What is growth recruiting?

In the world of hiring, everything moves so fast: job descriptions, hiring technologies, candidates’ motivations… Many companies struggle to keep pace while improving the “candidate experience”. Candidates are no longer only interested in a good salary and new offices. New factors now come into their order of priorities: personal and professional growth, flexible working hours, and so on.

All too often, these ever-growing changes penalise hiring teams and human resources. Companies are realising that they need to change their hiring approach, and fast, before they find themselves unable to attract fresh blood. But which form of hiring would be best for your company and your hiring needs? At Dgitags, our agents have particular mastery of “inbound Recruiting”, a method that really bears fruit, and we’ll explain why!

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Gone are the days when companies had total control over the hiring process. According to statistics, the majority of job seekers start their search on Google. Anyone can find all the information they need about any company in a few clicks: salary, open positions, working conditions and locations, etc.

As a result, developing a talent brand becomes particularly important. To attract more and more candidates, hiring teams need to think like marketers to revolutionise the candidate experience. To explain it better, we interviewed the founder of a hiring tool we use a lot, Louis Deslus, founder of Neo Staff. For Chrystal Robet-Tomborini, talent agent at Dgitags, it’s an essential tool for managing all her talent as well as all her hiring campaigns.

Louis is an influencer in what we might call “Growth Marketing” on LinkedIn. You only have to look at his number of followers (around 21,000) to see the interest in this new practice.

Growth Marketing “is quite simply applying marketing techniques to hiring”, Louis explains. It can be broken down into two hiring strategies: Inbound and Outbound. “As in marketing, we’ll distribute channels differently with inbound and outbound. We mustn’t forget that we’re addressing human beings who are looking for values, for pieces of life they can connect with.”

The most traditional approach is Outbound Recruiting, which involves publishing job ads on your website or on job boards. Generally, hiring teams who opt for this method fight to attract new talent. They look for promising candidates and use every possible means (emails, cold calling, ads, events) to initiate a first contact with the company.

Conversely, inbound hiring consists of creating the opportunity for your candidates to find your company. In other words, it’s where talent-brand strategy meets content marketing. It’s about creating engaging content targeted at potential, current and future candidates. Inbound hiring aims to create engagement and raise awareness among candidates to make them want to work at a company. Put simply, it’s an approach aimed at making a company more attractive to candidates. It often involves using digital campaigns (emailing and social media) to provide potential candidates with engaging content. The ultimate goal is to increase recognition of the talent brand while providing useful, persuasive content.

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For Louis Deslus, these are reflexes that should ideally be adopted in-house within a company’s human resources, to always guarantee a better candidate experience: “We’re not here to build a hiring machine; it’s about putting marketing strategies to work for the candidate experience.” Introducing these inbound hiring techniques also has many advantages; here are a few:

1. Draws attention to your brand

By creating content that candidates will find valuable and relevant, inbound hiring makes it easier for the candidates you want to bring on board to find you!‍‍

2. Stimulates interest

Careful: just because you have the attention of your target candidates doesn’t mean they’ll consider applying. You have their attention; you’ll need to take the time to turn it into action through ever more relevant content.‍‍

3. Simplifies decision-making

After all, what is a positive candidate experience? Well, it refers to how simple it is for them to be hired, as well as how quickly they understand the company culture, all while staying within the hiring process. In a few moments, a job seeker becomes a candidate. Inbound hiring makes it possible to create a positive experience around their job search, which increases the chances they’ll apply in the future: people no longer want to work for you, but with you!

Every hiring team, just like any marketing group, will eventually develop its own inbound hiring strategies. That said, if you’d like to get started, here are the three key points to keep in mind:

1. Content creation: telling captivating stories across several channels

Content creation is the foundation of inbound hiring marketing. You can attract potential candidates to you through blogs, e-books, social media interactions, infographics and other written resources. Content defines your brand and your capabilities in front of an audience (make sure it’s consistent with your brand’s mission and values!). When you pique someone’s interest, they’ll come to you. One type of media won’t be enough. How many of you use only one social media channel? What about a single website?

What’s more, today’s candidates pay little attention to content focused on self-promotion or the direct selling of a brand. They gravitate towards content that promises useful ideas, advice and tools. Don’t hesitate to offer your points of view: they can intrigue your target audience and give them the resources they need to succeed in their careers. It may feel like you’re giving away your secrets without expecting anything in return. Don’t hesitate to establish yourself as an expert in your field with a deep desire to help others: talent will turn to you as an essential source of information to best meet their professional needs.

2. Search engine optimisation (SEO)

It may be obvious, but building good search visibility is very important! Search engine marketing simplifies the way candidates discover your content. Although content SEO is more “technical”, it should permeate every aspect of your writing. SEO consists of finding the right balance between keywords, advertising and your posts in order to maximise your content’s position in an internet search.

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3. Strengthening company culture

In case you haven’t got it yet, the talent brand is an essential element of an inbound hiring strategy. Put brand-building strategies in place to attract candidates by describing the company culture, the possible career opportunities, and the training and mentoring that successful candidates will receive. Really dig deep into your company’s ecosystem. Translate that into your hiring content strategy by making talent want to apply (and stay!).

4. Evaluate your efforts with specific metrics!

Taking a smart approach to inbound hiring means devoting your time and effort to what works best. Each candidate can find you through different sources; it’s about identifying them and analysing the data.

Don’t hesitate to dig into Google Analytics or similar software to measure your website traffic. These metrics can tell you how many people visit each page of your site, as well as how they interact with each piece of content. Once the data has been interpreted, you can then focus on the best-performing sources to improve your hiring strategies.

5. The watchword is patience

As you’ll have gathered, inbound hiring strategies really bring out your brand image. It takes a bit of time to build goodwill and enthusiasm around a company, and over time this approach promises to attract plenty of CVs. But if you rely solely on inbound hiring, you’ll also have to wait for the right candidates to get in touch.

There you go, now you know everything! In other words, the outbound hiring method is only used when you can’t attract high-quality candidates with your inbound hiring strategy. You still need to know how to put it in place, and that’s why we’re here! Thanks to our talent pool and our hiring strategies, it will be much easier to fill your open positions. Call on Dgitags!

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