In Marketing, Lead Generation is known as a strategy for building a pool of potential customers. With proactive talent pool building becoming more and more popular, recruiters have adapted Lead Generation strategies as well.
So how does lead generation work in recruiting and talent acquisition work?
Many employers have become aware of all the benefits that proactive recruiting and talent pool building bring to their recruitment strategies.
In order to do so successfully, they have to have a clear and well-set strategy about how to build their talent pools.
To make it simple, we can define lead generation in recruiting as:
the process of creating great recruiting content, promoting it to various channels and attracting potential job candidates to take actions.
I know, it sound very vague, but my goal with this blog is to give you real-life examples and ideas about how you can proactively build your talent pools.
In marketing, leads are potential future customers. These people fit company’s buyer persona or ideal customer and they have shown some interest in company’s products and services.
In general, the goal of every marketer is to generate as many leads as possible as more leads lead to more customers.
In recruiting, leads are potential future candidates who match your candidate persona profile and have shown some interest in you as an employer. Recruiters and other HR professionals have a goal to generate as many high-quality leads (potential candidates) in order to fill their positions with high-quality employees and way less resources.
Get our guide for finding high-quality job candidates!
So why would anyone use lead generation strategy in recruiting?
Employers that use lead generation in recruiting have much larger pools of high-quality job candidates. Having such pools of talent means a huge strategic and competitive advantage as they result in:
In other words, HR professionals who enjoy larger pools of talented people are much more likely to fill their open positions with way fewer resources and often enjoy the title of “the employer of choice”!
Lead generation in recruiting is a process that consists of creating content or events that potential candidates find interesting and useful. These are created with the main goal to trigger potential candidates to consider you as their next employer of choice.
Unfortunately, many employers still use applications to open positions as their main source of new candidates. They wait until a new position opens and then collect applications.
You don’t have to wait to attract talent and have them join your talent pool until you have a job opening. Why not doing so proactively?
In marketing, we generate leads by creating content or events that potential buyers can get or attend ONLY AFTER they provide some kind of info. Often times that is contact information and some other information such as their position, work challenge or pain point.
Employers that use lead generation in their Recruitment Marketing strategy, ask candidates for data such as contact info, resume, career interest or similar.
After the info is collected, the candidate gets access to the content, and you, as an employer, get to use that info to research the candidate, identify the fit, add him to the talent pool and, eventually, hire him!
Career blogs are one of the most popular and relatively new type of recruiting content. They are now becoming the central part of every well-designed career page, and serve as the main source of information for people who are interested in your company.
To skip listing all the possible blog titles you can use, just check an example from Hootsuite!
However, career blogs won’t bring you leads just by being there.
They have to have a purpose!
For example, at the end of every career blog, you should either offer readers to apply to an open position or to join your talent network.
If you have already attracted them to visit your site, why losing them without getting to know them better.
I just mentioned talent networks above, but I want to explain what exactly they are and how are they used.
There are many potential job candidates who are interested in your company or open positions but are simply not ready to apply just yet. These may be perfect candidates for your future job openings, and are the best people to build your talent pools with.
So besides just offering to apply to an open position, offer candidates to join your Talent Network (a.k.a. pool of people interested in you as an employer). These can be simple forms with a Call-to-action (CAT) and just a few fields such as name, last, name, area of interest of resume.
People in your talent network that you find interesting and qualified for your company, you can engage with later on and try to convert them into job applicants.
The ways and places you can use your “Join our Talent Network” form are numerous. Some of them include:
Another interesting and very popular way of generating leads in recruiting is through local events or even global events.
There are a few companies I know that use this type of lead generation strategy successfully.
How do local events generate leads?
Let me give you an example. Infinum is a company that hires a lot of developers and designers. In order to attract these 2 groups of people, they organize local events and meetups on these two topics. People interested in these areas apply and attends the event after which many of them end up being Infinum employees.
I love this approach because it is relatively inexpensive way to reach a good number of candidates who are a perfect fit for your company. You can use your own experts to present at the event and talk about interesting topics. During the event, you should give your best to connect with people and answer any questions they may have about work at your company.
In marketing, writing guides is one of the most popular ways for generating leads. For example, if I want to get leads who could be potential TalentLyft customers, I will write a guide on a topic such as “How to improve your recruiting strategy with a modern HR software?”. People who download this guide are definitely a potential TalentLyft user.
Why not doing the same in recruiting?
If you are hiring, for example, a lot of entry-level sales reps, why wouldn’t you or your marketing team write a guide on a topic such as: “How to start your career in sales?”. Place this guide on your career site, in your career blogs, on Social Media and let potential candidate download it in exchange for some contact info.
Perfect and very inexpensive way to get a lot of high-quality leads!
I am still waiting for these to explode in the world of Talent Acquisition...but I think they will become a popular recruiting trend soon.
In marketing, they are currently the most popular way to generate leads with very few resources. Instead of organizing a local live event, or if you are a global company, you can organize an online webinar that people from all over the world can apply to.
What would a recruiting webinar look like?
Same as with guides, topic of a recruiting webinar depends on the type of people you want to attract. Some of the topics you could hold a 45-minute recruiting webinar include:
These are just some of the topics you can hold webinars on and attract a lot of people to sign up. After that, you can engage with them, get to know them better and attract them to apply to your job openings.
Career days are not a new thing. Many companies have been holding them for a while, but Microsoft has recently taken a step further.
Let’s face it, many people don’t like to attend events in person, but would do so from the comfort of their own homes.
Well...Microsoft has made career days more convenient to its potential candidates. They recently created a Facebook live event at which their HR professionals were live for some time to answer any questions candidates had about work, life or career at Microsoft.
I love the idea!
I believe that people who were the most engaged in the conversation were also Microsoft’s most interesting leads.
Social Recruiting is definitively one of the most popular recruiting strategies. If you already don’t have a big audience on Social Media it is not easy to get new leads from there. However, there are still Social Media platforms, such as Facebook, that are relatively inexpensive.
With just a little bit of money you can reach a pretty decent amount of people with your content on Facebook.
What is good about using Facebook to attract talent and generate leads is that you can target a very specific group of people.
Let’s say you are located in New Orleans, Louisiana, and you have a great story about your Marketing Manager. You now want to promote this story to reach people and get leads who are into marketing because you are hiring a lot in this field.
To reach up to 20,000 people in Louisiana who have experience in marketing or have studied marketing, you need only about 50 dollars.
If you are doing a research on an interesting topic such as salary ranges for a certain position in your geographic area, I can assure you, many people would be interested to see a research like this.
Why not allowing people, after they will out the survey, to get the results by providing their contact information?
I haven’t seen anyone doing this in recruiting but I love doing it in marketing.
After you get the results, you can hopefully send an email to your leads with something like this: “So seems like the average salary for position x is $x. We are proud to say that we are above the average :) So if you would like to join our company and enjoy the benefits, please check out our open positions!”
Sales is not my favorite way of generating leads but it can certainly work in some situations. If you have a list of interesting candidates that you want to attract to your company, try reaching out and offering to join your Talent Network, watch your webinar or attend one of your local events.
Often times, we don’t hire someone who is a great candidate. Unfortunately, many companies immediately forget about these people after they fill their position.
Why wouldn’t you try to trigger their interest again and turn them into a lead? When doing this, it is very important the way you approach them. Remember, you have rejected them once so they may not be happy about you reaching out again.
Making quizzes or interesting games and including them, for example, at the end of your career blog, is an interesting way of generating leads in recruiting.
I am expecting to see a huge spike in this approach soon.
How would that work?
For example, you can add a simple quiz on your career site, LinkedIn page or Career blog titled: “Would I be a good fit for [company name]?”
Here, you can just ask a few simple questions related to your company culture. This approach not only generates leads, but it can also help you identify the leads who are a good fit for your company.
Some employers are successfully using chatbots on their career sites to generate leads. For example, when a visitor comes to your career site or a specific job opening, you can send content through your chatbot that will trigger them to apply or join your talent network.
If they are looking at a job opening for a Marketing Manager, send them a link to your career blog where one of your employees talks about how is it to be a Marketing Manager at your company.
Ideal is one of my favorite providers for chatbots for recruiting. Here is an example:
This is a great way to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time and turn career site visitors into leads.
Here at TalentLyft we love partnerships. They are just a great way for building your audience faster and with more credibility.
Are you friends with a local reputable company with a strong Employer Brand who is not your direct competitor?
If so, ask them to collaborate to attract talent TOGETHER!
Of course, this is hard if you are hiring the same type of people. However, if you are not, together you can organize a career event and do a much better outreach than when you would on your own.
If you have another idea to generate leads in recruiting, I would love to hear them! 😃
