4 Ways to Change your Recruitment Marketing for the New Normal

Intro: Recruitment marketing has undergone a sea change following the pandemic with employers strategising more on enhancing the experiences of prospects and employees

Last year saw the basics of recruitment marketing strategies being turned over its head to appeal to a candidate pool fraught with an uncertain road ahead. Much of that has settled down now, with a new normal gradually becoming the same-old, same-old. Organizations are now building candidate experiences on Zoom interviews while recruitment marketing agencies are crafting employer branding through interesting stories about employee remote work experiences. What’s been consistent throughout these confusing times is that recruiters from both in-house HR teams and recruiting marketing agency have adapted brilliantly to achieve results.

Nevertheless, COVID-19 has left recruitment marketers with lots of lessons, some never implemented, some oft-reiterated and others that will always stand you in good stead for your employer branding and recruitment marketing through 2021. Here goes:

1. Building a meaningful relationship, be it with your prospective candidates or your employees, has been on every recruiter’s best practices list, but always sidetracked due to lack of time or commitment before the pandemic. Now, more than in the past, it’s a no-brainer that an emotional connect, where your attitude is candidate or employee-centric rather than task-centric, is bound to make your recruitment marketing and employer branding sticky.

2. Employer branding is an ongoing activity, and the pandemic has made several organizations realize that the only way to propagate their company’s culture in the present times is to bring forth interesting and inspiring individual, team and departmental stories. Devoid of office set-ups and the cooler and coffee machine exchanges, the new online conversations and discussions are, in fact, richer and deeper and connect with remote teams even better.

3. Eliciting experiences and work-related anecdotes from employees is one thing, but propagating them and having them resonate with the target audience and prospective candidate pool is an altogether different challenge. Earlier, company events like R&R (rewards and recognition) displays, annual meet-ups, CSR activities helped draw attention to the brand, creating photo ops and viral quality content. Now, organizations are hoping for their employees to take extra initiatives and create these employer branding features. This has led to organizations now training employees to create such user-generated content, and even sending across equipment like cameras, tripods to make it easier for employees to do so.

4. The pandemic also highlighted for HR teams the fact that at the end of the day experience is what counts, whether it’s in-person or digital. For both, candidates seeking to join an organisation or the employees at the organisation, the level of remote-friendliness that their employers offered, how seamless their digital experiences were be it on meetings and collaborative tools, exchanging work-related documentation, ease for candidates to give interviews and assessments is what earned extra brownie points. Consumer marketing has exposed everyone to such seamless practices that candidates and employees are bound to expect the same user experience even at their workplaces.