Lot has moved forward in the area of recruitment marketing and employer branding in 2019 with several companies creating and ramping up recruitment marketing and employer brand roles, sharper understanding of how content is creating influence, delivering great candidate experience and push in exploring media etc.

In 2020, I am hoping for lot of advancement in recruitment marketing. Here is my wish list for 2020:

Mobile friendly ATS: Consider these two facts – mobile contributes more than 70% of the traffic on career sites and conversion rates from apply click to a completed application are around 20% (mostly varies between 20%-30%). This also means we are losing more than 70% of users who have shown some sort of intent to consider the company to work. Why some large ATS providers are not doing enough in this area is beyond me. Remarketing helps to convert to a certain extent, but this must change in 2020 to make the most of the marketing efforts and also to improve candidate experience. 

Video job descriptions: With growing video consumption, it is the right time to explore more on video job descriptions. And they don’t need to be expensive with storyboarding, production planning etc. A simple templatized format that aims to give quality information to the candidate and that can be scale up with minimum cost and time will be a good start. 

Digital media: One more area that has unbelievable potential. For a long time, we were focused on job sites to hire and social media to influence. We have not thought about making use of the large digital footprint our candidates have. At the same time, media and ad tech companies don’t realize that recruitment media has great potential. Sure, it will not be as big as the consumer market, but if you consider the combined potential of job sites, social media and contingency agencies (not considering executive search), it has the potential to be a strong revenue stream. For example, we at TMP use Ola to push advertisements to users who have booked a shared taxi to a particular destination in the peak hours. Similarly, food delivery apps to push advertisements to users ordering food to a particular address. So, instead of skills which will not be available on any media outside job sites, we are chasing other variables like address, purchase of particular products etc., to create a pool of proximate audience. I wish to see media and ad tech companies give serious thought to create products to aid recruitment and companies exploring more avenues to advertise. 

Job sites as performance media: For long job sites have been monetizing their products based on subscriptions. It is perhaps time for them to think performance-based pricing model. While it gives the customers and agencies like us great leverage, it will increase the consumption and revenues for the job sites. If you have any doubts about the model, look at how indeed has grown over the years. If they start selling their banners based on clicks or even impressions, it can create more inventories for the job sites. It can create scalability even in job postings with the ability to monetize the number of applications vs per job cost. For clients, it is value for money, flexibility in budgets and a greater level of optimization. 

Programmatic media: Programmatic turned out to be highly successful for our clients in 2019. Besides that, I have not seen much work happening in India. In our experience at TMP, the quality and scale of data one can get with programmatic is unparalleled. For example, we can effectively know how many applications are needed to fill a role for a job, which media is best placed to deliver applications for that job and how much should we pay for each application. And if job sites create performance-based products, programmatic will only grow in strength. This is clearly the future of recruitment marketing and I wish to see more companies embrace programmatic in 2020.

Retargeting: We know that not more than 5%-7% of visitors on career sites convert into applications. Closely associated with programmatic, retargeting helps one to go back to the users who exited without any action and present them with content and jobs. For a tech client in India, we were able to convert additional 10% of users with retargeting. Bigger and well-known companies get lot more traffic and I believe there is lot of merit in retargeting to improve on conversions.

User-generated content: Almost every research tells us that candidates are looking for authentic content and are always influenced by authentic content. Consider the growth of Glassdoor and the conclusions only get stronger. Most of us are doing testimonials, making the tone of voice much more personal, imagery more relatable etc. However, the most unexplored area is of user-generated content. With technology and mobile, it is very easy to create an infrastructure to manage the content. Companies though will need to be open to give control to the employees to talk. User-generated content if executed well can give content that can fill your calendar for more than a year, have high employee engagement, offer the most authentic and real content to the users and helps live the employer brand. It can be deployed to solve various hiring problems related to a job description, location or department. 

Personalization: Users are now exposed to a high degree of personalization on websites and especially e-commerce sites and attention spans have come down drastically. That exposure is driving their behavior on job-search related activities as well. Users are no more interested in generic and unrelated content including jobs. That essentially means if we recognize a user from their past behavior, present them with content and jobs that match that behavior. So, if a user with a known history of looking through finance-related jobs comes to a career site, that user should be ideally served content on finance and jobs in finance on the home page. This reduces the exits and improves the conversion rates. Though we need to travel a lot of distance to have a career site with no home page, my wish in 2020 is that we start the journey towards personalization.