Attracting and engaging top talent is critical to business success, and companies with great talent hold a powerful advantage over their competitors. That’s why smart, modern organizations are taking a serious look at their recruitment strategy and formalizing their approach to recruitment marketing.
While technology can’t provide all the answers, a recruitment marketing platform can greatly enhance efforts to attract, engage, and convert top candidates. In fact, Aptitude Research found that when companies invest in a recruitment marketing platform, they are:
- 3x more likely to improve the candidate experience,
- 2x more likely to improve conversion rates, and
- 2x more likely to improve overall decision-making in talent acquisition.
Despite these clear benefits, Aptitude Research reports that just 14% of talent acquisition teams are adopting recruitment marketing platforms, and just 2% are fully utilizing the functionality of these platforms. As the recruitment marketing technology landscape becomes more crowded and complex, companies are struggling to understand what these solutions can do and how they should be used. Finding the right partner can be overwhelming.
To shed some light on recruitment marketing technology and help teams articulate its value to key stakeholders, Aptitude Research has released a new report: Building a Business Case for a Recruitment Marketing Platform. Sponsored by Jobvite, the report provides a comprehensive look at the capabilities of recruitment marketing technology, its role in modern talent acquisition, and how teams can gain support for such an investment.
Following are a few key takeaways from the report.
1. Recruitment marketing is more than just a technology investment.
Successful recruitment marketing requires more than technology. It is a top-down commitment to strategic talent acquisition that includes:
- People: Who are the talent audiences that companies want to attract?
- Process: What are the inbound, outbound, employer branding, and engagement tactics that are being employed?
- Technology: What capabilities are needed in a recruitment marketing platform?
Teams that can clearly explain who they are trying to recruit, how the process works, and how technology can help will be more successful in gaining internal buy-in for an investment in recruitment marketing technology — and will achieve better results from that investment.
2. Recruitment marketing technology helps to address key talent acquisition challenges.
According to Aptitude Research, 62% of companies are still hiring despite the current environment — so recruiting remains a critical function as companies embrace the changes ahead. Recruitment marketing can help companies thrive during times of economic uncertainty, because it elevates the employer brand and powers meaningful candidate engagement.
Without a recruitment marketing platform, just 35% of companies are engaging with talent before they apply for a job. This inability to connect with candidates on a relevant, personal level makes talent acquisition more difficult. A recruitment marketing platform can help to address this and other top talent acquisition challenges, including:
- Finding and attracting quality hires
- Competing for top talent
- Measuring the quality of hires
3. Teams must define what they actually need from a technology solution.
In order to clearly express the need for technology, teams must define their technology requirements and desired capabilities. But that can be difficult, as every platform is unique and it’s not always easy to understand what they include.
At a minimum, recruitment marketing platforms should provide core capabilities like career sites, CRM, analytics, talent networks, and employee referrals. These are the most important features of any recruitment marketing technology. They may also offer advanced, “nice-to-have” features like content management, sourcing, and the like. Underlying all of these capabilities, many recruitment marketing platforms now include a layer of AI and automation that can improve overall efficiency and effectiveness.
4. Analyzing ROI is critical to making the business case for this investment.
Finding budget and proving ROI are among the key challenges teams face when making a business case for an investment in recruitment marketing technology. According to Aptitude’s research, the cost of a recruitment marketing platform can be double or triple that of an ATS. This makes sense, as a good recruitment marketing platform can replace a number of other services, tech solutions, and agencies — but it can be difficult to justify the cost without a thorough analysis. To do this:
- Work with technology providers to set expectations for how ROI will be measured and what goals will be achieved.
- Consider both short-term and long-term benefits of adopting a recruitment marketing solution — from an immediate uptick in application volume to better candidate experience over time.
- Don’t neglect the value of risk analysis; demonstrate the risk of not implementing a recruitment marketing platform as part of your ROI calculation.
5. Understanding key stakeholders can help to strengthen the business case.
For most companies, the decision to make an investment in technology involves people from many parts of the organization — from HR and business leaders to IT and finance. Each of these key stakeholders may have a different set of priorities and metrics to consider.
By carefully analyzing each group of stakeholders, teams will be better equipped to address what’s most important to them and make a more compelling case for the technology investment.
The complete report, Building a Business Case for a Recruitment Marketing Platform, provides additional guidance on making the business case for an investment in recruitment marketing technology — and it also dives much deeper into the points we’ve covered here. It’s truly a must-read for any organization considering a recruitment technology purchase, as well as those who want to better understand what recruitment marketing technology is all about.
