Corporate recruiters are posed this question every day.  However, in today's recruiting environment the answer is becoming more and more complex.  Not only are recruiters being continuously bombarded with new positions that need to be filled quickly with top quality talent but they are presented with a slew of options to use in order to recruit and source this talent that makes it even more confusing.  (Not to mention trying to track all these sources with recruitment metrics so they know what's working.)

We get asked every week by customers and prospects, what should we be doing in order to attract more qualified candidates?  In looking at the wins of our customers as well as other success stories from recruiting organizations, here's how we see the process evolving from a recruitment marketing standpoint.

A recruiting organization receives a new job requisition and needs to start their recruitment advertising campaign.  In the near future, we see recruiters managing most if not all these functions for a single campaign:

• Build landing pages that are targeted for the position / job type they are recruiting for with a list of available jobs and promote registration for upcoming hiring events.  This is also where they include interactive content such as employment videos to give candidates a deeper look into the organization. (This doesn't include creating a SEO friendly job page on the Career Site for the position which should happen automatically)

• Proactively source talent for the position into a CRM and use status triggers to automatically email prospects about different openings and events based on their qualifications.

• Build and use existing talent pipelines in the Talent Network to engage, amplify response rates and better qualify prospective talent. (The organization should be using simple opt-in forms on their Career Site and in their job apply process to capture candidate prospects into the Talent Network for these campaigns.  Each new job ad will help them exponentially build these targeted pipelines.)

• Capture interested candidates with mobile recruiting technology such as mobile Talent Network forms through QR code based print ads, at recruiting events such as Career Fairs or through individual recruiting input (Important activity for college recruiting initiatives.)

• Initiate automated, recurring and manual posting of jobs out to job boards, social streams, keyword ads, banner locations, print and other various destinations

• Utilize your built up social recruiting profiles to generate awareness and source qualified candidates for the position

• Capture and analyze aggregated metrics of all sourcing activity to give a complete picture of the effect across all channels. (This should be done from initial click to hire so organizations can evaluate each recruitment source based on quality.)

*All these activities will either be executed from a few point technology solutions or a single platform.

One thing you'll notice above is that we are getting farther and farther away from the "Post & Pray" model.  While still important, running job distribution campaigns to various job boards is just one part of a larger process.  All these recruiting activities can help your organization not only increase your overall applicant flow through better conversion but improve the number of quality of candidates that are coming through the door.  It's your job to measure and track each activity in your process to see what works and doesn't work for your organization.

And then most importantly, evolve!

What do you think of the recruitment marketing process I outline above?  Did I miss any activities or functions that you think are important?

Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @smashfly.