Submitted by Haley Marketing

Talent shortages. Shrinking margins. Diminishing employee loyalty. Minimum wage hikes.

If your staffng company is like most, pressures like these are squeezing you from all sides.

How Can You Be Productive and Proftable in a Market Like This?

1. Flip your perspective

Instead of a talent-scarcity mindset, identify where the talent is and pivot your recruiting tactics to find those people.  With record-low unemployment, your best potential hires probably already have jobs. Identify your target candidates’ pain points and develop your messaging to attract them. What are your key differentiators? What actually makes working with you different. What’s in it for them (e.g., higher pay, better work environment, benefits, career growth opportunities)?

2. Plug your leaks

Develop a “non-leaky” candidate experience.

You can’t afford (literally) to lose qualified applicants! You are competing with TONS of other companies vying for their attention. You’ve paid in time and money to get them to your website to possibly apply. Once they’ve applied, make sure you have a defined process for staying in touch with that applicant with several touch points along the way.

Share a blog. Send them a helpful eBook. Send a list of places to go to lunch close to the business; the closest bus routes. ANYTHING to show them you value their attention. Continue to do this throughout their assignment (temp or contract), so you can easily retain them for the next opportunity.

3. Market effectively

Did you notice that Indeed just cut your organic jobs off from appearing on their site? Yikes! Gone are the days of being able to rely solely on organic traffc to your jobs. After making sure your website and job board are primed and optimized for organic search, develop a multistream distribution approach to get your jobs in front of both active AND passive job seekers. Here are a few ideas:

• Publish Facebook Jobs
• Share jobs to Facebook and LinkedIn job-search groups
• Send out hot-job emails to your ATS list on a regular basis (even to people who worked for you years ago)
• Publish regular blogs that are SEO optimized to increase your organic search presence on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo
• Run Remarketing Ads to people who visit your site (just like those Amazon ads that follow you everywhere)

As you test certain tactics, always keep in mind your larger goals for recruiting and sales, to make sure your marketing activities lead to better ROI for those goals.

4. Create a Candidate-Focused Application Process

So, you’ve spent lots of money to get people to your site through social media, word-of-mouth, Google ads and job fairs, and someone clicks on your APPLY NOW button. What kind of application are they faced with? Is it huge? Do they have to create a login and password? Are there multiple pages they must complete just to show they are potentially interested in a job?

If your career-site application requires someone to enter their social security number, remove that field immediately!  This is one of several items that instantly make someone leery to fill out an application. Here are a few ways you can make sure your application is user-friendly and gives you a chance to pull in better applicants:

• Shorten the initial application to name, email and phone number (you get two ways to reach out).
• If you need a resume, consider this the second touch point, not the first.
• Choose a job board with Easy-Apply options like Apply with Facebook/LinkedIn, Indeed/Twitter/Amazon. This literally allows the person to apply in SECONDS!
• Make sure your jobs and job board are formatted for Google Jobs and technically able to find them.
• Make sure your application is mobile first (not just mobile friendly). If you look at your website traffic on Google analytics, you will likely see close to 50% of your traffic coming from phones and tablets (if not more). Make sure your application can be filled out on a phone just as easily as on a computer.
• Don’t post vague job descriptions. If a site visitor can’t figure out what the job entails in the first few lines, they won’t apply. Make sure to communicate what’s in it for them (WIIFT)!

Get out of the squeeze!
If you’re feeling the squeeze right now, there are ways to reach the right candidates and generate sales leads. Take the time to reevaluate your processes and let data drive your decisions. 

If you’re looking for data on what’s working and what’s not, reach out to us at Haley Marketing Group. We practice what we preach. Our marketing best practices are tried and true, and we are always looking at data and new tactics to help our clients reach exactly who they want to.

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