Introduction to the concept of Talent Demand Generation
Recruitment is more of a marketing activity than it ever has been. The world’s most sophisticated marketers combine targeted marketing programmes with a structured sales process as a holistic approach to drive awareness and desire for their products or services and when done in a comprehensive way, this is referred to as demand generation.
Talent Demand Generation is the focus of an employer’s marketing efforts to raise desire in everyone they might want to hire now or in the future to want to work for their organisation.
Background
Organisations are fighting hard for a share of each individual’s mind space. To get people thinking about working with your organisation, you are competing with Amazon for shopping, Facebook for socialising, Match.com for dating and Netflix for TV streaming; not who you would think of as your traditional competitors.
Until the internet became so ubiquitous, the only people you were really talking to about careers with your organisation were active job seekers.
Now however, you are able to disseminate subliminal messages to everyone you might want to hire today or in the future. You can:
- Connect with them at LinkedIn, follow on Instagram or Twitter
- Encourage them into your talent communities
- Use paid search engine or social media marketing to advertise your vital messages
- Nurture, track and automatically score each potential candidate’s engagement with a talent pipeline product like Candidate.ID
Common Components in Talent Demand Generation
Every employer will have different demand generation challenges and opportunities but some of the most common may include
- Building awareness of your organisation as a desirable employer
- Building awareness of your hiring managers as people candidates should want to work for
- Positioning the unique selling points of your organisation as an employer – often linked to culture and encapsulated in an employer brand and employer value proposition
- Changing perception if for example your organisation is renowned for poor pay, conditions or culture
Occasional v Evergreen Requirements
The world’s most sophisticated talent acquisition teams apply different tactics for hiring that one-off legal counsel vacancy versus the positions that are non-stop conveyor belt hiring requirements. Examples might include sales and scientist roles for biotech, customer contact roles for customer services and kitchen managers for leisure.
Your Total Addressable Market
For evergreen hiring, I believe it is vital to identify and maintain visibility to the total addressable market. That is everyone you might want to hire now and in the future.
How do you do this? You:
- Refresh and enrich the data on your ATS or CRM
- Undertake a campaign to ‘wake the dead’ on your ATS or CRM
- Identify them on social media and other online sources
Generating Demand
It’s likely your total addressable market includes a large number of people. To activate each person in the past you needed to communicate with them all 1:1.
This however simply isn’t a scalable activity other than in the executive search area of recruiting and this is the reason why it has been extremely difficult for employers to generate genuine talent pipelines.
Now however, technology has emerged in recruitment which allows employers to nurture their total addressable market and based on each person’s interactions with this nurture content, identify who is cold, warm and ‘hire-ready’.
If you are able to nurture relationships with potential candidates at scale, you create more demand for employment at your organisation.
Generating Demand – Talent Nurturing
At each stage below, your challenge is to drive more people to the next. That’s talent demand generation.
- Top of the Funnel Talent: This is the group who are merely aware of your organisation as an employer. Most potential candidates will start at the top of the funnel. Nurture these people by sharing skills and industry insights for example, ideally authored by hiring managers; people they might want to work for or whose jobs they might want to occupy in the future. Don’t market your employer brand and certainly not send job opportunities to these people.
- Middle of the Funnel Talent: These people are displaying more signs that express interest. They have moved beyond your top of the funnel content and have moved onto your corporate or even perhaps careers website. They may have looked at the hiring manager on LinkedIn or your company’s culture, vision and values. Share traditional employer brand-type content with them.
- Bottom of the Funnel Talent: These people are or are nearly ‘hire-ready’. They’ve been looking at your careers site and perhaps specific job opportunities. Depending on the size of this population, your next step may be simply to arrange 1:1 conversations and find out about each person’s career aspirations and where that might sync with your requirements.
You simply can’t drive demand if you are sending the same content (particularly job descriptions) to everyone on your database. You must use technology to understand people’s preferences according to their behaviour.
Candidate.ID enables international employers to drive candidate demand and create genuine, sustainable talent pipelines.
About the Author
After 3 successful years making placements, Adam moved into recruitment and employee communications with HAVAS and PwC. In 2009 he founded Social Media Search, helping employers use social media for recruiting. After 4 years as a JV with Norman Broadbent plc, Adam undertook a management buy-out in December 2016 and formally launched talent pipeline software product Candidate.ID.
Candidate.ID enables international employers to drive candidate demand and create genuine, sustainable talent pipelines.
