Today’s marketers have a basic framework for thinking about how a potential customer becomes a paying customer. It’s called the buyer’s journey, and it’s composed of four stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision and Customer Experience. With the buyer’s journey in mind, recruiters can and should) use a candidate journey to strategically create and deliver content that engages, informs and aids job candidates.
To help develop a candidate journey strategy, Dice recently published the eBook, Recruiting Tech Talent with a Marketing Mindset. Check out the eBook now for practical insights, and enjoy this quick look at each stage in the candidate journey and how to use content to your advantage each step of the way:
Stage 1: Awareness of Employment Brand
When building awareness of your employment brand, you need to meet top tech talent where they already are. That means creating social content that highlights your unique culture – and empowering your employees to do the same. Ensure that your company is applying for company culture awards presented by local and national media. If your budget allows, advertising across a mix of digital and traditional media can allow you to creatively tell your employment brand story on high-value media properties and platforms.
Stage 2: Consideration of Employment Brand
At a certain point in the candidate journey, nearly every professional will transition from passive to active. It could be triggered by a social post or display ad that prompted her to wonder if your company would be a better fit. At this stage, the candidate will go deeper into the content that tells your employment brand story, and it’s crucial that your website’s career portal holds valuable content like employee testimonials, photos of the office or teams during an outing, and descriptions of the company mission and values. This is your business’s opportunity to highlight what makes you unique in your own words.
Stage 3: Candidate Experience and Decision
When a website visitor fills out a form to request a demo, the marketing team considers that action a conversion, which results in that person becoming a lead. The parallel scenario for recruiters is when a person applies for an open position. This is the stage in the candidate journey where the recruiter can enhance the candidate experience through a combination of automated emails and personalized communication to ensure candidates are informed and feel valued throughout the process.
Communications should confirm next steps at every touch-point along the candidate experience. Many applicant tracking systems (ATS) allow you to configure trigger campaigns to email additional content (blog posts, thought leadership, awards and case studies) to the candidates who didn’t receive your one-on-one attention in the consideration stage.
Stage 4: Employee Experience
A company’s current and past employees are responsible for the online reviews, word of mouth and organic social posts that will provide future candidates with the authentic content that shapes their perception of the employment brand and continues to inform them at every step of their candidate journey. Therefore, it’s critical for every company to empower employees to share their employee experience with the world. Will the content be perfectly polished? Absolutely not, though their voice is a genuine one, and for almost any candidate, that’s valuable.
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