The Digital Transformation of Recruitment

 
Win the War on Talent by Treating Candidates Like Customers
 
Excerpted from the eBook: The Digital Transformation of Recruitment by Charlene Li, Founder of Altimeter Group and author of Open Leadership.
 
In higher education, the war for talent is fierce. Whether you need to recruit faculty, researchers, executives or administrative staff, the “time-to-hire” rate is longer than it’s ever been. Today, you must be able to identify and use the best sourcing methods and tap into diverse job seeker pools to find the right candidates.
 
To become a modern recruiting organization, colleges and universities must be willing to go through a digital HR transformation – and rethink the entire recruitment process through the lens of candidate experiences and employee relationships.
 
In the “old” days, recruiters were resigned to the fact that a minority of employable candidates was actually looking for jobs. Those “active” candidates were your best – and, in most cases, only – prospects.
 
Recruiting is no longer episodic; rather, it’s continuous.  Everyone is a candidate at a different point in the journey. Just as marketers look at everyone as a potential customer, higher education recruiters should assume every friend, customer, and supplier today could be a candidate tomorrow.  
 
To win the war for talent, recruiters can learn from marketing and follow these three best practices:  
  1. Embrace the candidate journey.
  2. Create personas to understand unique needs.
  3. Identify experiences to engage candidates.
Brand marketers think about how they will develop relationships with people over time – not only when a specific need surfaces. Recruiters must take on this new mindset. This means listening, sharing, and engaging, all the time, in real time.
 
According to Mark Stoever, COO of Monster Worldwide, the parent company of Monster, “We’ve turned our gaze to the changing nature of hiring – getting hired or finding the right hire – in today’s socially-driven environment. Never before has so much emphasis needed to be placed on personal engagement.”
 
As the first generation in the workforce to have used the Internet since childhood, millennials especially expect that recruiters will find them, and that they will be surrounded by personalized content that will drive them to their next job.  
 
For more information on how to take a marketing approach to recruiting and start treating job candidates like customers, download our eBook
 
Back to top