It is well-known how crucial excellent recruitment processes are to your success, but have you ever heard of inbound recruiting? This is the recruitment strategy that could bring your organization up to the next level of success. Keep reading to find out more about it as well as a 6-step strategy for effective inbound recruiting.

What Is Inbound Recruiting?

Inbound recruiting is a way of recruiting even when you’re not looking to hire anyone just yet. It’s a long-term recruitment technique that requires you to create engaging content to increase your employer brand. You want to be seen as a good employer and an exciting company to work for. One way of doing this is to create excellent content that you share on your website and social media. Then, when you are hiring, you will have already appealed to applicants who may be interested in working for your business.

You may be wondering what the difference is between inbound and outbound recruiting. Outbound recruiting is the traditional recruitment method of posting a job on job boards and simply hoping that people apply. Inbound recruiting is much more proactive and it’s about building relationships with qualified candidates in advance so that when you post a job, you have plenty of fantastic applicants.

6 Step Inbound Recruiting Strategy

A LinkedIn survey found that only 25% of job seekers were actively looking for a new job. The rest were either open to speaking to a recruiter or asking around in their personal networks. This proves that to expand your talent pool, you need to be able to turn passive candidates into active ones! That’s exactly what inbound recruiting will help you to achieve.

Get Proactive

The first thing you will need to do is start being proactive about recruiting. If you have chosen to start using an inbound recruiting methodology, you cannot wait until an open position comes up to start advertising your company. You need to start now, to widen the talent pool before you even need a candidate.

What does this look like? It’s all about creating content to promote your brand, otherwise known as content marketing. You can create blogs using branded content and SEO to ensure that it is easy to find this content on search engines. Update or create social media profiles for your company, such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Also, take a look at anywhere your business is mentioned online, on sites like Glassdoor. Make sure that you take charge of how you appear on these sites by responding to comments.

Get Leads

Now it’s time to turn these passive candidates into leads. Optimize the careers page on the company website. That way, if people who have been reading your content look up the site, they can easily find available roles. Add some calls to action to your social media and other content. This could be asking qualified candidates to apply for a role or filling out a form to let you know they are interested in one.

Engage

Now you’re ready to engage with those leads you generated in the previous step. If you got people to submit a form, you should have asked for their email address. This gives you an entire mailing list of people who are already interested in your company.

Now when you create blogs or other content, you can send out an email to your mailing list to let them know. You could even create an event and invite these people along to find out more about your company and further advertise your brand.

Personalize

Once you’ve engaged at a group level, it’s time to get personal. Send individual candidates a message on LinkedIn or a personalized email. By having one-on-one conversations with promising candidates, you can find out where they are at – whether they are seeking a job or waiting until their current project is finished. That way you will know when to directly ask them to apply for a role.

Most employers only send out automated mass emails. You can make your company stand out by sending a personal message. You can even include details of the person’s career history to let them know why you are interested in them.

Analyze

To keep track of all your recruitment marketing activity, you need to use a CRM. This will be critical for getting some data on how your campaigns are going. You will find out who is actually opening your emails and visiting your site – these are the more interested job seekers.

You can also optimize the timing of your marketing. Do more people open your emails in the evening or the morning? Once you know this, you can adjust your email timing to suit.

Follow Up

Now, when you’re posting jobs, you will know who to ask to apply for them. You will have a wider talent pool with plenty of top talent who will hopefully be applying for open roles at your company. When someone applies for a job, make sure to follow up with a survey to find out how they found the application process. This will give you useful information on how the experience was on their end, so you can continue to perfect this. It will be a work in progress that you will improve upon over time.

You can also track the data of whether the number of applicants per role goes up over time. If you are correctly using an inbound recruitment strategy, this number should definitely rise. If it doesn’t, it’s time to go back to step 5 – analyze to try to determine where you’re going wrong. There will be some trial and error, but you will get there in the end with a little determination.

Now that you’re getting proactive about recruitment by using an inbound recruiting strategy, you will have far less stress getting applicants for your positions. Improve the quality and productivity of your workforce by creating relationships with future candidates. You will see your business reap the rewards.