What is inbound recruiting?

The recruiting landscape has drastically changed over the last years. On one hand, we have seen a lot of specialized jobs popping up, compelling companies to find more and more targeted profiles. On the other hand, top talents are facing plenty of opportunities and have the luxury of choosing their employer. The figures speak for themselves, according to the LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends 2017 report 57% of recruitment executives admit that talent competition is now their biggest challenge.

However, they keep spending more than 50% of recruiting budgets in advertising, job boards and recruitment agency costs¹. But is it really wise to pay an agency to recruit a specific profile when you know that 41% of candidates don’t see themselves staying at your company for more than 2 years¹?

HR thought leaders identified that paradox some time ago and new strategies emerged to promote companies using different techniques with measurable ROI. You have most probably heard of inbound recruiting, employer branding or employer value proposition lately. But what is it all about? We will go over all these topics step by step. In this article I will explain you what inbound recruiting is and focus on the 4 different steps of this strategy.

A strategy in 4 steps

Inbound recruiting is a strategy based on employer brand content and digital marketing. In this approach, you attract candidates to you by creating and broadcasting relevant employer content. Once you attracted them, you work on several action points to maximize your chance to convert visitors into candidates and hire top talents by creating an engaging and inspiring candidate experience throughout the recruitment process.

First step is to make yourself visible to attract top talents to your HR digital ecosystem (LinkedIn company page, job descriptions, career pages, etc.). Just like your corporate website is there to show your customers and prospects who you are and what you do, your HR pages need to show what kind of employer you are and how great it is to work for you. To do so you must, amongst others, produce relevant employer content to enrich your career pages and to be shared on your social accounts.

Now that you have attracted top talents to your career pages, you convert them into candidates by convincing them that applying is the best decision they could ever make for their career. You create an engaging environment gathering all information they may need and design a seamless application process so that they can easily apply.

Once they have applied, you keep talents motivated to avoid losing some of them (or even worse, the perfect match) along the selection process. You maximize your chance to hire top talents by nurturing your candidates on a regular basis. You provide them with relevant follow-up information: clear feedback, timelines, news related to the job they have applied for, company successes, etc. Make them feel they are part of the organization already!

Finally, you create an outstanding candidate experience and onboarding process to engage your newcomers and create a community of promoters inside your company. Your talents most certainly know other great people and will share the positive experience you have created with them.

Ok, that is the theory or the set of principles on which the practice of inbound recruiting is based. Your next step is to use this framework to improve on your recruitment processes. In my next article, I will deep dive in the practical steps you may take to identify potential pain points in your processes and fix it by setting up a comprehensive inbound recruiting plan. Stay tuned…

1 LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends 2017