3 innovative recruitment marketing tips—an EMBARC recap [Video]

Next Wednesday (October 20th), the first virtual event in a series of EMBARC® Talent Talks will be coming to you with live (and, quite frankly, lively) insights from our industry’s top thought leaders. Do you know what the recruitment marketing tips are? How about talent acquisition? Employer brand? Well, get thee to the signup page and prepare to have your mind blown.

Want a sample of the EMBARC goodness? Check out this paradigm-redefining talk given on recruitment marketing by Elliot Garlock, the Global Head of Employer Branding at Wayfair, at our 2019 EMBARC HR Innovators Summit. In it, he discusses how to use recruitment marketing for companies that don’t fit into the traditional mold.

Persona-driven campaigns bring your brand to life in a way that resonates

Sometimes, those who are working on creating stellar employer branding can forget what the ultimate goal is: to attract a diverse and highly qualified field of candidates. As Elliot Garlock discovered, recruitment marketing allowed him and his team to broaden their message for a variety of potential positions.

“I think that the employer brand value proposition conversation has gotten overcomplicated,” he explained. “At Wayfair, we hire a very diverse set of people. We hire people all over the country, all over Europe. We hire people that work in our sales and customer service centers. We hire people that work in our warehousing facilities. We hire data scientists, machine learning engineers, software engineers. We hire business people. We hire people at different stages of their maturity in their career. We hire a lot of students who when they graduate from college, their first job or their first internship ever is with Wayfair. We also hire executives with 20 years of experience, and if you start looking across the diversity of all those people, there’s no singular employer brand proposition that’s going to be compelling to all of them. What we do is we create these different personas, and then we create really targeted marketing that’s pointed at all of them. We don’t really believe in the monolithic employer brand.”

By creating different campaigns that are targeted to these particular different personas, Wayfair was able to attract specific types of talent.

“Once you’ve really figured [the adaptations of the brand] out, then you just scale it up across whatever channels are relevant for the talent market that you’re focused on,” he said. “It could be videos, it could be photos, it could be written content, it could be out-of-home media, it could be speaking at conferences, recruiting events, podcasts. It’s going to be different depending on the demographic of talent that you’re trying to recruit for.”

Hyper-specific content can identify perfect-fit candidates

More views are always better, right? That depends on who’s viewing the videos, especially when that person might be a potential candidate. Creating hyper-targeted content, even if it has a relatively low overall viewership, can result in finding exactly the candidates you’re looking for (and screen out the ones you aren’t).

“We hire a lot of data scientists at Wayfair, and one of the things we’ve learned about data scientists is that they are nerds who like to learn about very intricate details at an incredible degree of specificity,” Elliot explained. “What we do is we have a YouTube channel that we started that’s called the Data Science Explainer Series. Every week, we have our own internal video person who goes to someone on the team, who then goes on a whiteboard, and in intricate detail, explains exactly how one of the machine learning models works that drives our website. Our business runs on hundreds of models, so this content will never end because we’re always producing new models. These videos have very low viewership because most people in the world are not data scientists, and most people do not care at all about this, but the people who do care are the people that we’re trying to hire. We do this for everything: for call center workers, for warehouse workers, for business people. We will get data on how this type of content affects our recruiting yields, and it dramatically improves our yield of getting people to respond to our outreach, and to move them through the funnel, and also to prep people for when they come in for interviews.”

Experimentation can have a huge recruitment cost-savings

According to Elliot, on average it costs $8,000 to hire a software engineer. After experimenting with recruitment marketing, Elliot managed to shrink that down to $1,200 per hire by analyzing Wayfair’s specific use of and the subsequent application rate generated by sponsored job board ads across a few different platforms.

Encouraged by this success, Elliot tried another experiment. “We ran a little campaign where we just put job ads on outdoor media signs right near the train station in Fenway in Boston. We always like to measure everything that we do, so we put QR codes on all of the ads. It performed really well. One hundred of those things got scanned. When they’d scan it, it would bring them to a form, and we just made the form really simple: ‘What’s your name?’, ‘What’s your email?’, ‘What’s your phone number?’, and they’d hit submit. As soon as they hit submit, it sent a push notification text message to a guy who works on my team named Sean Lee. He’d immediately text the person, ‘Hey, this is Sean at Wayfair. I saw that you saw our sign and you want a job. What are you interested in?’ From ten minutes after the time they would scan that code, we would get them into a requisition, and then move them through an assessment process. We’re actually still running this little experiment, but through this brand-based media investment, we’ll probably hire these people at a cost of $3,000 or $4,000 per acquisition, which for us, we would consider a pretty compelling metric based on just purely a media spend.”