The recruitment industry changes rapidly with the changes in the global labor market. Finding the right talent has become even trickier when unemployment is low, and competition is higher. Hence, relying on outbound recruiting strategies alone won’t help companies scale or fill open positions easily. Most companies rely on an inbound recruitment strategy to make quality hires faster in the modern recruitment environment.
Moreover, today potential employees have abundant choices for choosing their next employer. Hence, attracting candidates has become one of the crucial parts of modern recruitment.
This article explains what inbound recruitment is and how to create an effective inbound recruiting strategy. Let’s get started.
What is Inbound Recruitment?
Inbound recruitment is a strategy to attract candidates by creating a great experience through insightful branded content and remarkable candidate engagement techniques. Although both outbound and inbound recruiting aim to find and hire the best candidates, inbound recruiting requires tremendous effort and marketing.
In short, inbound recruitment is a mix of employer branding and recruitment marketing to increase employer brand value and relationships with active and passive candidates.
There are many benefits of including inbound recruiting in your recruitment strategy. While candidate experience has become more important than ever now, companies with good reputations attract more talent. Inbound recruitment helps you focus on such areas and boost your recruitment efficiency.
Advantages of Inbound Recruitment
Attracts Quality Candidates
The inbound recruiting strategy makes your company attractive enough to draw potential candidates to come and apply for your jobs rather than reaching out to these candidates. Attracting potential candidates is not that easy, especially when your competitors also seek the same. One of the major benefits of inbound recruitment is that it helps you draw the attention of quality candidates. You will have qualified applicants who genuinely took the lead to apply for the job you posted. These are candidates interested particularly in your company rather than every other open job available on job boards.
Boosts Employer Brand
In outbound recruiting, the recruiters sell the job to the candidates convincing them to apply. In inbound recruitment, recruiters play a prominent role in building the employer’s brand. They manage the employer’s online presence, reputation, candidate engagement, and marketing activities to ensure that the employer brand is influential enough to attract more candidates.
Enhances Candidate Experience
Studies say that 72% of employees who had a bad experience with a company are likely to share that on social media. Negative candidate experience can badly affect your employer’s brand and quality of hires. Inbound recruitment involves engaging with candidates throughout the recruitment process, which boosts the candidate experience.
Drives Passive Candidates
About 75% of professionals are passive candidates who may not respond positively when you reach out to them directly with a job. But when you build a strong employer brand and build an excellent online reputation, passive candidates are likely to stop by and consider your job when you reach out. This is one of the other significant advantages of inbound recruitment.
Improves Diversity
An inbound recruiting strategy can take your employer’s brand to a broader range of candidates. Your good reputation can attract applicants from different backgrounds diversifying your talent pool.
Challenges in Inbound Recruitment
It is time-taking.
As discussed earlier, although the benefits of inbound recruitment seem easy, the whole process requires a lot of time. When you have immediate job roles, you can’t expect people to know your credibility through your blogs or social channels and then apply for a job. In such cases, outbound recruiting is the perfect strategy.
Moreover, it also takes time to build a proper inbound recruiting strategy. You can’t improve candidate experience or boost brand as soon as you are in for the inbound recruitment. First, you need to fix the negative feedback and start small when building your brand.
Now, let’s see some inbound recruitment tips for creating a successful inbound recruiting strategy.
Tips to Implement an Effective Inbound Recruitment Strategy
Inbound recruiting strategies include maintaining a strong online presence via blog posts, social media, podcasts, etc.
Prepare a plan keeping your objectives at the core.
Create a clear and detailed plan that includes and prioritizes your objectives. Discuss what you want to accomplish and who you want to attract and hire with your team.
Understand Target Audiences.
Understand your target market and create a candidate persona that fits the roles in your company.
Engage your ideal candidates
In recruiting, the actual job starts after you attract candidates. Once you have a pool of applicants, you will have to engage with them throughout the process. Recruiters need to stay in touch with candidates through emails, sharing company news, culture, and corporate retreats.
Find where exactly your candidates are.
Before you invest time and effort in marketing, find out where your candidates reside online. Knowing which platforms your prospects use to engage with companies will help you save lots of time and money. Optimize your social channels, job titles, and careers page with proper keywords to make them easily accessible through google search.
Create quality content.
There’s no other way except to create quality content to attract and engage your target market. Write interesting and relevant blog posts, social media posts, case studies, eBooks, and infographics to establish a strong employer brand. You can also explain why your company stands out and is the best place to work in your blogs or video content. The videos or any other rich format content need not be grand but real; it can be just “a day in your office” by your employees.
Measure the progress.
Last but least. Measure the progress of your inbound recruitment strategy. Study the data and pay attention to how much time and money you spent on it versus the results. This will allow you to improve your recruitment marketing and branding strategy.
Bottom Line
Finding the right candidates in today’s talent-driven job market is not simple. Inbound recruitment helps you create a wider (your own) talent pool and eases your job when you are looking to fill a position. Although it is a time-consuming and tricky process, inbound recruitment will allow you to make the perfect hires faster if done rightly.
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