Do you Know Your Target Audience?
If I asked you if you knew who your target candidate audience was and what the best way to reach them was, what would be your answer? Are you sure that you really know them?
Every day as a recruiter you are posting positions, news, and pictures on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Are you doing this because you believe this will bring you the right people for your team or just because other recruiters are doing the same?
Knowing your audience is key for any recruitment strategy because the goal is to entice your audience and let them listen to and read what you would like to share with them. Most importantly, you want them to react because an engaged audience drives results. In your case, it means applications and candidates.
Who is Your Audience?
Understanding your audience is crucial, so start with these questions:
- What talent you are looking for?
- What kinds of people will fit your company culture?
- How do those people search for jobs?
Every recruitment advertising campaign begins with defining your target audience. After you define your audience, you can begin to prepare an effective communication strategy. It is also important to remember that every target audience is made up of different segments. With the right communication strategy in place, you can influence how these groups can respond to your recruitment efforts.
Wrong Channels
Choosing the wrong channel for your strategy could hurt your efforts significantly. On the Internet, and especially on LinkedIn, you can kill you brand and audience’s trust just in one simple step. For example: Only using LinkedIn Publisher for posting jobs. I know it’s free and the only thing you need to do is paste the job description and post it. But LinkedIn Publisher is not for posting jobs.
Have you ever thought about who is reading these articles?
Let’s think about these postings: Do you know who is online 24/7 on LinkedIn? The answer is recruiters. This means you are posting these job opportunities not for your target group, but mostly for other recruiters — the wrong audience. Job postings as articles are would probably work if you were looking for a recruiter. Otherwise, you are targeting the wrong audience.
Based on the latest LinkedIn Global Talent Trends 2015, around 30% of candidates are active candidates on LinkedIn and looking for a job. You also need to consider that from these 30%, around some 13% of LinkedIn users visit the site every day, including 7% who say they visit LinkedIn several times a day (recruiters or very active job seekers).
On average, every user spends about 10 minutes per day on LinkedIn. Is a long job posting as an article really the right attraction factor? And how can you attract people in a short period of time while competing with other companies?
On LinkedIn, content is the means by which you engage and build a relationship with your candidates. You are building not only your personal brand, but co-creating your company’s brand. Posting jobs as articles won’t create trust with your intended audience. Also try to avoid posting only one sentence with the URL to your open position on some job board, or link to a video instead of adding video into the article. These approaches do not hold much value — Not to you and certainly not to your reader. The response rate (comments, likes) on your articles depends on the value of postings you create for your network.
LinkedIn Publisher is a great tool for building relationships with your network. It will help to build better brand awareness, which leads to stronger candidate pipelines. Through these articles, you can arouse people’s curiosity by describing something interesting, such as what your company is doing, how your offices look, etc. Just posting a job posting is not the right approach and it’s not going to get you candidates.
When a reader has already liked or commented on your article about your new office, products, processes, etc., you already have them in a better position. They have expressed their interest by investing their valuable time in reading your article, where they got information about your company and you. Now, when you approach them, you are not a random person from some unknown company. Because of this, you will get a better response on your inmail message.
And how do I know that job postings though articles are not working? I checked 30 of these articles (with job postings) and contacted fifteen people who posted them. I asked them only one question: “Can you tell me if you hired somebody through this article (job post)?”
Ten people responded with these answers: “We don’t have any candidates from this article”, “We don’t know if we get any from these job articles” or “Others post jobs through articles, so we also tried that.” Ten responses but nobody was hired.
Data after one week from the time that article was posted.
If you have any other experience and results from job posting through LinkedIn Publisher, let me know, because I would like to hear your results.
When a reader has already liked or commented on your article about your new office, products, processes, etc., you already have them in a better position. They have expressed their interest by investing their valuable time in reading your article, where they got information about your company and you. Now, when you approach them, you are not a random person from some unknown company. Because of this, you will get a better response on your inmail message.
You should also know this: To ensure members only receive high quality and relevant publishing notifications, we do two things. First, all posts must pass our spam and low quality filter before having a notification published for them. Second, only connections whom we deem are strong connections will receive these notifications. We determine this by leveraging the connection strength score from the LinkedIn cloud service. Cloud service maintains connection relationships between members. (Source: LinkedIn Article)
Does your article (with the job advert) ready to pass through the LinkedIn “low quality” filter?
Weak Audience Understanding
Based on the survey from LinkedIn: 75% of recruiters don’t use data. That means that 75% of us don’t work with what we learned and discovered during our previous searches and recruitment activities. If you would like to get a competitive edge in talent acquisition for your company, start using data for your recruitment activities. It will take some time at the beginning, but in the end, it will save money, and time, making you more effective at your job. And according to LinkedIn, 77% of recruiters are more efficient and more effective when they understand their talent pool.
“Data can become every recruiter’s secret weapon for faster recruiting and better relationships with hiring managers. It can be the game changer you need to be more efficient and successful at your job.” (Source: LinkedIn survey)
The Data are the key and the one of the secrets for the selection of an effective communication strategy with a targeted audience. Data also will help you to benchmark value in measuring the return on investment (ROI). One answer that I got from asking if recruiters had any candidates from job posting articles was “We don’t know if we get any from these job articles.” This is a perfect example of how many of us are not using any data analytics and how we are just doing and repeating the same things over and over again, copying others and wasting our valuable time using sources that are not working.
Wrong Message
Your messaging should be consistent across all channels. It is also helpful to know which channels are bearing the most fruit. You can find out which channel is best for you by utilizing data and analytics. Understanding which sources are right for you will help you further customize and focus your recruitment marketing campaign, as well as be more effective.
With the internet, LinkedIn and other social websites, we have access to candidates in every country. However, keep in mind that what is working for one location may not be effective in another location. Spend some time and do your research: see what competitors are doing and analyze their methods. Take risks. Not everything is going to work, but doing the same things as others is not the right way and doesn’t appeal to new talent. Even if you fail, you will learn new things and some of our most memorable lessons come from mistakes. Failure is the fastest way we learn.
Once you understand your audience, you can craft the right message and recruit more effectively.
Last Updated on January 23, 2024