In today’s highly competitive job market, recruitment marketing tools are now an indispensable asset for recruiting managers. By some estimates, the global talent deficit could reach 85 million individuals by 2030, forcing business executives to consider recruitment marketing a serious and all-important component in their arsenal. In this context, having the right toolkit can make a big difference.
What Are Recruitment Marketing Tools and Why Are They Important?
A recruitment marketing tool is software used to promote your job openings and the business to draw in prospects and turn them into applicants and new hires.
These tools mimic the features of marketing automation systems like HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, and Active Campaign but were created for marketing to candidates instead of customers.
Recruitment marketing software can be standalone, but they are increasingly integrated with applicant tracking systems (ATSs) and the general HR technology ecosystem.
Whether standalone or embedded, a recruitment marketing tool will look after the following:
- Promotion and dissemination of your job postings
- A content management system (CMS) for hosting and administering your employment website.
- A candidate relationship management (CRM) system that will work as a talent directory and engagement tool.
Once you begin marketing your positions beyond job platforms, you will need recruitment marketing tools to help you work more efficiently and monitor the results. HR professionals include these tools in their talent acquisition technology platforms because they optimize the starting point of the recruiting process.
Top 8 Recruitment Marketing Tools for Your HR Tech Stack
Advancements in HR and marketing technology can turbocharge your talent acquisition strategies to a great extent. These include:
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Programmatic job ads
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has existed for some time, but programmatic job ads are innovative. It employs software solutions and records real-time click and application conversion data to manage and improve your job campaigns. PPC notes every instance when someone applies for a job, and you can use this data to enhance the campaign.
Moreover, it enables pre-programmed configurations that help you govern your hiring costs. For example, if you designate a budget for ten job ads and indicate you would only like to spend $100 per ad, whenever one of these advertisements hits that financial limit, it’ll be deactivated while the others stay active.
Programmatic media can be initiated in a few minutes, letting HR teams launch fresh campaigns and adapt, when necessary, in response to developing roles.
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Candidate relationship marketing
Recruiting on a bigger scale necessitates using candidate relationship management software to organize and manage the ongoing influx of applications.
Traditionally, companies relied on Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to handle their high-volume hiring, which would track every incoming applicant. With a recruitment CRM, organizations can manage the entire journey of a candidate from the time they complete an application to when they take on their new role.
This encompasses emails that scope the applicant ecosystem to job offers and candidate contract signatures. A CRM tackles every aspect of the total engagement process, starting with recruitment marketing.
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An analytics tool, such as Google Analytics
Recruiting teams can use Google Analytics to determine which channels draw candidates to the business’s website or careers site.
This is useful because it allows you to easily distinguish between sponsored and organic (i.e., free) movement or traffic, i.e., visitors who naturally/organically looked for your company or the position online.
Having these insights lets you make educated decisions on allocating your resources. It will also tell you if you need to devote more time to an SEO (search engine optimization) plan so that you generate more free traffic from Google and other search engines.
Additionally, you can set up cross-domain monitoring across your ATS, job site, and CRM with Google Analytics.
It can track all of them synchronously and offer you an all-encompassing pane of view from initial candidate registration to a finished application. This helps gain an in-depth comprehension of respondent behavior, which means you can optimize your marketing efforts as needed.
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Social media platforms
Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are great places for posting job ads. They will help you build a robust network of competent professionals and discover potential job candidates.
This recruitment marketing tool helps you master the art of social media recruitment.
Along with posting job advertisements across different social media platforms, you can share information depicting a favorable workplace environment. This brings more candidates, especially Generation Z, to your recruiting pipeline.
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Career page chatbots
The chatbot on your website is also a vital recruitment marketing tool, i.e., the first interaction a prospective candidate will ever have with your company.
You can configure these chatbots to reply to candidates’ general inquiries about the position or your company. Chatbots improve the candidate experience by enabling effortless knowledge discovery. This is also an opportunity to showcase your culture with a bot that has some personality.
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Attribution tracking
You can place attribution monitoring components baked into your URLs when posting a job ad or job posting. It lets you monitor their performance in Google Analytics and the ATS without other steps or hurdles.
For instance, imagine your job link is this one:
- com/job1/role/
When an attribution monitoring tag is attached to your URL, the ATS and web analytics tool will track it automatically. Now, you will collect and analyze data whenever there’s any activity on the URL. Here’s an instance of a tracking query that may be added to the end of the link to the job above posting:
- ?utm_source=facebookad
Therefore, the final URL appears as follows:
- com/job1/role/?utm_source=facebookad
With this data, you can monitor your top resources for talent and remove unsuccessful marketing campaigns.
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Data visualization
Data visualization makes it much easier to comprehend recruitment marketing data when compared to Excel.
It can also help reinforce your argument if you are trying to persuade other parties involved that it’s time to begin/cease doing something. For instance, it can assist you in showcasing trends or contrasting various recruitment marketing channels.
Tableau, a well-known data visualization application, can store more data than your laptop! Domo and Google Data Studio are other equally outstanding alternatives.
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SEO optimization tools
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an array of techniques that lets you generate organic website traffic using search engines (Google, Bing, etc.). SEO tools enable you to rank highly on all major search engines using tactics and strategies with no ad spending involved.
One of the most significant advantages of SEO is reaching the right demographic. Consider candidate-visited websites, like web pages, career boards, blog posts, or job postings. If you optimize your website to draw in visitors, you will locate the candidates already looking for those search keywords; odds are, you’ll discover the most suitable candidate much faster and with less effort.
SEO tools will perform essential recruitment marketing functions. They will tell you which keywords are trending among your target applications, the right way to structure your content, and unexpected keywords that your competing employers might ignore.
Building a Data-Driven Recruitment Marketing Function
This might be a partial checklist. However, regardless of the tool you’re thinking about using, consider how it will help you gather, organize, and evaluate data.
Knowing your candidates’ online activities is the secret to engaging with them effectively. As skill requirements evolve and talent gaps emerge, the right recruitment marketing tools can help you find top talent in unexpected places.
Next, sharpen your hiring skills with eight effective marketing strategies for recruiters.
