This advent calendar presents 24 practical suggestions on how to learn from candidate behavior to improve your HR marketing, based on early results from Potentialpark's upcoming 2024 Talent Comm study.
I'm afraid we are seeing a trend of HR teams giving up a bit of their autonomy these days, and it's worrying me a bit.
Yesterday, we talked about the importance of building paths from social media to your own channels.
Now the 4th Door of our Advent Calendar sheds light on a related discussion: the pros and cons of maintaining career-specific social media channels versus sharing the page with corporate communications.
Or, the difference between Instagram Careers and Instagram Corporate, as an example.
In the annual assessment of top employers worldwide, Potentialpark has seen the number of career pages goes down.
Share of top employers with career-specific pages (2023 vs. 2022):
Facebook: 51% (down from 67%)
Instagram: 56% (down from 66%)
X: 30% (from 64% !)
Why? Well, often in the name of efficiency and reach. And this is where the problem starts.
"Let's consolidate!"
Sure, on the one hand you save money when you pool your resources with other departments and at the same increase your reach. Tempting! Why not show your open jobs and employer branding stories to the entire company's followership?
Aren’t customers and fans the best potential applicants, too? And aren’t job seekers equally interested in some general company news?
Even from an organisational perspective, fewer channels may appear cleaner. “What do we need all those different pages for anyway?” I hear a communications manager shout out in a meeting. “Let’s consolidate!”
Except, that seems like all the wrong way to think about marketing to me: marketing is neither about consolidation, nor about reaching as many people as possible. But the right ones, with content that converts them.
The winners stick to their own channels
Without giving away too much, I can already announce that the winners of Potentialpark’s 2024 social media rankings in the US, Europa and Asia (coming in March) will see employers on the podium run dedicated career channels. Not shared ones.
And this is how HR markting differs from business marketing, how selling jobs fundamentally deviates from selling lemonade, cell phone plans or consulting services:
While a soda company earns money for each additional bottle sold, no matter to whom, recruiters can still only hire one person per open job, and that person better be right for the job, or else it was all in vain. So it's not all about reach, but fit. And competitiveness means you hope to attract the best and the right talent, not the most.
The risk of being too efficient
Today, quantitative metrics rule, like views and costs. Anything a controller can count. But my personal experience - in any innovative and creative space – is: the moment a creative team makes decisions under the prime directive of efficiency and risk-reduction, quality suffers.
HR marketing teams need space and freedom for what they are best at: speaking from the heart and soul of the company straight to talent.
And while a combined corporate and career channel may be announced as an “equal partnership” at first, some employer branding teams soon realize that since they gave up their autonomy, they also lost control and now play second fiddle in the content plan.
Now some HR marketing teams are so small that they can't afford their own career accounts. But while it’s not impossible to run successful combined accounts, data suggests it’s best to avoid as soon and as long as you can.
Marketing should be targeted, run by teams that know their audience and with success defined by employer branding and recruiting goals.
One advantage of working with corporate marketing and comms is certainly: you can benefit from what they are posting, too.
However this may very well be accomplished by what some employers call a media pool: when HR aligns their content plans with other (often bigger) comms teams in the company to use some of their texts and pictures for the career channels as well.
Practical tips
For anyone who absolutely can’t avoid it, here are some tips to still get the most out of combined career and corporate channels:
To attract candidates to a corporate channel, give job seekers a signal that they are welcome and can expect career content. This can be achieved by using names with “career”, “people” or “life” in them, career statements in the bio, or a link to the career website.
Avoid relying too much on other departments and make your own content plan that ensures regular posts dedicated at driving traffic to jobs and your career website.
At the same time, try to be in the loop about upcoming posts, news and events by other departments so you can find synergies – and possibly give them a twist that’s more interesting for potential candidates.
Implement career-specific analytics and KPI such as number of applicants coming from social media posts.
Collect research data, benchmarks and awards in order to increase your internal standing as employer branding team. After all, the influence that HR has in decisions is always a matter of the right lobbying and stakeholder management.
BONUS: Would you like to receive the results of the new Talent Comm study when it comes out? Sign up on the Potentialpark website to secure a free research expert talk (no strings attached) and tickets to Potentialpark's events to meet peer HR marketers.
Come back tomorrow for the next Door of this Advent Calendar.
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