A strong applicant tracking software can help you address this challenge in 2021 and beyond.

Powered by an ATS that utilizes AI, recruiters have the opportunity to not only expand their search but also find a diverse group of potential candidates who possess the skills and abilities the organization needs. Whether it’s veteran status, age, disability, gender, or any other characteristic, recruiters have access to a variety of tools and sources within the ATS to attract diverse talent.

Start building your winning team with powerful tech solutions

While some companies remain reticent about relying on technology to attract and engage qualified candidates, 70% of companies are beginning to invest in recruitment marketing. In baseball lingo, without a strong digital recruiting lineup, you’re guaranteed to strike out when you get up to bat.

To move your business forward and reach your goals, you need the right people in the right jobs. Your competitors will also be looking for many of those same advanced skillsets so you have to grab every advantage that you can.

Ready to start building that winning team? Download our Definitive Guide to Recruitment Marketing ROI to learn how to tap into a diverse pool of talent by putting your tech to work.