If there's one constant in the talent landscape, it's change. As candidate expectations and talent acquisition technologies evolve, organizations need help understanding the best methodologies to attract, recruit, and retain top talent.

To help talent teams align their 2024 talent acquisition and recruitment marketing strategies, the State of Recruitment Marketing in 2024 report examines the state of each stage of the recruitment funnel — awareness, connection, qualification, and retention — providing a data-driven snapshot of challenges, opportunities, and future priorities for leading talent teams derived from a survey of over 450 HR and TA leaders. 

In this four-part blog series, we drill into each stage, focusing on strategies and tactics to help you get ahead. As the first part of the series, let’s concentrate on the awareness stage of recruitment and discuss how you can better attract talent. 

Raising awareness in your recruitment marketing strategy 

Industry experts anticipate a surge in hiring for 2024, especially among large enterprises (25k+ employees). Optimistically, 55% of C-level executives foresee an upswing in recruitment within their organizations. That means your team may be hiring at some point this year, even if you are not hiring today.

Priorities for the year identified in the report align with anticipated hiring needs. In 2024, the primary focus is garnering increased attention, interest, and conversions. 

To successfully attract talent, organizations are honing in on the following key priorities:

• Building a talent pipeline: 48% of professionals cite this as their top priority.
• Targeting the right audience: Despite efforts, 68% acknowledge challenges in reaching the ideal target audience.
• Leveraging technology: A whopping 91% recognize the advantages of investing in technology to enhance talent attraction strategies.
  

Attract talent and build a robust talent pipeline

Generating awareness for your organization and brand is the first step to building a solid talent pipeline. Targeting the right audience is critical to success. According to surveyed participants in the 2024 report, the top channels used to generate awareness and attract talent today include: 

• Career websites
• Programmatic advertising technology
• Candidate relationship management (CRM)
  

Optimizing career websites to attract talent 

Overwhelmingly, 90% of organizations use career websites to target talent. Career websites are often your brand’s first opportunity to make a good impression on a candidate. Ensuring your career site is as engaging as possible requires high-quality content, compelling brand stories, and all the information candidates need to understand who you are as an employer.

With marketing-grade, recruiter-friendly career sites that allow you to create and edit pages and templates with drag-and-drop editors, your team can confidently tell your story and tailor it for specific talent audiences. 

• Deliver engaging, relevant content — from videos, images, and employee stories to events, jobs, and career paths.  
• Target candidates further based on real-time persona, location, or site behavior with dynamic personalization.
  

One of the best places to focus when creating a robust career website is on the individual job descriptions. Enhanced job descriptions have increased in popularity recently, yet not all organizations have adopted the practice. 

Enhanced job descriptions: 

• Use photos, videos, and Google-powered interactive maps and commute-based search to strengthen conversion.
• Boost the candidate experience with relevant job and culture content on job pages. 
• Fuel a deeper understanding of your job and company for a more qualified decision to apply.
• Include all relevant information, including a salary range, cultural benefits, and medical benefits. 
  

It’s no wonder that career websites are the top prioritized channel for attracting talent due to the integration with your organization’s homepage and ability to add ample tailored content. However, don’t underestimate the power of combining career websites with additional recruitment marketing solutions like programmatic media and CRM. 

How to use programmatic media to attract talent

Organizations should consider how best to leverage programmatic media to attract talent. Almost half (41%) of respondents noted programmatic media as a successful channel for attracting talent.

Programmatic media saves you time and money while helping to improve the candidate experience with personalized content and touchpoints. It eliminates inefficient processes and curtails unnecessary spending endemic to traditional recruitment advertising by spending wisely and adjusting spending as needed. 

Managing multiple job ad vendors or consolidating data from disparate sources is unnecessary with programmatic media. And because it's instant, you won't be left waiting for results or spending money placing ads on sites that don't align with your hiring goals. 

Today, programmatic media should combine targeted display banners, search engine marketing (SEM), and nurturing/remarketing strategies to convert people into applicants. It should leverage an ecosystem that uses data, analytics, and machine learning in a goals-based format to target specific audiences for your recruiting message.

These sophisticated algorithms serve job advertisements to individuals who fit your target candidate profile and automatically optimize the ad buying process in real time based on performance metrics.

In short, programmatic media paves the way for working smarter, not harder and seeing hiring success where you otherwise may have struggled. Learn more about how Fortune 500 companies leverage programmatic media here.

Widen your talent pool with a CRM 

A candidate relationship management (CRM) solution is the backbone of a candidate-first strategy — which focuses on creating a positive and candidate-centric experience throughout the hiring process. However, only 53% of respondents use CRM to attract talent. For those that don’t, matching the best-fit talent, providing a seamless experience, and automating tasks for efficiency are at risk. 

A CRM is a powerful tool to enhance your talent attraction efforts. By creating a talent network — perhaps through your career website and targeted advertising — and managing your interactions with that network via your CRM, talent acquisition teams can easily build and maintain relationships, quickly communicate with top candidates through targeted recruitment campaigns, and get actionable insights that drive strategic decision-making. 

When working with CRM capabilities to attract talent, it’s vital to note that every touchpoint with a candidate needs to be authentic and engaging while delivering on your employer branding and value proposition. 

Consider the following when designing recruitment campaigns to attract and nurture talent: 

• From the initial interaction with potential talent, strive to create a positive and affirming experience that remains relevant. 
• As the engagement progresses, tailor its relevance according to the candidate's stage and behavior, paving the way for successful conversion. 
• Post-conversion (meaning the candidate applied to your talent pool), sustaining interest and fostering a continuous relationship become imperative to keep them connected and receptive to your brand. 
  

Organizations stand to gain a competitive advantage by harnessing the power of a smart CRM with built-in AI, predefined workflows, and deep analytics across all activities. Fifty-seven percent of respondents report a faster time to application when leveraging a CRM to power recruitment efforts. 

However, for nearly half (47%) of organizations, the top challenge when connecting with talent is managing manual systems and/or processes.

Expand your reach with recruitment marketing technology 

Overwhelmingly, 63% of organizations surveyed reveal they have leveraged recruitment technology to expand their reach when attracting talent.

Key benefits of implementing technology to support attracting talent: 

• Expanded reach 
• Higher quality candidates 
• Reduced time to application 
• Reduced recruitment costs 
• Higher talent team engagement and satisfaction
• Improved / streamlined processes 
  

With the right technology, talent acquisition teams can seamlessly integrate sourcing, attraction, marketing, programmatic advertising, creative services, and assessment phases into a unified, efficient, and continually evolving pipeline, and this is what the state of recruitment marketing looks like in 2024. 

About Symphony Talent

Symphony Talent's SFX workflow engine intelligently nurtures candidate pipelines with content, job recommendations, and other experiences based on candidates' actions. Suppose a candidate views specific jobs or segmented pages on your career site or opts into a talent network form on a diversity page. In that case, SFX will trigger communication tailored to what that candidate will likely care about. Symphony Talent CRM clients benefit from a 50% reduction in time spent on administrative tasks, partly due to triggered workflows and templates. Learn more about our CRM here.