What is Inbound Recruiting?
Inbound Recruiting is using the tools and methods of Inbound marketing to draw in applicants and retain employees instead of focusing on prospects and clients. It is a holistic method of increasing the quality of hires you are making and extending retention. Companies that use Inbound Recruiting methods and the tools associated with them report simplifying their processes and efforts used in recruiting. This is the first major benefit of Inbound Recruiting. These same companies also see rises in retention and worker satisfaction. This leads to lower costs to acquire employees and the ability to attract higher quality, more skilled talent. Inbound Recruiting also creates less need to rely on recruiters and gives the company more internal control of their hiring.
Review of Inbound Marketing
At this point, you probably are thinking that benefits sound good, but may be confused about what Inbound means in the context of Marketing. At its core, Inbound Methodology revolves around the journey of taking customers from strangers who know nothing about your company all the way to active brand evangelists to promote your company to other strangers with who you can then repeat the same thing (in a process called the “flywheel”). Along the way, your target passes through being a visitor, prospect, and customer. Companies can use many tools in this journey including social media, blogs, emails, internal workflows, chat landing pages, lead magnets, and phone calls as well.
This process is focused more on helping the client buy as opposed to selling them. The buyer journey is of foremost importance here, not pulling them through the stages of a one size fits all sales funnel. The mindset is a pretty big departure for many sales organizations that wind up chasing that next metric to get someone through their sales process as opposed to helping the prospect and providing maximum value anytime you can for them.
Differences of Inbound Recruiting and Inbound Marketing
Inbound Recruiting and Inbound Marketing have many similarities, but they are still distinct and different processes. The first and biggest difference is the target. In Inbound Marketing the goal is to bring in new clients, while in Inbound Recruiting the goal is to bring the best candidates into the company as employees. That different focus waterfalls down into several differences.
Inbound Recruiting still uses keywords and social publishing, but they are decidedly different keywords focusing on prospects, and the social networks used will be more focused on places like Glassdoor and LinkedIn instead of broader social networks.
With this methodology, the job listings themselves become lead magnets, and the application is your landing page. Once you have them in your internal systems, then you can email them new information, use advertising to retarget them, and even call them to catch up and see if situations have changed.
The other major change is the timeline involved. The best talent for your company routinely is not actively looking for a new job. They are relatively happy where they are and would need a big reason, or many small reasons to justify a change. If you engage with these prospective hires at this point in their journey, when they do start actively looking for a job and do move positions, you will have a significant advantage in the final decision. That stands in stark contrast to how many recruiters only start looking at what talent is available in the market when they have a specific job requirement to fill. It creates a very different dynamic and can lower the cost and time of having to fill a position, and increases the quality of hire and likelihood you have found the right person for the right job.
Flywheel Comparison
As mentioned above, the Flywheel concept and illustration are a key part of Inbound Marketing. Below is a picture of the Inbound Marketing Flywheel. The biggest difference between the flywheel idea and that of the standard sales funnels is the acknowledgment that once someone gets through your buying process, whether they buy or not, they can still impact other potential buyers. So it makes a lot of sense to pay attention and nurture those companies that have been through your process so that they then promote and refer more and better clients your way (Not better than the referrer of course, but better than traditional cold leads).
You can see as well that as these buyers change from strangers to prospects to customers to promoters, you need to do different things for them. Initially, you will use tools like blogs, good SEO, social media posts, and advertisements to attract them to your company and bring awareness to their problem.
Once they become prospects and are more seriously considering your solution, you may still use those tools but will change your content to focus more on the questions and concerns they may have at that point like different ways they could solve their problem and how your solution could fit into that mix. Here, webinars and how-to kind of content become a much better fit. It’s very important at this phase to not act like your company holds the answer for every problem or company and help the buyer determine whether or not they are that fit.
After they buy and become customers, you can use tools like email, chat, and social media to help them get the most out of their purchase and get them to really feel great about the company and in turn help you attract a new round of strangers through referrals, testimonials, and case studies.
This same process plays out in recruiting. Your goal is to attract high-quality employees, so instead of “strangers” think of his group now as passive job seekers. prospect become active job seekers. Customers are now employees. Think of promoters as referring employees.
So in this execution of the Inbound model, your company is going to attract passive job seekers using social media posts on LinkedIn and Glassdoor (and other places), by going to job fairs, through putting on webinars about job changes in your industry (or other topics like what employees should look for in fulfilling careers), blog posts giving career advice, a well-optimized (both for search and conversion) careers section of your website, and other methods.
This will convert some of these into active job seekers. In this case, there are also active job seekers out there that you have not had to do the work to convert, but they should be treated the same way, and are not anything you should plan on as a starting point in your process. Your company should then engage those active job seekers through job listings (that are more like ads than descriptions) with forms to fill in, emails highlighting the benefits of working for your company, invitations to special events that only qualified prospects can attend, such as office tours or seminars in your industry. This is the part of the flywheel where the hiring process itself occurs, so make sure to provide personalized value through that process and not just have it feel like an assembly line screening process.
Once you have decided to bring these applicants into the fold of your company, the Inbound Recruiting process is not over. Now is the time to delight those employees so they turn into referring employees. These are the employees that love where they work so much that no other company could ever pry them away. This is some ways is the most difficult part of this process but will have the greatest dividends because not only do happy employees perform better but they also actively recruit other great people to come and work with them, making less work for you in sourcing future hires. It won’t take all the work out of it for you, but it will make it easier. Delighting can be done in many ways including good onboarding through good training and smooth integration, paying attention to what perks employees prefer (through employee surveys), ongoing training events, and having work events to build a sense of camaraderie. These are a few, but there are many other ways to delight your employees.
Why Use Inbound Recruiting?
Inbound recruiting can be very valuable for the right positions. When you look at what it costs to use a recruiter to find high-value, medium to high-turnover positions and combine that with how much time it takes internally to hire a new employee, it can be quite costly. Automating, simplifying, and optimizing how you are attracting and maintaining your employee relationships has many benefits and decreased cost than the methods I mentioned above.
However, if your hiring is primarily focused on areas that are considered low-skilled and the goal is to hire a maximum quantity as opposed to maximum quantity, Inbound Recruiting may not be for you. In these instances, you would want to focus on different methodologies that allow your opportunities the most amount of visibility possible, as opposed to having the right people see your listings. In cases like these, employer branding can still be valuable, but look different and more general.
Inbound Recruiting Methods
Email Marketing
This is not the buy a list and blasts out a generic message kind of email marketing. Personalization is very important to the Inbound methodology and email is a major tool to deliver this kind of content depending on any number of triggers including where they are in your hiring process, how long ago they interacted with your content, and what content they interacted with, and many others.
Social Media
Different platforms play better to different audiences, but it is a great place to provide people the tools they need to move through their process, especially at the start of the process.
Webinars
There are some times when having a person present some information on an interesting topic can really push someone through their own journey to be making decisions. Webinars can be leveraged at all stages of the flywheel, but with different content.
Blogs
Another way to provide lots of value on a variety of topics based on your company culture and the job openings you have is to write about them. You can write employee profiles similarly to you would client testimonials to help people get a clear picture of what working for you would be. Other great options include writing about company events, different benefits, etc.
Job postings
One key difference with Inbound Recruiting is that you have a very natural, default lead magnet to draw people to your brand and have them give you their contact information: job postings. Notice the use of postings here and not descriptions. This is your advertisement for the job you are posting designed to attract as many of the best applicants as possible. Use this not as a way to prescreen prospects with all the requirements and responsibilities, but as an opportunity to pitch your opening to the right people that you want to apply to. Get fun and creative! Have applicants fill out a shorter form as opposed to the full application that you can get later. This is a huge conversion opportunity!
Other Lead Magnets
Just because Job Postings are the most natural and easy lead magnet, there are many others you should still consider. Everything in this section so far is lead magnets, but you can also produce guides and checklists about what to look for in career advancement, what to have prepared when you start looking for a new job, etc.
Workflows
Once you have a prospective employee in your database through any of the above methods, it’s very important to make sure you are following up with them in regular and important ways. It makes it much easier if you can use technology tools to automate this process, like HubSpot where you can specifically create actions for the system to do on their own or to poke you to do when prospects do certain individual or combination of actions.
Tools
On-Site Conversion Optimization
It’s important to look at the job section of your website and make sure it is obvious and easy to get to where you would like your prospects to get to. A simple design that points them to your job postings is always going to help your conversion.
Search Engine Optimization.
I’ve heard Search Engine Optimization referred to as high school and your website as a kid that wants to be popular. In order to do that, it’s important you prepare the site properly, and that you have other popular sites point back to it. Make sure you have the proper code on your job postings for Google to see and put them in their jobs widget. The popular sites can be accomplished by posting your jobs on high-quality job boards. Both of these can be very important tools attracting job seekers.
HubSpot
As mentioned in the workflows sections above, HubSpot can be very useful to your Inbound Recruiting efforts, allowing you a tool to help with Social Media Management, Email Marketing, Building Forms for your website, and in general allowing you to keep better track of your prospective hires.
As important as it is to make sure you are listing your jobs, and even promoting your job postings on the world’s premier professional social media site, it also serves a more important task: branding your company as a place that is attractive to work for. You can use your company’s LinkedIn page to tell the world what is going on in your company, share industry-specific knowledge, and client/employee stories to show the world how awesome you are.
Cat videos and political content aren’t all Facebook is good for. The truth is that Facebook is a huge resource when it comes to reaching people, who are going to be open to attractive content and willing to click on ads, whether they be more personal or professional in nature.
Glassdoor
This website has become synonymous with job hunting. Whenever someone is considering a new position they come to Glassdoor to check out the reputation of the company they are considering. Because of that, it has become a great tool to promote and brand your company as a great place to work.
Comparable
This up-and-coming site is similar to Glassdoor, and its awards programs have great SEO, which will give your jobs website a huge lift if you are on this site.
Examples of Inbound Recruiting
Good Fit Inbound Recruiting Examples
Recently Rothstein Consulting worked with an accounting firm that was looking for more hires to be able to increase their bottom line. At this point in their growth, the major bottleneck for them in achieving more revenue was the ability to deliver on the work their partners sold. Inbound Recruiting was a great help to them in growing their field of available talent, and by the end of last calendar year they had already staffed up for the coming tax season much earlier than they would have previously.
Other professional services firms such as lawyers, architects, etc. where the skilled employees could produce massive returns as compared to their salaries would work very well for this method. Especially if they are not at a point yet where they have devoted recruiters and the added efficiency would be a very helpful piece of their recruitment puzzle.
In other fields where hires will have to be made at a steady pace but could be very expensive if done one at a time, Inbound Recruiting would work well. Positions such as data scientists, various IT positions that are frequently needed to be hiring would fall under this category.
Bad Fit Inbound Recruiting Examples
There are still lots of positions that don’t make sense for this kind of engagement. For starters, if you are looking to fill positions that most would qualify as low skilled, such as fast food or hourly waged retail workers, it wouldn’t make sense for you to put the time, money, and effort into Inbound Recruiting, because you’re not as worried about finding the exact right fit, you’re looking for something different.
Also, if you are looking to fill roles that you rarely fill, and when you do it’s only one position, having an inbound recruiting program wouldn’t be a good fit for you. Some examples of these jobs include office manager, CTO, or someone in accounts receivable when none of those are part of your core business.