3 Ways to identify which TA and recruitment marketing projects to focus on in 2021
2020 has been a wild ride. It feels surreal, but can you believe it’s almost over? With only a month or so left in the year, it’s time to start planning your strategic talent acquisition and recruitment marketing priorities for the upcoming calendar year so you can set aside the requisite budget and resources for those priorities.
Strategic planning can be a daunting task, particularly during these difficult times. To help you determine which talent acquisition and recruitment marketing projects you need in 2021, we’ve identified three approaches you can take to start your planning efforts.
Approach #1: Cover the basics
If you’re not sure where to focus, then a great place to start is at the beginning to ensure that all your basics are covered. The foundation of any employer brand is your employee value proposition (EVP).
If you haven’t developed an EVP, then you’re essentially driving in the dark. Without knowing your unique offerings, it’s difficult to determine your content strategy for talent attraction and retention purposes.
Even if you have an existing EVP, now is a great time to revisit it, since the world of work has changed drastically this past year. Is your organization now primarily remote? Are you in-office with enhanced safety protocols?
If you haven’t updated your EVP to reflect these changes, you need to. Otherwise, you’re not giving candidates an authentic look into your organization, which will ultimately create a disconnect that may turn them off from joining your organization. Or it may cause them to leave shortly after joining, which costs your organization big bucks.
A tool you can use here to identify if your bases are covered (beyond the EVP) is a candidate journey map. Mapping out your target candidate’s journey and thinking through what their experience looks like can give you a better understanding of what questions, concerns, or even barriers they may have throughout your organization’s hiring process.
A tool you can use to identify if your bases are covered (beyond the EVP) is a candidate journey map
Creating a candidate journey map can help identify what pain points your candidates are experiencing throughout your process. Based on that information, you can prioritize where to focus your efforts from a tools and content strategy in 2021 to reduce these pain points and increase conversion along your recruiting funnel.
A great way to approach this is by going through your recruitment process yourself, logging all of the touchpoints that exist, and noting any areas of friction that need to be addressed. Now is a particularly good time to review this, as your recruitment process may look different if you’ve moved to a partial or fully virtual experience. You can read more about how to do this on our blog: How to design a candidate experience that communicates your employer brand.
Approach #2: Work backward from your upcoming people objectives
If you already have the basics covered, then another approach to take is to look at your most pressing people needs and work backward to identify what resources are required to implement and support those initiatives. Start by collaborating with your talent acquisition, HR, and business teams to identify the talent needs for the upcoming year.
For example, if your company is launching a new product in Q3 2021, you’re likely going to need new talent to support that initiative. Will you need additional developers? Sales associates? Once you’ve identified the prospective candidate pools to target, you can create work back plans for your recruitment marketing campaigns.
Creating a clear work back schedule is essential to ensure you can support the business and meet your team’s overarching objectives. Working backward in this way can help you to map out due dates, required tasks, budget and assign accountabilities.
Maybe you’ll require a number of highly skilled, hard-to-fill roles such as DevOps engineers. If you know when you need to make these hires, you can then look back at metrics such as time-to-fill and the number of applicants per hire to identify how much time you’ll need and how many applicants you require to make a hire. From there, you can then develop a comprehensive and timely social media strategy aimed at getting in front of that talent segment, and drive them to take action by joining your talent community or submitting an application.
You can read more about creating a social recruiting strategy in this blog: How to create a robust social recruiting strategy in 7 steps.
Approach #3: Review your analytics from the past year
In some cases, you might already have your basics covered and might not know your recruitment objectives for the upcoming year due to the nature of your business. In that case, you can determine which priority projects to focus on by reviewing your analytics from the past year.
Your metrics are key to evaluating the health and effectiveness of your recruiting process. The proper mix of recruiter productivity and recruitment marketing metrics will reveal what’s working and what’s not. It can also show you how to better allocate your budget. For example, if you notice that you’re not getting enough qualified applicants and your recruiters spend the majority of their time sourcing, then you should look at your recruiting funnel metrics to see where you’re losing people and come up with a solution to fix the leak at that stage in your process.
Example of a website heat map (Pixeltr)
Let’s say you found that a number of prospective candidates were visiting your career site, but many dropped off before applying. You might want to consider a careers site revamp. This can take a number of different approaches such as:
Investing in website heat mapping technology to see where people spend the most time on your site
Conducting an audit to ensure your content is portraying your organization in an accurate, authentic, yet appealing light
Integrating a chatbot to engage candidates and manage communications
We hope this article shows that there are a number of ways you can approach planning and identifying what talent acquisition and recruitment marketing projects your organization needs for 2021. We wish you all the best of luck as you develop your strategic priorities for the upcoming year and if you need help with your planning, feel free to get in touch.
About The Employer Brand Shop
The Employer Brand Shop is a boutique recruitment marketing and employer brand agency located in Kitchener, Canada. Our team helps organizations around the world attract and engage talent using creative marketing strategies.