Performance Recruiting: Lead pipeline or bottomless pit?

One of this year’s special guests for a session of our Talentor’s Marketing Practice Group was Tobías Pichler, Digital Marketing Manager at epunkt. Tobías has vast experience in Digital Data Analysis, E-commerce, Marketing and Sales, and of course, Performance Marketing.

In his presentation, he talked about what Performance Recruiting is and how this approach can streamline the candidate application process in our international job opportunities and help us continue finding the leaders for tomorrow efficiently. Discover everything that Tobías shares with our #marketingpower group here!

At the present time, many countries and markets are complex, many companies seem to be struggling when recruiting the best talent. Candidate acquisition appears like a challenge for many reasons like candidate ghosting, an increase in rejections by applicants, and of course, the high investment companies need to make in their recruiting processes, among other many reasons. Placing a job advertisement doesn’t suffice anymore these days, since only a small proportion of potential applicants actively search for a job regularly.

That is why those companies that reach passive job seekers have a clear advantage over the competition.

Employers need to stand out from the crowd, but how can they accomplish that? Through the job position and application process itself, being Performance Recruiting the right approach for this!

Performance Recruiting can easily be explained by the Customer Journey according to Tobías.

So, let’s start by defining the Customer Journey as the principle followed by marketing experts. It consists of a certain number of steps a customer follows to become aware of a product/ service until they become a loyal customer.

Performance Marketing becomes a key part of the Customer Journey from the awareness until the conversion stages, but it can also influence the retention and loyalty stages because it’s data-driven (predominantly digital), based on measurable user interactions (views, clicks, form submissions, etc.), and has a strong focus on selected target groups (who they are and how companies can reach them).

Now, if we look at the Candidate Journey, we see that it’s almost the same:

Performance Recruiting also can support the first 3 stages as in the Candidate Journey because it’s data-supported communication of potential applicants and provides ongoing measurement and optimization of communications continuously throughout the journey. To get an idea, in the awareness stage the candidate sees an open job position, in the consideration stage they compare the job offer to other job offers or their current job position and in the application stage they decide to apply.

• Aimed outreach to the target group: The #1 success factor in Performance Marketing is to know the candidate. Having in mind their skills, where you can find them, etc.
• Addressing passive seekers: If you go to the passive job seekers you have a larger pool from which to choose your candidate as you would have the active and the passive candidates.
• Measurable results that allow for ongoing optimization: With a digital strategy it’s easier to measure the KPIs of campaigns or job advertisements. But don’t forget that it can take some time to see results! Give enough time to test the campaigns or job ads you run so that the algorithm can deliver results to make the needed optimizations or improvements into the application process.
• Pre-qualification of applicants: The idea behind Performance Recruiting is to improve the application process for candidates and recruiters. With digital techniques, it is easier to know whether or not a candidate's profile is suitable for the position.

epunkt’s wide experience in using Performance Marketing comes a long way! Tobías shares that they combine marketing and recruiting knowledge from each one of those departments, being their main focus: the target group.

They experiment with digital channels for internal and external recruiting and rely on social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and others) to improve their candidate experience and generate high-quality applications to find the candidates they are looking for!

If they ask us at Talentor, we agree with Tobias that Performance Recruiting will become a part of every recruiting strategy because it’s a very important touch point on the Candidate Journey. So now more than ever we believe that it is vital to create and use the synergies between the teams (marketing and recruiting), and to take advantage of the virtual world to draw conclusions from data to determine success in the recruitment process!

If you are a recruiter put yourself in the candidate's shoes, think about the application process you would like to go through to find the job of your dreams. And if you are a candidate we hope you find in the Talentor projects and opportunities a pleasant journey before starting a new adventure!