Recruitment Marketing Strategies and Best Practices: Insights from HR Professionals
Are you struggling to attract top talent and create a diverse and inclusive workforce? Are you wondering how to optimize your recruitment process and improve the candidate experience?
Check out these key takeaways from PeopleAdmin’s recent webinar, How to Win Top Talent in a Competitive Market with Recruitment Marketing, featuring four HigherEd HR experts:
- Alicia Barthel, PHR, Director of Talent Acquisition, Texas State University;
- Carla Major, Chief Human Resources Officer, Delgado Community College;
- Robin Borough, Director of Talent Acquisition, Chapman University;
- and Sarah Gasparini, Talent Manager, St. Catherine University.
These insights can help you better understand the importance of building a strong employment brand, engaging with the right
audience, and fostering a positive candidate experience.
What is Recruitment Marketing?
Recruitment marketing is a strategic approach to attracting, engaging, and nurturing potential candidates throughout the hiring process. It involves promoting and communicating your organization’s employment brand to create awareness and interest among potential applicants, as well as building a talent pipeline and using analytics to ensure effective use of resources.
Start with your Employer Value Proposition (EVP)
“In the non-profit world and the corporate work, people are very on board with defining their EVP, but in the university community, that’s still new. We’re good at marketing to attract students, so we need to ask ourselves, how do we leverage some of those same tools to market to applicants?” – Sarah Gasparini
“We need to not only be recruiters but be marketers. We need to define what audience we are targeting and what types of candidates we are trying to attract. You can’t use one strategy for all candidates. Are you recruiting for faculty? They look for very different things than what staff might look for at an institution. For each audience, you have to ask what type of value your institution is bringing to them.” – Alicia Bartel
How to focus on DEI
“At St. Catherine’s, equity and inclusion has been a strategic initiative for six years. It’s great to have a strategic objective, but you also
need to define the implementation of that objective so that people know what to do in their daily work lives to make that happen. We looked at our candidate pools and saw that we actually already had a lot of diversity in them, but we were filtering those pools down to just ten people who we would talk to. So, we had to shift our thinking there and examine what it means to be qualified for a position. We should be considering a much greater portion of the candidate pool, because as soon as you decide you’re only going to talk with three candidates, you put your unconscious bias filter on, and all the candidates that make it through start to look the same, whether they’re from the same type of school or from just one discipline.” – Sarah Gasparini
“If there are any groups on campus that love diversity and are having good results, find them and interview them. Figure out what they’re doing right, and duplicate it across campus.” – Robin Borough
Focus on the candidate experience
“People need a positive candidate experience—you can’t keep job seekers in a candidate pool for future postings if they aren’t treated with respect, if they don’t get prompt communication. We are encouraging all of our departments to communicate with their candidates.” – Alicia Barthel
“At universities, the candidate experience was invisible until the post-covid landscape brought us smaller candidate pools. It’s something that’s been on the radar for recruiters outside of HigherEd for ten years, and now we in HigherEd need to be thinking about that.” – Sarah Gasparini
Final thoughts
Effective recruitment marketing requires a holistic approach, teamwork across campus, and thinking outside the box. For more insights and to learn more about building a recruitment marketing strategy that works for your campus, watch the full webinar or reach out to our experts.
