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Stuart Gentle Publisher at Onrec

Why your marketing colleagues are your secret weapon for recruiting great people

Jon Addison, head of Talent Solutions at LinkedIn UK

In today’s candidate-centric job market, the competition for talent is fierce. For employers, this means going the extra mile to stand out from the crowd and show prospective employees why you are a great place to work.

New research from LinkedIn has found that 62 per cent of recent job-switchers in the UK knew little to nothing about their current employer before applying for the job. We also found that one in five recent job-switchers in the UK were unable to find out information about what a prospective employer was like to work for prior to applying, with 14% saying information on would-be employers’ websites is too vague.

These findings should be a wake up call to recruitment teams as it is vital that Britain’s employers are doing more to boost awareness and promote themselves among professionals.

One of the best ways to attract talented professionals to work for your organisation is by building a strong, accessible employer brand. But showcasing the opportunities you offer as an employer isn’t something that falls to just recruitment or HR. Instead, it’s vital that recruitment and marketing colleagues work together to pool expertise when sourcing, attracting and hiring future employees.

Recognise that many heads are better than one

Employer branding should draw on a number of areas within a business from marketing, communications, IT and of course HR and recruitment. While it’s vital that your employer brand reflects all areas of the business and is genuine in its approach, you’ll be surprised how many different skills are required to get your employer brand up and running. 

A great example of a company who does this well is AND Digital - whose recruitment and marketing leads meet on a weekly basis to monitor engagement, and to develop new ideas for content. And it’s clearly working - follower growth on all social media channels is surpassing goals, and the team are now achieving 100% direct hires.

Join up your approach to social

Your company’s website and social media channels are your shop window for candidates. If a job ad piques the interest of a professional, you can bet that they’ll go online to look for more information about your company. And, while online channels are often managed by the marketing team, your followers are often some of the best candidates for job openings - especially as they’ve already chosen to engage with your company.

This means that it is vital that recruitment and marketing teams take a joined up approach to social media, to ensure that job hunters can find information online easily and remove any barriers they might face when applying. Recruitment teams should feed content into social calendars, and ensure that content published through these channels is as engaging as possible for prospective candidates during hiring campaigns.

Remember what you stand for

LinkedIn research shows that more than half (52 per cent) of professionals consider a company’s values to be a deal breaker when it comes to accepting a job offer. This means that your employer brand needs to communicate your company’s values and purpose in order to connect the right employees to your business.

This is where HR and marketing working together can really help; HR understands the employees of an organisation and what matters to them, but marketing understands how to communicate a message, and how to make sure that it’s seen. By involving HR teams in the marketing process, and visa versa, you can help ensure that there’s consistency between the company’s consumer and employer brand - and that your company’s values are weaved in throughout both.

While our research shows that candidates currently struggle to make a connection with companies, it doesn’t have to be that way. By fostering cross-departmental collaboration, you can ensure that your organisation is tackling the challenge of recruiting top talent in a competitive market head-on.