Editor’s Note: This concludes our five week series on the Five Ps of Recruitment Marketing (product, price, people, placement, and promotion). Special thanks to Mike Dwyer  for an afternoon conversation that inspired this series of blog posts. For a look at assessments on product, price, people and placement, view my previous posts.

Promotion involves the means by which a product is communicated to, or sold, to customers. Traditionally, these aspects of marketing could include direct mail pieces, television and radio advertisements, press and demonstration events, sponsorships and celebrity endorsements, coupons and rebates, brochures, packaging, and free samples. Today, promotions involve other tactics like websites, guerilla marketing, search engine and display advertising, email, and SMS communications.

There is an unending list of ways product benefits and features can be communicated to a highly defined audience. And what’s better is that recruitment marketers can use all these same tactics to market their product: jobs and culture. Promotions are not free however, so marketers factor cost of promotions into the product’s profitability the same way you factor cost per hire.

How do you decide which are right for your target talent?

Start with the basics – the job posting and title. Is it attention-getting and appealing? Does it excite the reader and prominently feature the attributes you know motivate your target audience? Are the images thoughtfully chosen to resonate with the type of people you seek? Some companies are taking a radical new approach to conveying their employment brand or the details of a hard-to-fill position: infographics. Like a microsite or video, infographics are a popular way to convey complex ideas visually. Since each one is unique to a job, event or brand, they are simple, quick to read, and easy to share.

Beyond your careers site and job boards, where do you distribute your message?  Hiring fairs, trade publications, and employment guides are great places to find active job seekers. Reach passive candidates as well on social networks by asking employees to share the job with their friends and families. Recruiters can form one-to-one connections with passive candidate on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Run display ads on social networks and popular websites or send targeted email by defining your ideal candidate in terms of years of experience, fields of study, and current location. Even if an individual isn’t actively looking to make a career change, an aptly placed ad on Facebook where he or she socializes could spark interest.

Try this exercise: Create a mini marketing plan for a new vacancy or a tough to fill position. Profile the attributes of the talent you wish to attract and the logic behind how your plan will deliver your message effectively. Aside from a job posting, be sure to include four additional tactics you can use to reach the candidate – including how it will tie to at least one key characteristic or motivator you listed.

Bottom line: Like marketers, talent strategists must also use a diverse mix of techniques to distribute their hiring message. In a market where top talent will flock to companies with the hottest brand, a creative message sent through the right channels can make a big difference.

Editor’s Note: This five-week series is dedicated to examining the five most common Ps of a typical marketing mix and assessing how they relate to recruitment. Today’s post focuses on placement, and next Tuesday will cover the concept of promotion. For a look at assessments on product, price and people, view my previous posts.

In marketing, placement involves getting your product or service in front of your target customers. This means selecting the right stores and determining the best place to display it – like the end of an aisle or rack, with a special stand-alone display, or within a check-out counter. The act of distributing the product and ensuring consistent supply within key markets is also involved. Marketers must estimate how much demand they can create in a certain area and supply the right amount of product to meet anticipated demand. Often, pricing strategies fluctuate with changes in placement, thereby adding another layer of complexity to strategy. Logistics – the act of physically transporting a good – must also be considered. As demands grow, additional distribution channels and manufacturing sites closer to where the product is sold are often needed to minimize transportation costs and increase speed to market.

In recruitment, talent acquisition strategists employ these same principles to sell their product: jobs. We plan placement strategies to support regional hiring – say when a new location opens or during periods of growth. To hire, a national job advertisement is often posted, along with state and local advertisements, to source talent already residing in a specific market. Other times, if the role is specific or highly specialized, job ads will be placed on niche boards to reach a defined audience of the workforce. Some geographic areas have less supply of specialized talent, so relocation costs are paid to overcome talent shortages and secure the right candidate for a job. Recruiters attend career fairs at colleges and universities known for strong academic programs to put their product in front of graduates who will have skills and education applicable to a role at the company. Other times, recruitment can resemble a commission sales model and a staffing agency is paid to help fill a job. Similar to a rebate offered to reward consumers for purchasing a good, recruitment marketers may also offer a signing bonus to candidates who accept certain jobs.

So how do you put your product in front of the right candidates at the right time?

One way is to rely on outside data. For instance, a tool like the Supply and Demand Portal shows where labor pressure is highest for key positions across the country. It helps recruiters see where the most jobs are posted for that type of position and where the most candidates reside to fill those positions. With this information, you can see where supplemental sourcing is required to successfully fill a job.

For example, say you are looking to fill a position for a software engineer in the Pacific Northwest – specifically Washington. According to data, it is harder to recruit for this job in Washington and Oregon, and the demand for talent there is significantly higher than in the Northeast. Knowing this, you will need to supplement your placement strategy to get your message out in new channels, reach a wider geographic audience, and consider paying relocation in order to effectively compete for top talent. The data also shows it is easier to recruit software engineers in New Mexico, Florida, and Louisiana; therefore, a targeted campaign could be run in those markets to attract qualified candidates to move and meet the need in Washington. Hosting job fairs at relevant universities and working directly with local IT professional groups are two simple ways to take your message straight to the audience you need to reach. Use social networks and display ads to target online messages to people in specific markets, too.

Another way to be successful in this area is to get to know the profile of your target talent inside and out. Most product and service providers know their customer (person who buys the product) and the consumer (person who ultimately uses the product) down to the nuances of their behavior. Marketers use a VALS model to understand the psychographic attributes that impact decision-making within their target audience and place products based on what that analysis reveals. An acronym for values, attitudes, and lifestyles, VALS (according to www.strategicbusinessinsights.com) asks you to bucket your customer into one of eight categories that best describes their motivation:

• Innovators
• Thinkers
• Believers
• Achievers
• Strivers
• Experiencers
• Makers
• Survivors

Recruitment marketers should think seriously about what motivates candidates when shopping for a job – or even better, which deep-seeded switches can turn on a passive candidate’s desire to make a change.

Is it desire for recognition and status, opportunity for greater pay or benefits, emphasis on work-life balance, or an employer committed to activism? Without knowing what is most critical to your ideal candidate, how will you know which qualities of your product (job and culture) to play up?  Collect this information through surveys of staff in a specific role or division. Also, purchase insights from people outside your organization, or gather anecdotal insights from ongoing interactions with candidates.

Try this exercise: Choose any opening and envision your ideal candidate. Which of the eight VALS categories does this person fit into best?  Next, use a site like Pinterest, or cut pictures out of a magazine to create an inspiration board of what specifically defines your ideal candidate. Focus on strong motivators and the characteristics of successful placements you’ve made for a job or location in the past. Think about hobbies, family profile, issues they might support, and pop culture (websites, movies, TV). Understanding what values, attitudes, and lifestyle will be a match for this job and geographic area can help you place your message in the right spot and obtain a hire that is less likely to turnover. Use what you gather to re-write the job posting so it emphasizes what is important about the job or your company. Run that job ad in geographic markets and niche sites where your desired talent lives, works, and plays. Vary the images on your branding so they reflect the lifestyle of the applicant you seek to reach – consider using your own people that fit the profile. Choose the top three defining characteristics and feature those on social media sites when promoting the opening.

Bottom line: Not all positions and the talent needed to fill them are alike. Tailor your message to your audience and play on the strengths you know will appeal to ideal applicants. After all, quality is far preferred over quantity when it comes to sourcing candidates that stick.

Editor’s Note: This five-week series is dedicated to examining the five most common Ps of a typical marketing mix and assessing how they relate to recruitment. Today’s post focuses on people; the remaining concepts – placement and promotion – will run in sequential order every Tuesday over the next couple weeks. For a look at assessments on product and price, view my previous posts.

Regardless of the business, the people involved with producing a product or a service inevitably shape the final outcome. While the nature of a particular business certainly renders some attributes more influential than others, the appearance, attitudes, experience, and beliefs of staff impact the sale of a product. In service-based businesses, like restaurants and retail, the appearance of staff reinforces commitments the company makes to health, safety, and brand position. Uniforms and service standards are just two ways businesses seek to deliver on their brand promise through their agents. These define the claims made by the company – whether it is to be the number one luxury retailer or safest car manufacturer.

A company’s people are often called upon to respond to crisis and serve as a testament to a brand promise. Toyota, who issued recalls of roughly 2.3 million vehicles in January 2010, created a series of videos featuring employees stating their commitment to safety. A number of technicians, engineers, plant employees, and dealers discussed the recall and how they planned to move forward. In another example, Domino’s created “The Pizza Turnaround” documentary featuring actual employees and their reactions to consumer opinions. The project featured people from all departments – from chefs and senior leaders to marketing and product management – who openly addressed criticism uncovered online and in focus groups.

So how do people impact recruitment? The individuals within your organization can be your biggest advocates, or the most compelling deterrent in your pursuit of top talent. Employers tell us that employee referrals are often the number one source of hire, even when the awareness of an employee referral incentive is low. What this tells us is that people are passionate about where they work. So much time is spent at work and whether the experience is good or bad – people talk.

Creating opportunities for your passionate brand stewards to publicly endorse your company as a place to work is the cornerstone of social recruitment. The content you share on social media channels should be a combination of company-created messages and unsolicited testimony from real staff. Encourage employees to join your communities, interact with potential applicants, and take a vested interest in the conversation. Not only does this substantiate your claims as a desirable place to work, but it can serve as a research mechanism to see which messages are most effective with potential candidates.

Try this exercise: Ask functional area leaders within your business to identify key individuals who demonstrate company values and could serve as a mentor to potential applicants. You can also look to staff members who have been recognized for awards, participate in corporate volunteerism, or are active in affinity groups. Pull these individuals together and create short videos documenting why they believe your company is a great place to work or what they like best about their job. The videos don’t have to be extravagant (here are a few simple examples: SCA and CR Bard), but the faces of staff will serve as an interactive influence to outsiders. Use these videos to start conversations in social media and post them on your careers site.

Bottom line: Don’t make the mistake of excluding people from your recruitment marketing presence. Physical evidence is a fundamental part of effective persuasion, so encourage employee participation in official corporate-created social media communities – their credibility on working at your company will give potential applicants plenty of authentic proof to support your claims. Discuss important topics – like culture, growth potential, and benefits. Tap recently hired staff to talk about their experiences with your recruitment and on-boarding processes – two areas most companies fail to address, yet one of the topics four out of five job seekers want more transparency on. Promote referral bonus programs and invest in a job sharing application that integrates with Facebook or LinkedIn to give your staff easy ways to share job opportunities in their networks. Lastly, create internal channels for staff to feel heard in case negative issues arise. Without support internally, your authorities won’t defend you publicly.

Editor’s Note: This five-week series is dedicated to examining the five most common Ps of a typical marketing mix and assessing how they relate to recruitment. Today’s post focuses on price; the remaining concepts – people, placement and promotion – will run in sequential order every Tuesday over the next few weeks. For a look at the assessment of product, check out my post from last week. 

A number of factors contribute to the final price of a good or service, including the cost of materials or labor to produce the final product, overhead and distribution costs, and desired profitability. Other things like discounts, commission, and marketing costs to acquire a customer impact the bottom line as well. To learn from marketing, consider what it will cost a candidate to accept your job offer.

Seldom is a career opportunity a perfect match for a candidate. In most cases, there may need to be a trade off of desired benefits or a minor sacrifice of one benefit for another. Most job seekers bargain with the variables when deciding whether they will apply for a job. For example, a job may require a longer commute but offer greater advancement potential. Or, a company with a stronger brand reputation may offer a smaller starting salary than a lesser-known company.

Understand the price a candidate may have to pay to accept a particular job so you can proactively emphasize the redeeming qualities of the opportunity that offset costs. Don’t overlook how helpful it can be to share information about the realities of a job. For example, say you know your target talent has between five to eight years of experience and prefers urban living; but your job is in a suburb that requires relocation or a 50 to 60 minute commute. Address it!  While it’s unrealistic to include this type of detail in a job advertisement, social media is the ideal forum to elaborate on things beyond essential qualifications and job functions. Seek out employees who have a reverse commute and get them to share their perspective on Facebook. They can give details about taking public transportation and shortcuts they’ve found that make the commute manageable. Whatever the topic, this is just one of the ways to remove obstacles that could prevent your target talent from applying to and accepting your job.

Try this exercise: Before you can effectively anticipate the costs that might accompany a job or working at your company, you must fully understand the profile of your target audience. As you’ll learn later with the remaining Ps, the nuances that define your ideal candidate are incredibly important in the placement and promotion of your recruitment message. Make a list of observations about your current workforce. What similarities exist among your staff? Are these characteristics among departments or do they change as you move from entry-level to senior leadership positions? While this may seem simple at first, the patterns you observe can start to shape how you seek out and tailor your message to attract the right fit for a specific job.

Bottom line:  Nearly every decision – from purchasing a product to accepting a job – involves trade-offs. Resist the nature to be arrogant about what your company can and cannot offer a potential applicant. Seek out information, both about your ideal candidate and the specific position, to understand what financial and personal costs might affect your ability to attract and retain the best people for the job.

What other ways do you think price impacts recruitment? Share your thoughts below!

Editor’s Note: This five-week series is dedicated to examining the five most common Ps of a typical marketing mix and assessing how they relate to recruitment. Today’s post focuses on product; the others – on price, people, placement and promotion – will run in sequential order every Tuesday over the next five weeks.

Raise your hand if you remember Marketing 101! If you’re like most talent acquisition professionals, the principles of marketing are hazy. A few Ps here, a DMA or two there. Most recruiters know enough to be dangerous, and it doesn’t matter much for day-to-day talent attraction anyway, right?

Think again.

Follow the typical marketing mix and apply it to recruitment – you’ll find there are an astounding number of similarities. The techniques used to effectively sell a product or service work just as well in selling a career opportunity. As such, the most successful social recruiters view talent acquisition through a marketing lens.

For my next handful of posts, I’d like to focus on the five most common Ps of marketing and tie to them into recruitment. And since each concept holds significant value, it’s only fair to give them the appropriate coverage, breaking tips and exercises into a series that will run over the next five weeks.  

Today’s focus: Product

In traditional marketing, a product is the physical good or service offered to a consumer. The attributes of the product are the accompanying benefits the product boasts. These attributes – function, design, packaging, ease of use, and warranty – are weighed against costs to determine if it is desirable for the purchaser. The purchase is influenced by the seller’s overall brand identity and word-of-mouth reputation as well as the influence of other consumers on the customer (e.g. a child may influence a parent’s toy purchase).

In recruitment marketing, your product is a job. The attributes of that job – pay, working hours, essential job functions, supervising staff, full time vs. part-time or contract – are all considered by a candidate. The decision to apply for the opportunity is impacted positively or negatively by the company’s employment brand and word-of-mouth opinions of current and former staff. And, like a product, there are influencers in an applicant’s life that factor into the decision to apply for or accept a job offer. For example, the impact on family is considered when a lengthy commute disturbs work-life balance.

Just like any product, your jobs compete for mindshare among qualified talent. Before going to market with a product or service, companies work to thoroughly understand the competitive landscape and develop a defendable position that differentiates them from alternatives. You must do the same for your job and workplace. The things that make you different from other employers will be the cornerstone of your employment value proposition and social media messages.

Try this exercise: Visualize the last advertisement you saw for a food product. What are the three things you remember the most?  It could be the taste, packaging or health benefits. These memorable images or qualities are what make the snack appealing. Apply this to recruitment by defining two or three things you want candidates to remember about your job opportunity or company. It could be philanthropy, continuing education, or commitment to innovation. Once you have two or three solid attributes, emphasize these in your social media messaging so candidates remember what you have to offer.

Bottom line:  Present job opportunities and culture in terms of the benefits. Be honest about the limitations of your company and stay true to its employment brand promise. Your product’s features, core benefits, and differentiators from those you compete with for talent should be the basis for social media messages and inspire former and current employees to validate the claims with their own testimonials. Individual social proof is the closest you can get to a satisfaction guarantee.

How else will you effectively utilize the concept of product for your business?

Feel pressure to add social media to your recruitment mix?  Chances are you’ve been putting it off for one or all of these four reasons:

1. Lack of urgency – Existing responsibilities claim priority over new developments.
2. Impact – You can’t predict an earth-shattering ROI, so it’s difficult to sell up the chain.
3. Organizational fear – Someone forwarded the Domino’s Pizza employee video to everyone in the company without showing how they responded and are growing stronger from it.
4. Analysis paralysis – You’ve got the green light to create a social recruiting presence, but are unsure how to get started.

Sound about right?  Read on.

This scenario is common. We meet social media evangelists everyday who “totally get it” and are nearing their breaking point trying to convince those who don’t. Pushing social media uphill in an organization riddled with naysayers often involves debating countless public social media disasters to convince everyone the anticipated rewards are worth any small risks. Before you throw in the towel, try practicing these four ways to sharpen your lobbying skills:

Wise up on the big “C”
Compliance. It’s the trump card the critics will undoubtedly pull from their sleeve to discredit social media sites for recruitment.  Be ready for this objection and practice your rebuttal. There’s a difference between using social media sites to source candidates and extending your employment brand to attract candidates. In fact, Anthony Scarpino, Director of Talent Acquisition at Sodexo describes it best here.

By participating in social media to source, a recruiter uses a site like LinkedIn to seek out candidates and contact them directly or through an introduction about an opportunity. This involves targeting and evaluating attributes of the candidate profile. This type of sourcing should follow a standard process to ensure equal consideration of all candidates and is most effective when initiated from individual recruiter accounts.

Social recruiting differs because the main goal is to motivate people to join the company’s talent community, apply to jobs, attend job fairs, and experience the culture. Calls to action for candidates on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., typically link back to a job posting tied to an OFCCP-compliant application process. Simply put, social recruiting is experiential marketing. It’s about showing people that your company is a great place to work, connecting them to peers who can affirm what you claim, and answering questions. It leaves the screening up to the trained recruiters.

Be savvy about the sites
Facebook boasts over 500 million users and eMarketer predicts the site to reach 57% of the adult U.S. internet population this year.  Despite widespread adoption, most arguments opposing social recruitment still claim that Facebook isn’t an appropriate site for career-related content. This is steadfastly false.

According to a recent CareerBuilder survey, 74% of participants were interested in seeing job opportunities posted on company social media pages. HR departments have seen as much as a 65% increase in employee referrals with Work@, a Facebook application that matches jobs to employees’ friends using career information listed in public profiles. Even more astounding, more than 54% of job seekers say they are more likely to apply to a company after becoming a fan on Facebook or following a company on Twitter. Arm yourself with these stats so you can confidently defend the need to use the largest and fastest-growing social networks on the planet to unlock passive candidate streams.

Resist the Field of Dreams whisper
Even if you’ve never seen the 1989 American sports drama, Field of Dreams, you probably recognize the often misquoted line whispered to the main character in a cornfield dramatic scene: “If you build it, He will come.” There’s a chance that no less than half of your company feels this way about creating a social media presence.

Those who make this assumption generally fear that people will bombard social media page(s) with negative comments. In their minds, there’s a virtual lynch mob just waiting to strike – rejected candidates, disgruntled employees, and former staff with hundreds of bones to pick. In this nightmare, the page goes live and a Batman signal illuminates the internet, drawing people in by the thousands to attack. Albeit a dramatization, this is an unfounded fear you must educate decision-makers about.

Without advertising, company Facebook pages only grow by an average of 35 fans within the first month. Not only are pages not blitzed by raging lunatics, they’re not graced by the avid supporters either. A campaign is essential to effectively launch a new Facebook page and should consist of Facebook advertising, integration on existing web properties, and employee support. And, if mobsters do find their way to the page, have an effective management strategy in place to respond. If criticism occurs, this CB Social whitepaper reveals that 63% of users have a better impression of a company that responds to users’ negative posts than those who do not address negativity.

Give them something to talk about
While some of us may be too young to remember Bonnie Raitt, we can all learn from her catchy tune. Without real, resonating examples of why a brand should participate in social media, the idea will remain just that – a good idea. A “When we get around to it,” item on a perpetual to-do list. Even worse, it could become a “We should’ve done that years ago,” after the opportunity has passed by.

The easiest way to get people to pay attention to social media is to show them conversations taking place that involve something that is important to them.

• For HR and recruitment, check out sites like Glassdoor,  Vault, and Jobitorial for an indication of your employment brand.
• Browse Yahoo! Answers, Ask, Yelp, and Amazon reviews for product questions, ratings and buyer reactions.
• Use sites like 48ers and Social Mention to see how much buzz exists about working at your company. Check out Openbook to search for keyword mentions of your company in Facebook status messages.
• Set up Google Alerts and advanced Twitter search feeds to learn about conversations as they unfold. Get notifications in real time by enabling the email setting on Google Alerts and using the feed option for a Twitter query to push new tweets to your RSS reader.

Share select examples from these free search sites to start conversations around what it would be like if you had a social media page to host and respond to conversations. Share the positive remarks and help alleviate the fear that nothing good can come from social recruiting. Take note of recurring topics and misconceptions – these are important messages that will shape your social media messages.

The point: Ignite the need to participate in social media work by alleviating fears and uncovering conversations that excite your biggest critics. Once the need is clear, you’ll know how to use social media to support internal initiatives and have a sense of urgency with which to act. With a clear goal, the impact on your recruitment and the organization as a whole will be much easier to measure.