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Translating Marketing into Recruiting

By Kathy Barton, November 28, 2007

Translating Marketing into Recruiting

I've always thought there were a lot of similarities between marketing and recruiting. Both are often considered "overhead" positions. Both work at proving their value to the business. Both can be poorly understood at the executive level. And both are often undervalued – after all, anyone can be a recruiter (or marketer), right? I once worked at a company where my predecessor as SVP of Marketing had previously been the VP of Engineering. He hadn't worked out in engineering, so they moved him over to marketing – after all, how hard can it be to run marketing (or recruiting)? He was actually there for over a year before he was eased out of the company.

Read more articles by this author.

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Marketing, like recruiting, has been transformed by the internet. Suddenly you can actually measure the results of on-line marketing campaigns. You can test multiple messages, graphic presentations, and offers. You can measure response rates, click-through rates, and orders completed or leads generated. You can tell where business is coming from, and where you should be investing your marketing dollars. Here is where we get to one of the biggest differences between marketing and recruiting these days: no marketing department worth its salt would think of running a department without these metrics. Marketing departments measure where the website stands in Search Engine Optimization lists, where web traffic is coming from, where customers go on the site, how long they stay, and where they drop off. And now marketing departments are starting to compare these metrics to the competition. But are recruiting departments measuring these things?

Most recruiting departments don't think about these kinds of metrics. They look at time to hire, candidates interviewed per hire, number of interviews set-up by recruiter by month or by year, and candidate quality. In The Adler Group's Recruiting Top Talent 2007/2008 survey, these metrics were the only ones that were tracked by at least 30% of the people responding, with answers ranging from 30% for quality of hire to 39% for time to hire. The use of a tool like WebTrends to track ad performance had the lowest response rate at 11%.

It's time for recruiting to borrow some of the techniques that marketing professionals have used so successfully to increase both their effectiveness, and their ability to prove their effectiveness with metrics. Let's start with a quick look at the fundamental principles underlying marketing, and how these can be translated to recruiting.

The classic "Four Ps" of marketing are Product, Pricing, Promotion, and Placement. These have been updated with the advent of on-line marketing, but really, these four principles have been the basis of marketing programs for years. Product, of course, is what you are selling. Pricing is what you charge for it. Promotion is everything you do to promote the product, and Placement is how you get the product to the customer. There are endless variations on these four aspects of marketing (and it differs when you are marketing a service versus a product), but you can't do marketing if you don't understand everything there is to know about them.

Let's translate these for recruiting and call them the "Five As": Accomplishment, Audience, Advertising, Accessibility, and Assessment. These don't equate exactly with the "Four Ps," but the critical thing here is to change your mindset. Stop thinking about your internal stakeholders, and start thinking about the candidates. Marketing is all about understanding the wants, needs, and mindset of the customer. The Five As focus on the wants, needs, and mindset of the candidate.

Accomplishment: Start thinking about job openings in terms of what the candidate will need to accomplish in the position to be successful – and, equally important, what new skills and accomplishments they will acquire in this position to increase their marketability. If you don't understand the benefit to the candidate of taking this job just as thoroughly as you understand the benefit to the company of hiring this person, then you haven't done your homework. The classic question here is "Why would a top person want this job?" This is where having a Performance Profile, not just a Job Description, is critical.

Audience: Understanding your target customer is critical in marketing. It is equally critical in recruiting. The flip side of the question above is "Who is the top performer who would want this job?" One way to get this answer is to analyze the most successful people currently doing the job. Are they just out of college? Taking their first management position? What attracted them to the job? In call centers we often find two groups: the ones that are using this as an entry into the company or the industry, and the ones that like the consistency and stability of a 9-5 job. These are two totally different groups, and you need to have two different recruiting strategies to attract them.

Advertising: Let's all agree right here that a job description is a purely internal document that should never, ever be used externally to attract candidates. After all, do you see your marketing colleagues using product specifications as ads? This is probably the biggest change between what you are doing today and what you should be doing to compete more effectively for top performers. However, this is also where marketing concepts can have the biggest impact on your success. I know that it's really easy to just push a button to post the job description while it takes time to come up with a compelling ad. Marketers generally never run an advertising campaign without first producing a multi-page document that includes everything from company brand to product position to customer mindset. Be happy that you don't have to do all this. What you do need to do is understand the answers to the two questions above. Then target your ad to the top performer who would want your job, and make sure the ad explains why they want your job. Use humor, unconventional titles, and compelling descriptions. Focus on what's in it for them. Don't hesitate to ask your marketing department to help you – they like this stuff!

Accessibility: Once you've got a great ad, you need to make sure your target audience can find it. This is where reverse engineering your ads and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) come in, both topics that are covered in our Recruiter Boot Camp. Search for your competitor's ads and see where they are posting them. Focus on niche sites and try paying for Google Adwords. Get a sense of where your target audience spends time on the web. Then make sure they find you there, too.

Assessment: Here's where assessing the success of your efforts comes in. There are a number of tools out there, from WebTrends to Alexa, which allow you to assess the success of your efforts. What sources drive the most candidates to your website? What do the candidates do once they are on your website? Do they complete an application? Where do they drop off? Try slightly different ads on two different sites, and see which one is most successful in driving candidates to apply. The beauty of the web is that you can measure the success of just about everything you do, if you just take the time to look at the information that's available. The secret of successful recruiting is the same as the secret of successful marketing – figure out what works, and be ready to change it when it stops working. As Will Rogers said, "Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."

Organizations measure and track what's important to them. If you want recruiting to be important, start measuring it and track how you improve using the Five As. Don't think you know what will work or not work until you've tried it. Or, to quote that great marketing genius Yogi Berra, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."