Modern Staffing Solutions Need to Adapt to the Marketplace – Here’s How

The social revolution altered the marketing industry forever. Companies are no longer in control of their brand. Instead, a brand’s determined by how customers experience the product or service. Corporate messages no longer carry the weight it used to. Instead, consumers are placing their faith in the recommendations of complete strangers. Perhaps most disconcerting of all, consumers are sharing their impressions of a company, brand and service in an extremely public and unfiltered way.

Marketing had to quickly adapt to this sea change, adopting inbound marketing strategies to its brand and outbound marketing approaches. Staffing solutions and talent acquisition also experienced a similar digital disruption as marketing, but this sector is still adapting to the changes the social age has ushered in.

The recruitment sector relies heavily on advertising, even though competitive talent doesn’t seem to apply to jobs anymore. What’s more, everyone in key industries are vying for the same talent you are. This is especially true in South Africa, which has been experiencing a crunch in skilled labour for many years. If you’re vying for skilled labour, your staffing solutions need to start following marketing’s lead in three key areas. Let’s take a look at how you can adapt your recruitment drive.

#1 Talent Branding and Your Staffing Solutions

Your business needs to look at talent branding through marketing glasses. Then, you’d see your product is a job. In a way, a recruitment professional is a product manager for a company, and the product on offer is work. To market work, you need to think beyond the service or product a company produces, and examine the element of the job itself.

While a company’s work culture is certainly important, defining work goes into the elements of the job. A clever way of thinking about talent branding is if a candidate takes this role, what’ll that work do for their career? What will the candidate learn, and how can this experience be leveraged in future?

#2 Outbound Recruiting

This point is essentially how you market your vacancies too your heavily competitive target audience. It entails recruitment advertising in its multitude of forms, from social media to job boards and SEO, all the way to branching out in professional networks.

Advertising remains essential to telling your company’s story, and is set to remain a key part of any company’s marketing mix in the future. However, rather than marketing a position with a protracted description featuring requirements for the job, you should start to focus on the experience, skills and expertise a candidate will use in that position, and how performing those tasks will make the candidate more valuable in future.

Inbound Recruiting

Integrating an inbound recruitment strategy into a company’s marketing mix can lead to an incredible impact. This is especially true in South Africa’s extremely competitive environment when it comes to attracting key talent. Whereas outbound recruitment usually comprises of advertising your vacancies to the masses, inbound recruitment sets out by segmenting the target talent segments that are key to your business, and building longer term relationships with that human resource talent.

Essentially, inbound recruitment seeks to offer value to the targeted talent that transcends a job, thinking about how the role can add value to the person’s profession, or skills. Inbound recruitment’s top goal is to be at the forefront of target talent when seeking their next role.

If this seems a bit overwhelming to you, contact us to discuss your recruitment and staffing solutions in greater detail. We’ve been helping South Africa’s top employers attract top candidates for many years, and can do the same for you. We look forward to hearing from you.