If you need a recruiting advantage, borrow the inbound marketing approach that works with customers and apply it to employee recruiting.
What is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing has become a powerful tool in the effort to win customers. At its heart, inbound marketing is the delivery of value through content that builds trust and leads to a loyal buyer. Valuable content helps the customer throughout their entire journey from exploring a need all the way to making a buying decision. This approach is highly effective with home care marketing because it addresses the whole customer journey as well as the what's required for for search engine optimization (SEO). Those that find you through SEO are often the most qualified customers and employees.
The Employee Buyer's Journey
Here's why inbound marketing works for recruiting, too. Like customers, employees have a buying journey too, but instead of buying "care" they are "buying into a company" where they might work. They are starting with a need or goal for employment, and they go through the same stages of awareness, consideration and decision. Just like a customer, they are buying in to the value of your company in a big way - they're considering working for you. The best employees are often more thoughtful and experienced, and they are looking for higher quality opportunities. Like customers, their awareness and trust comes from both personal referrals and what they experience as they explore the company online.
Collecting resumes through a paid service alone doesn't connect people to your culture- that's what wins great employees
Winning great employees requires an effective digital journey
Beyond the primary considerations of work opportunities and compensation, the kind of employees that you want to win and keep are looking for things that need to be available and supported online. This information is both caught and taught, and inbound methods can help significantly in creating a consistent experience that builds trust and strong interest.
- Looking for reputation - Inbound methods allow you to tell the stories and share the experiences that convey the strength of your reputation. Inbound for recruiting includes both customer stories as well as employee experiences that speak to the integrity and quality of your company.
- Looking for quality - Every employee wants to be a part of something great. Not only do they want to feel valued, they want to believe that their company is one of the best. Since, directly stating that your company is the the best isn't an effective way to demonstrate that you are, inbound approaches allow you to communicate about the training, support and opportunities that define your company quality.
- Looking for differentiators - Most home care agencies represent their employee benefits in a list on a single web page that is intended to tell the entire employee brand story. A better approach is to create an inbound Employment Microsite that allows prospects to explore everything that makes your company special in advance. A bullet point of benefits is helpful for reference, but unless you want to be just another commodity for comparison, taking prospects deeper is critical. Expanding this information is also a great way to highlight what you do offer, instead of reducing your benefits to a stale bulleted list.
- Looking for company culture - Not only do employees want good opportunities, they want to work for a company in which they fit and belong. Communicating culture is a vital part of what needs to happen for highly effective recruiting to occur. Inbound helps you to provide online experiences for future employees that allow them to experience your company culture.
Without offering a pre-application experience of your culture on your website, you're like a restaurant that claims to have great food, but offers neither photos of the plated food nor an aroma as you walk by.
The digital experience relies upon your website as the place where you communicate the culture of your company to your prospects. Often this is accomplished on a specialized microsite focused just on recruiting. This isn't just one page with a few benefits and job openings, it should tell your employee experience story using testimonials, photos, and videos. The more you can immerse the prospect in what it is like to work with, the stronger your connection in the hiring process.
How does Inbound Recruiting Work?
Get Found with Valuable Content
Beyond your reliance upon the major application and recruiting services (which is a pretty expensive activity), inbound recruiting creates and shares content that is valuable to your employee prospects. This content provides practical and real value as they explore their own needs, goals and employment prospects with you. It also boosts your search engine rankings. Adding value to the employment journey builds trust and sets you apart as an agency, while helping more people find you organically (that means without having to pay a fee for advertising).
Content that delivers value to your community also helps develop another important relationship: referrals. The fact that you invest in the industry by educating caregivers also sets you apart in the mind of case managers and referral decision makers.
Insight from 2020 benchmarking study: Winning home care agencies get 2X more employees through their own websites that agencies with less revenue.
Connect with Prospects
Inbound will help you build an email list and social following of prospective employees and the networks of prospects. By serving them early in their journey, prior to asking for an application, you build connections with a pool of people that not only know about your company, but also respect your position in the market.
The Inbound approach is to view the employee as a unique target audience or persona. Because inbound speaks to the unique needs, concerns and values of the employee through online and and follow-up content, it connects deeply with the prospective employee. This connection helps build trust and value before an application or a conversation ever occur.
Connecting with prospects early in their decision journey is important. If you only focus on accepting applications, all of those who are not yet ready to make a change or a commitment remain invisible to you.
Immerse Prospects and Help Them Grow
Contrary to the popular practice of offering a single page of employment information, the more you engage and immerse prospects in both the value of what you offer, and the unique story of your culture, the greater their trust and interest. A single page isn't an appropriate exchange for the ongoing faithful commitment that you're seeking. Winning great employees is like selling a car. The sooner you put that person in the virtual driver's seat with online content and video to experience the ride, the more likely you are see them face-to-face. Why settle only for employees who want or need a job right now, when you can build a pipeline of people who really want to work for you?
Nurture Interest and build trust
Inbound recruiting delivers ongoing personalized information to nurture and build interest. Once identified, prospects receive ongoing content that is valuable to them and displays what makes your company unique.
Segmentation + Ad Performance
Just like customers, great employees are often located within niche audiences in your region. Using inbound methods and microsites, you can create segmented pages and communication that highlight the unique interests and preferences of your top niche audience. This approach also boosts ad performance by creating pages and even whole microsites that are designed to win prospects.
Inbound marketing doesn't just work with customers, it is effective with employee recruiting, too. The same technology and CRM can work for your entire operation. Talk with us to learn more.
Photo by Georg Arthur Pflueger on Unsplash
