5 Things You Can Learn From Inbound Marketing in Your Recruiting & Hiring

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

As a marketing strategist who earned her stripes working in HR and recruiting, much of what I do centers around engagement, community and relationships. When I made this transition, it was a major shift in my career but it wasn’t a 180-degree turn around because what I quickly found out is that marketing has striking similarities to recruitment and hiring. And what I’ve seen through the years is that the recruitment function is becoming more and more like marketing every day.

Marketing is all about promoting, reinforcing our brand, fostering connections and creating channels through which customers can engage. Recruiting leans on those activities heavily to find, engage and hire the best candidates by focusing on building an employment brand, developing an employee value proposition that is in line with an employee's needs and wants, shaping the public’s view of the company through a number of ways using multi-channel messaging and creating unique campaigns that reach a very targeted and niche candidate community.

You may not know it, but you’re probably already using inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is one of the most significant ways we achieve customer or candidate reach and response goals, in both marketing and recruiting. Inbound marketing focuses on creating channels for customer traffic to occur and engaging community members by using specific messaging and materials. Essentially, inbound marketing happens when we promote and engage with the hopes of customers, or in our case, candidates, circling back around and engaging us or making a buying decision. In recruiting, these efforts could mean providing a downloadable resource or job seeker template, or providing a salary negotiation guide video series for technical candidates.

Whatever the platform, messaging or method you use to engage as well as attract candidates, inbound marketing in recruiting focuses on these five things:

Your website or career site as a foundation

Your website or career site is the force holding all your efforts together. It should be where candidates know to go first anytime they have a question, are interested in your company or are ready to make the buying decision of applying for a job. It should be easy to navigate, optimized for high listings in search results, feature content people want, and most of all should help candidates engage and take that next step in the decision making process.

Creating candidate landing pages that convert

Creating landing pages that relate to what candidates are searching for, from “cover letter templates” to “tech jobs in California,” is simple and it works. The key to move them along in the buying decision once they’re there is the language you use.

Speak to your candidates as well as employees

In marketing, research is the first step and guides most of the decisions marketers make. Take a lesson from the profession and talk to candidates and employees about what’s working, what’s not, where and how they’re looking for jobs, what the company has to offer, where you’re lacking and more. Not only does it help you make the best inbound marketing recruitment decisions but it also provides a good baseline if you choose to measure your efforts. (Which you definitely should.)

Go visual

We are visual people living in a visual world, so as important as the words you use are, an image or video can sometimes say more than an entire page of copy could. Use visual channels and use pictures and video in your communications and channels that you wouldn’t necessarily consider visual as well.

Make your website sticky

Your inbound marketing will likely send candidates to your website or careers page, but what’s going to make them want to stay there?  Make your website sticky, that is, make them want to stay, with free resources, great content, ways to engage and more. Give them a reason to hang out a while and you’ll make an impression on them.  

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell. 

Why You Should be Building a Candidate Pipeline of Your Contingent Workforce

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

The job economy is different now than it has been for the past several years. We’ve seen unemployment drop and jobs grow, which has led to a newly competitive and fluid marketplace for job seekers. Workers are freer to go from job to job and expect a great deal from employers looking to woo them. These changes have also brought about a change in the way companies are staffing as they rely more and more on project-based contract workers.

Why a contingent workforce makes sense

These temporary, specialized workers fill knowledge gaps and meet an immediate need. This is a huge consideration as the struggle to find an employee who is a perfect match is one that’s all too familiar and the average time to hire in currently at almost 60 days! For all these reasons, a contingent workforce has become a valuable part of keeping the business going.

Contract workers also offer companies the flexibility to seek out specific skills they need to solve a problem or complete a project. The workers offer experience and expertise that current employees may not possess and limit the time required to onboard, train and get them started on their job responsibilities. Contract workers may also be a great option for companies that have a temporary employee gap to fill, such as when a worker is out on maternity or paternity leave. Overall, the freedom and expertise that comes with utilizing a contingent workforce just makes sense.

Maintaining a contingent workforce

The same things we consider advantages of utilizing a contingent workforce can also be drawbacks. For instance, the freedom goes both ways. You are free to hire and dismiss based on your needs, and a contract worker is free to come and go as their needs dictate. This can create a challenge for hiring managers and business leaders who need to maintain a productive workforce. However, one way to meet this challenge is to develop a candidate pipeline of contingent workers.

Building a pipeline

Building a candidate pipeline of contract workers not only makes it easier to find the types of workers you need down the road, but it also takes away the element of mystery when you and the temporary worker don’t know, or necessarily trust, each other. Another major advantage is that the workers in your pipeline will already know your business. Though there’s usually a much smaller learning curve for a contract worker than a permanent one, there will always be one to some degree. A pipeline of people who know your company eliminates that.

One of the biggest obstacles to creating a pipeline of contract workers is the fact that their short stay in your company makes it hard to develop relationships and engage these subject-matter experts. This challenge is the reason that many companies work with outsourcing, staffing and consulting firms or technology platforms that specialize in these particular areas, such as oDesk.

While these resources can be effective, companies relying solely on these channels to engage, recruit and hire project-based workers are missing a huge opportunity to engage personally. By getting to know your contingent workforce in the same way you would your full-time, permanent team members, you’ll see greater success both now and in the future.


TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.

3 Reasons to Insource Your Executive Recruiting and Hiring Efforts

In a traditional corporate recruiting model, companies often leverage their recruiting teams to hire and recruit for entry level to mid level positions leaving specialty and executive positions to third party recruiters. A new study tells us that this once widely used practice is on the decline. HR and recruiting teams are moving to insource or in house instead of outsource their senior business recruiting efforts.

Brining Your Executive Recruiting In House Instead of Outsource

A now 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using in house executive recruiters to fill key positions within their organization which is up 15 percent from a decade ago according to the Association of Executive Search Consultants.  These internal executive recruiting teams seem to be flourishing as companies like Pepsi, Time Warner and Sears look for ways to cut costs while attracting the best talent for their organization and on their own terms.

As someone who has worked with a number of third party recruiters for executive and specialty positions, I can attest to the expense that they sometimes bring. For large organizations that work on a global scale, the cost can be staggering. It’s not uncommon for third party recruiters to expect 15-40 percent of a placement’s first year salary for their efforts. A number like that can really add up. 

• ·      Executive Recruiting is Strategic. Internal recruiting teams are viewing their recruiting efforts as long term focusing on relationships with key players building a candidate pipeline for these executive positions before they become vacant.

• ·      Executive Information is More Easily Available Online. With the growth of social networking sites and an increased focused of sourcing within large organizations, more and more senior business leaders can be found online. This practice will surely continue as business leaders focus more on building their personal brand and persona with the support of the Internet.

• ·      Substantial Cost Savings. Recruiting and HR senior business leaders are focusing more on looking at bigger picture metrics and how human capital practices impact the entire organization versus just their department’s individual bottom line. These cost savings can be tied back not only to cost per hire but productivity of an entire team or division making a stronger business case for the practice of insourcing your executive hiring within HR.

Recruiting regardless of the position level within the organization takes strategy, skill and effort. Moving these senior level recruitment and hiring activities in house can be effective but only if a company creates a long term candidate engagement strategy and pipeline to facilitate these relationships focused on results. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

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