How to build a multi-channel recruitment marketing strategy—an EMBARC recap [Video]

We know: good candidates are hard to find. At least, that was what everyone was saying before our latest episode of EMBARC Talent Talks. If you haven’t heard, EMBARC Talent Talks is our virtual, totally free version of our annual EMBARC Innovators Summit, served up in monthly paradigm-shifting presentations from thought leaders and innovators like Nirali Matalia from Saama Technologies, Shawn Scott from Vi Living, and Karen Viera from Church’s Chicken, among many others. We’re addressing topics like building a recruitment marketing strategy, employer branding, talent acquisition, and everything else in the HR/recruitment space.

So, what is the best way to find and recruit candidates? Well, that’s a trick question: there’s not one way, but rather many ways that work together to attract a steady stream of excellent candidates. As Kristen Ferguson and Brian Haukoos of Inspire Brands reveal in this recap of their EMBARC Talent Talk, having a multi-channel recruitment marketing strategy is the many-pronged key to success.

1. Partnering with marketing to leverage owned channels

In many industries, your customers want to become your employees. So don’t overlook opportunities to put your recruitment messaging top and center on your brand homepage. And don’t be afraid to collaborate with your marketing team to make it happen. Here’s how Inspire Brands did it:

“I am consistently shocked at how often I go to websites and have to look everywhere just to find the career site link buried in the footer,” Kristen said. “Obviously, we want to make sure that our candidates can easily apply. We don’t want any barriers.”

Kristen then shared how she convinced one restaurant’s marketing leader to help market their open jobs right on the homepage. Kristen and Bian asked [the CMO] to go to buffalowildwings.com and, from there, get to the career site. She couldn’t find the link because it was buried. Immediately, she said, ‘Well, that’s crazy. We need people.’ And it was done within two days. We had a link on the top navigation, directly to the career site. When we did that we monitored our traffic for the first two months after making that change and the number of job seekers coming to the career site from buffalowildwings.com increased by 80% and the apply clicks from those people coming from buffalowildwings.com to the career site increased by 42%.”

For a more comprehensive overview of this topic, see this post on Why your HR and marketing teams should be working together

2. Employ an “always-on” strategy with ad hoc campaigns

For active job seekers, job boards are usually the easiest way to find applicants. However, because of the competitive nature of the current employment environment, the best recruitment marketing strategy often pairs a particular job board with a targeted action, such as an online hiring event.
Kirsten explains that they take an “always-on” approach which entails sponsoring their restaurant brands’ jobs on job boards and then supplementing that strategy with ad hoc campaigns, such as hiring events or targeted ads.

It’s about knowing which levers to pull based on your workforce. Kristen adds, “Really, you just identify those levers that are going to work best for your roles with your population and then pull those levers as needed.”

For tips on hosting hiring events, see this piece on 3 Steps to planning a kick-ass recruiting event

3. Social recruiting: connecting with applicants through their preferred platforms

Organizations need a pipeline of both active and passive candidates. Unsurprisingly, passive candidates usually aren’t found on job boards—but they can be found on social media, which is why partnering with a company that specializes in developing social recruitment strategies is a vital part of any recruitment effort.

“The reason we actually initially broached CareerArc is because we identified social recruiting as a really big gap in our overall digital strategy. It’s been fantastic to be able to now have, through CareerArc, postings on Facebook and Twitter. Obviously, that means that we have thousands more job postings out there but it also enables us to share our employer brands on these social channels in an automated way, which is great.”

One of Inspire Brand’s social recruiting posts.

For more on this, see our Essential guide to social media recruiting.

4. The on-premise recruitment marketing strategy

For retail, hospitality, restaurants, and other businesses that have physical locations, creating “on-premise materials” like brochures, postcards, one-sheets and posters can inspire candidates to apply. However, it’s great to keep it simple and direct.

As Kristen Ferguson explained, “Something that we’ve discovered with the on-premise materials is that they need to be really straight forward. They need to break through the clutter. They need to capture a candidate’s attention really quickly and give a very clear call to action. There’s the ‘now hiring’ message, there’s ‘join our team.’ And we’ve saved some of the ones that share our employer brand with our tag ‘game-time energy, lifetime experience.’ We’ve placed that information and the information where it shares more about what it’s like to work at Buffalo Wild Wings on the takeaways, on the things like bag stuffers or on career pathing documents and things like that, that candidates actually take with them.”

For more on this topic, see 8 things you should include in your employee recruiting brochure

Watch the full webinar above to learn more winning strategies as well as how Inspire Brands is setting standards in candidate experience to become a 2020 and 2021 CandE Award-winning employer.