3 Talent Engagement Strategies You Need to Know

talent engagement

Recruitment is as competitive as ever and the race to deliver more value to candidates shows no signs of slowing down. So how do you ensure your brand is recalled at the critical time when the candidate is looking for a role?

This is where marketing comes in!

At Engage Sydney 2022, Rhys Bateman, Senior Director of Demand Generation, Global at Bullhorn was joined by marketing leaders — Ez Khan, Co-Founder at Hume Scope, Nicole Hart, Marketing Manager at Fuse Recruitment, and Vivianne Arnold, Chief Marketing Officer at Capgemini (previously Hudson) — for the session, Marketing Leaders Tell All: Talent Engagement Strategies to Win. Read on to learn three strategies you need to know to enhance your talent engagement and help you deliver more value to candidates.

1. Enhance your campaigns by telling stories

According to Hubspot, storytelling is an art. A marketing campaign with a compelling story behind it can set your brand apart from other agencies.

Recruitment is a competitive industry so help your team stand out from the crowd by narrating your next marketing initiative. It can be done across all channels, in written form, via images or verbally in a video. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Vivianne notes, “when you write engaging content, if you tell an engaging story you get to reproduce that at mass at scale – cost effectively. Your marketing spend, engagement and nurture streams become part of the ROI”.

She went on to share a “pandemic example”. In order to support the Victorian government’s vaccine rollout, Hudson needed to help source candidates who were able to give injections.

So they started off with traditional job ads as that’s what the government agency they were working with requested. However they got zero responses. This is when Vivianne spoke to a colleague who was an ex-nurse. She told Vivianne about asking her retired nurse friends to ‘step up for the community’. This was her call to arms!

“We’re marketers, we’re storytellers, there’s nothing better than not just looking at different channels, but going back to the basics of marketing and saying, ‘that’s the campaign’,” Vivianne explained. From this, they had “the most overwhelming response rate because we told a story, and we put that through multiple different channels”. “Don’t forget to tell the stories”, Vivianne stated.

2. Nurture your candidates and create positive experiences

“It’s all about nurturing candidates in your database”, Nicole stated. When sourcing candidates, all three panellists agreed recruiters should be looking within their own database first. Through his work training recruiters at Hume Scope, Ez Khan highlighted he’s seeing this big shift towards agencies looking at who they have in their database first.

This is not surprising as your database offers a treasure trove of qualified candidates. Rather than increasing job board spend, look within your database to source candidates. You can nurture and add value to your existing pool of candidates by using the communication methods they prefer, to reach out at the right moments.

In an earlier session at Engage, Martin Hayden, Chief Operating Officer at Hudson said, “candidates want to speak to specialists, they want to speak to people who understand their role and understand the skills they’re working with.” So position your team as specialists and create positive experiences for candidates by using recruitment automation to ensure your database has clean, segmented candidates according to skills, interests or status. By doing this you can personalise communications with candidates to connect with them at the right time with content relevant and interesting to them. “The more personalised you get, the better the response rate”, Ez stated.

3. Invest in tech stack to improve your marketing function

The right tech can help your marketing team deliver more value to candidates and clients, at the right time and place. “Marketing automation can do things at scale and [it’s] why you need to invest in technology to enable it”, Vivianne said. “If you’re seeing your marketing team as a cost team, you’ve got to shift the culture of that team and also your mindset. They are the engine that can help you do business development at scale.”

Ez noted as a business owner, he considers “what we’re actually trying to achieve” first and foremost. When it comes to exploring new marketing technology, he said, “it’s worth researching the whole gambit, from the super cheap to the bells and whistles” so you can ultimately choose the most effective option for your agency.  Meanwhile, Nicole highlighted at Fuse Recruitment, “We use a lot of technology – the hard part about being in marketing and [using] all these technology pieces is, we implement it, but recruiters actually use it”. To make your recruiters work in conjunction with marketing to maximise opportunities, Nicole said, “it’s really important that you have a champion in each team, each state, each office, that can really learn the product and train their fellow recruiters.”


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