The New hiring ecosystem: part 1 - talent marketing

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4 mins, 33 secs read time

Overwhelmed.

I hear this word a lot when I ask recruiters, managers, and candidates about the world of talent acquisition software today. They’re overwhelmed with the new ways candidates want to interact with you, with the number products in the market, and how competitive it is to get quality talent. There are so many new products each year, and it seems like each time Bersin by Deloitte releases their latest, annual trend report, a myriad of new recruiting or HR products spring up.

We’ve seen this explosion of new technology happen before our very eyes here at Greenhouse within our own partner ecosystem.

Over the last two years, our ecosystem has grown significantly. In fact, Greenhouse has become the largest and fastest-growing ecosystem in the market, collaborating with over 200 unique partners - with another 50+ partners on the way. We’ve seen an emergence of specialty products creating niches across talent acquisition software and blurring the traditional definition of what talent acquisition software is.

I want to share the three areas I’ve seen really innovate in the space: talent marketing, sourcing, and hiring. This three-part series will dive into each, starting with Talent Marketing.

Talent Marketing

At a high-level, products within talent marketing should help you with at least one of these initiatives:

  1. Build your employer brand
  2. Develop communication with talent
  3. Grow your candidate pipeline

This is your front-line of talent acquisition.

1. Build your employment brand

Candidates now have greater freedom and power to move between companies to pick their next employer. The supply of candidates is down, and employer demand is up. This has made it more important than ever for companies to make meaningful connections with their prospects, candidates, employees, and even alumni workers.

Millennials are not making job selections based on salary and benefits alone; they want to work with people whose missions resonate with them. They want to work at a company that shares their values. They want to learn about your company, your culture, and your employees before even applying, and this is happening wherever they can get the information. No longer can we just post a job description on our website and expect candidates to come to us; we need to go where the candidates are. And while it’s important to make your career page culturally rich, it’s now just as important to extend the visibility to a variety of channels.

Companies like Glassdoor and The Muse have become standard models for how candidates learn about your company—promoting new levels of transparency never before seen.

But employer branding isn’t just one-sided, it should be a conversation, and we’ve seen these companies evolve beyond an employer review site and advice publication to providing employers with the tools to establish their employment brand.

What was once only feasible for huge companies with big marketing budgets has now become democratized, standardized, and measured.

2. Develop communication with talent

Another big development in talent marketing has been the emergence of products focused on improving communication with candidates.

With the rise of recruiting CRMs, companies now have greater visibility into their pipeline and are able to tap into their passive candidate pool. But if you have an understaffed recruiting team or you’re managing high-volume jobs, it’s tough to juggle the 100’s or 1,000’s of prospects in a timely manner, creating an unscalable, poor experience.

This gap has given rise to nurturing products such as MixMax and Canvas which layer on top of your ATS. They facilitate and automate parts of the communication process to make sure no candidate is left behind and drastically improve your recruiting team’s ability to scale.

The Marketing products of ten years ago are now being introduced to Recruiting teams today, advancing how talent professionals share information and nurture candidates.

3. Grow your candidate pipeline

We have also seen major advancements in a recruiting team’s ability to reach new candidates and re-engage with old ones.

In the last decade, the Marketing business function has made many strides. And now Recruiting teams are applying these same ideas and tactics, for example in the form of using new technology like deep learning. Terms like PPC, pay-per-click, and CPH, cost-per-hire, are now a part of talent marketing teams’ KPIs, and ad networks, like Google and Facebook, are being leveraged to create candidate pipeline the same way companies generate lead pipeline for their products.

Restless Bandit, for instance, took these approaches to help companies rediscover the talent that was already in their system, match them with new roles, and then automatically created personalized outreach to them.

Even the humble job description is being thought of as a place to expand your talent pool. As it turns out, many job descriptions have been copied from somewhere else, written in haste, or use buzzwords or gendered phrasing which can greatly limit the candidates who might apply. By using products like Textio, recruiters can undo those mistakes and remove the bias and gender discrimination language from their postings.

Coming up

The innovation doesn’t stop at just Talent Marketing. Keep your eyes peeled for my next post, when I’ll share some interesting trends in Sourcing and discuss how to continue building out your recruiting tech stack.

If you’re a current Greenhouse customer, you can check out the integration tab in your Greenhouse dashboard to learn more about the solutions we have available today.

Thanks to Garret Starr, Jillian Trubee, and Dinah Alobeid for reading drafts of this post.