In a climate where companies compete aggressively for talent and applicants have their pick of open positions, inbound recruiment is an important method for maintaining a high-quality pool of candidates.
In today’s market, prospective employees should not be viewed as job seekers. Instead, like highly regarded free agents in professional sports, they are coveted consumers with abundant choices for their next career move. Recognizing this, many companies have shifted to an inbound recruitment strategy.
Considering that the current job market is talent-driven, inbound recruitment offers a long-term recruiting and hiring strategy designed to build your employer brand and consistently grow your talent base.
What is Inbound Recruitment?
Inbound recruitment involves attracting the interest of job seekers through insightful blog posts, effective search engine optimization (SEO), relevant social media outlets, and other types of content marketing. Think of inbound recruitment as a mix of employer branding and recruitment marketing that piques the interest of job seekers who are ideally suited for your company’s career opportunities.
While outbound marketing requires purchasing ads, building email lists, and crossing your fingers for leads, inbound marketing emphasizes writing remarkable content that attracts candidates to your company and explains to them how they can thrive as part of your team. Aligning the content with job seekers’ interests increases the chances of turning initial interest into prospects who are hired and retained for the long term.
Companies that author and implement a thorough inbound recruitment strategy consistently hire extraordinary employees without incurring the prohibitive costs of traditional outbound recruitment. Organizations benefit from a healthy bottom line, a happy and productive team, and positive brand awareness.
Inbound Recruiting Methodology
Inbound recruiting uses a methodology that mirrors the framework used for inbound marketing. When marketers leverage inbound tactics to win customers, they focus on achieving four key actions: attracting, converting, closing, and delighting leads. In inbound recruiting, the four actions are the same, but instead of dealing with paying customers, you’re engaging with talented candidates.
Here’s a breakdown of each phase of inbound recruiting and some examples of activities that might occur during each phase.
Phase 1: Attract
Goal: Making candidates aware of your company and its openings.
Example activities:
- Seeing a social media post about your job openings
- Viewing a testimonial video from happy employees
- Reading a blog post about your benefits
Phase 2: Convert
Goal: Getting candidates to engage with your company and application materials.
Example activities:
- Subscribing to your email list
- Asking questions about job openings via an onsite chatbot
- Registering for a recruiting webinar
Phase 3: Close
Goal: Getting candidates to complete an application.
Example activities:
- Attending a hiring event
- Filling out an application
- Completing a screening call with a recruiter
Phase 4: Delight
Goal: Turning candidates into promoters of your employer brand.
Example activities:
- Receiving nurturing emails
- Filling out a candidate feedback survey
- Sharing your job openings with friends
Creating content using this methodology allows you to continuously fill your talent pipeline with high-quality candidates and engage them with a positive, productive experience.
The Difference Between Inbound and Outbound Recruiting
As their names suggest, inbound recruiting focuses on attracting candidates into your talent pipeline, while outbound recruiting requires you to make the first contact with candidates.
Think of inbound recruiting like fishing on a lake. The company baits the hook and provides an attractive lure, but it’s up to the candidate (the fish, in this scenario) to swim over and bite.
If we’re keeping with the fishing metaphor, outbound recruiting is like trawling, which uses a big net attached to a boat. There’s no lure and no waiting for the fish to approach. Instead, the company goes out, casts the net, and catches the fish.
Both methods are effective ways to catch fish, and each has its own advantages. Likewise, both inbound and outbound recruiting can be valuable strategies in a company’s overall approach to talent acquisition.
Reasons to use inbound recruiting
- Is a long-term strategy
- Requires an up-front investment of time/resources
- Can attract candidates for years to come after the initial investment is made
Reasons to use outbound recruiting
- Is a short-term strategy
- Requires a continuous investment of resources/manpower to maintain
- Produces results in the moment
If you want to be a company that candidates aspire to work at–rather than one where filling openings is a struggle–your efforts should focus heavily on inbound recruiting.
The Benefits of Inbound Recruitment
Always “on”
Once you’ve put in the initial work to create a piece of inbound content or a series of nurturing materials, those materials work to attract candidates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This is in contrast to outbound recruiting strategies like paid ads, which stop running when the budget is exhausted, or candidate outreach, which only works when a recruiter is actively messaging candidates.
Consistent talent pipeline
The “always on” nature of inbound recruiting creates a steady stream of qualified candidates continuously entering your talent pipeline. You can engage with prospective candidates in some cases before they’re even looking for a job and nurture those relationships over time, which means your company is a natural top choice when they are looking for a job.
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High-quality candidates
Inbound recruiting methods attract candidates to you like a magnet versus you going out and trying to force candidates to engage. This means they’re more likely to be interested in your message and aligned with your values, which can promote a stronger fit for your needs and culture. It also works well to reach elusive passive candidates who aren’t as apt to interact directly with recruiters.
Control of brand messaging
With inbound recruiting, you have direct control over the content and platform of every message. This promotes consistency, helping to create a harmonious flow between different points of messaging and types of content. It also helps you to communicate your brand message in a more strategic way (i.e., an email nurture feed that delivers a series of strategically timed blog posts on different aspects of employment with your company).
Positive candidate experience
Inbound recruiting empowers employers to deliver articulate and informative messaging in a seamless way. Candidates enjoy content that’s relevant to them while building feelings of goodwill and trust over time, leading to a more positive experience overall.
Analytics friendly
Because most inbound recruiting activities occur online, the resulting activity can be easily tracked and cross-referenced between platforms. This facilitates an intricate data set that allows you to track the effectiveness of your efforts and continuously refine your campaigns.
The Disadvantages of Inbound Recruitment
Heavy up-front investment
While the inbound marketing materials you create can deliver qualified candidates for months and even years into the future, they require an initial investment of time and resources to plan and create. You’ll need to allocate a budget for these efforts, knowing you likely won’t see measurable results for at least several months.
Delayed results
If you need to fill a role ASAP, inbound recruitment is not the method to use unless you already have an established strategy in place. As we said earlier, inbound recruiting is a long-term approach and works best when paired with strategic succession planning.
Specialized skill set
Your inbound recruiting results will only be as good as the content you create. Creating high-quality content requires capabilities different from those that recruiters typically possess, including skills like copywriting, SEO, and social media marketing. You may need to train or hire new staff specifically for these campaigns.
Unpredictability
Unlike outbound recruiting, where the results happen pretty immediately after you complete an action, inbound recruiting results are harder to predict with precision. A candidate who enters your inbound pipeline may convert to an applicant in two days or two years. Candidate volume can be subject to natural ebbs and flows that don’t necessarily reflect what’s happening in the job market.
Lack of filtering ability
Anyone can see your inbound recruiting content and decide your company is a good fit for them, which limits your ability to control who enters your candidate pool. With outbound recruiting, you’re often doing some level of screening, like reviewing a candidate’s LinkedIn profile, before contacting them.
Audience limitations
Inbound recruiting campaigns are primarily conducted online. This means you risk excluding people who don’t spend a lot of time on the internet, which can limit the diversity of your talent pool.
Why is Inbound Recruitment Effective?
Job seekers perform in-depth research about potential employers, which is why recruiters must think like digital content marketers. Just as marketers capture and convert leads into sales with targeted content, creative recruiters can incorporate the same tactics to enhance their talent pool.
Inbound recruitment creates a phenomenal experience for prospective team members through employer branding, which is defined by how our company is perceived from the viewpoints of candidates and team members.
Job seekers become familiar with your business through their personal knowledge and experience of your products and/or services. Employer branding impacts every aspect of your company, including how you communicate as a business online, the comments your employees write on public sites, the content of your job postings, and the salaries, benefits, and perks you offer.
Outstanding employer branding helps attract and retain noteworthy talent.
Through strong employer branding, inbound recruitment:
- Cultivates a larger pool of accomplished and experienced applicants
- Requires less upfront, individual effort than outbound recruitment (which demands intensive scouting and tireless communication that yields a smaller number of ideal candidates)
- Creates extensive awareness of your company and your opportunities by producing content that is valuable to candidates
- Allows companies to closely target job seekers in a way that outbound recruitment cannot achieve
- Provides a residual effect for attracting talent over an indefinite time frame
Of course, even when you have the attention of ideal prospects, they will only apply if they apply. When you capture their attention, it’s vital to transform that awareness into action.
How Do You Implement an Inbound Recruitment Strategy?
Inspiring action through inbound recruitment is attained by developing content that showcases why your company is a sterling employer.
Examples of effective inbound recruitment strategies include employee spotlight articles, company blogs, social media posts, video interviews, infographics, and newsletters. These foster relationships with candidates so you will have top-of-mind awareness when they search for opportunities. Providing a glimpse of what it’s like to work at your company permits job seekers to consider how they align with your culture.
Inbound recruitment allows prospects to envision themselves as part of your organization’s team.
Once a candidate is intrigued by the possibility of joining your staff, you are tasked with building that relationship. You can spearhead this with these tips:
Consider what you want to achieve
Before launching your inbound recruitment campaign, it’s important to craft a clear and detailed plan that includes your objectives. What do you want to accomplish? What candidates do you want to attract and hire? Just as a real estate agent does not target first-time homebuyers with articles about downsizing for empty nesters, a company interested in filling entry-level positions should not focus on content emphasizing management roles.
Are you striving to find spectacular and seasoned senior-level managers? That requires a different approach. Successful inbound recruitment strategies target candidates at all career stages. Again, think like a marketing professional who is developing a multi-pronged campaign to generate awareness for your product or service.
Understand your target market
You must deeply understand your target audience to connect with prospects through targeted content. This is where candidate personas are appropriate.
A candidate persona is a profile of your ideal hire for a role. The profile includes essential skills, education, experience, career goals, key motivators, and personality traits.
Candidate personas impact your inbound recruiting strategy at every level, from the content you author to the platforms used for generating awareness. Ready to build a candidate persona? Simply gather data from all available sources. Then, identify common traits and data points that indicate a person is likely to be successful in a particular role. An ideal first source of data is top performers who are already in the position you are looking to fill. Identify and define the trends in skills, traits, characteristics, education, certifications, and experience that make these candidates successful.
Nurture your ideal candidates
You might be familiar with the concept of a sales funnel and the various objectives as you move candidates through it: attracting leads, nurturing them, and converting them to customers. Inbound recruiting is structured in a similar way, except instead of customers, we’re dealing with candidates.
So, once you attract interest from a wide pool of job seekers, it is time to nurture them and further enhance their interest, eventually converting them into applicants.
Encourage candidates to finish applications with automated emails that remind them to complete unfinished applications. Send articles, videos, and other company news to candidates. Share your company culture by showing the social side of your firm through photos, videos, and news of events like corporate retreats, conferences, holiday parties, and team-building exercises. Brainstorm targeted content to reach candidates. Follow up with the most recent job openings and invite job seekers to hiring fairs and training events directly related to their interests.
A candidate might not be the perfect fit at the moment, but they may be exactly who you need at some point soon. Keep in touch with exceptional prospects, even if you have yet to have an ideal opening right now.
Related: Ways to Hire Faster by Nurturing Candidates
Find out where your candidates reside online
Effective inbound recruitment attracts quality prospects, but that objective is only realistic if the candidates can find your content.
Determine where your candidates are likely to be online and the platforms where they reside. Also, it helps to learn where they are not likely to live so you can avoid those forums.
SEO allows you to accomplish these goals. Complete a keyword analysis. Ask how popular are specific job titles, which keywords attract the most traffic to your job postings, and where does your company ranks for job title keywords compared to competitors?
Use targeted keywords to optimize your job content. Include the job title, company name, location, and other relevant keywords. Using easily understood language in job descriptions for search engines and job seekers is important. Another SEO tip is to feature engaging content on your careers page so prospects are interested from the moment they arrive. Your page will rank higher the longer candidates stay.
Quality content is king
When you determine your target market, where they likely live online, and what type of content interests them, start crafting captivating copy. Post intriguing ads on relevant job boards. Write blog posts that are interesting and relevant. Use SEO-friendly keywords so content is easily discovered. Author white papers, case studies, eBooks, and infographics demonstrate who your company is and why it is an ideal place to get a job and, most importantly, grow in a career.
Consistent messaging instills a warm feeling of familiarity when candidates connect with your company’s website, social media, hiring portal, or other content marketing avenues. Project a consistent and desired image through your words and tone of voice across all marketing channels.
Related: We Are Hiring Sample Posts
Measure your inbound recruitment strategy success with analytics
You can discover what is working and what can benefit from improvement through web analytics and recruiting metrics. It is important to find out where the most qualified job seekers originate from, what job posts generate the most applicants, and what the most effective marketing channels are, among other questions.
Paying attention to analytics also helps you determine how much time and money you spend on your campaigns. Inbound recruitment strategies evolve over time, just as new trends arise. Analyzing results allows you to study how you can improve.
In conclusion, inbound recruitment is an ongoing process that requires the same creativity and insight as a company’s marketing and branding strategy. Finding qualified candidates in today’s talent-driven job market is not a simple task, and it demands more engaging ways to reach job seekers than traditional outbound recruitment.
Companies that continue to optimize their inbound recruitment strategy are ideally positioned to attract exceptional candidates and fill open roles for the long term. Remember, you are recruiting premium talent. These prospects have a multitude of options, and organizations that understand outstanding inbound recruitment techniques have an advantage over competitors who focus on outbound recruitment of yesterday.
Related: How to Leverage Data To Improve Your Recruitment Process
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