- 6 Ways to Use AI in Recruitment Marketing - June 20, 2024
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“We’re falling behind in terms of employer branding. We need to do more.” Sounds familiar? Then, you might not understand how to use AI in recruitment.
Or…
“Our candidates express dissatisfaction with their candidate experience. Something has to change.”
“The conversion rate from our job postings is much lower than we expected. What can we do?”
Chances are you’ve said all of these recently about your recruitment marketing strategy.
Well, the answer you’re looking for could be gotten by leveraging a shift that is already transforming almost every area of organizational operations.
Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI).
According to a 2024 survey by LinkedIn, 62% of Talent Leaders are optimistic about the potential of AI in recruitment marketing. However, only 27% have begun experimenting with AI solutions.
But why wait? By embracing AI in recruitment marketing now, you could get a headstart on your competitors in turning recruitment marketing into a strategic asset to your organization.
Want to understand how you can use artificial intelligence in your recruitment marketing plan to win A-list talents and boost your organization’s performance?
Let’s get into it.
How’s Recruitment Marketing Changing And What’s the Role of AI in Recruitment?
Recruitment marketing is the method of promoting the value of working for your organization to attract, engage, and retain employees.
It is a strategic approach to recruiting that requires you to craft a strategic narrative around your brand and create experiences for your talent pipeline that align with that narrative.
But is the recruitment marketing game changing?
As the war for talent gets more intense, recruitment marketing specialists are finding it more difficult to fill key positions with top-tier talents. Traditional tactics that once yielded results now show signs of diminishing effectiveness.
Consider the experiences of Sheena Hartlooper and Claudia Zwitser, Recruitment Marketing Specialists at Nederlandse Spoorwegen, the Netherlands’ national railway operator. In an article with Think With Google, they revealed their struggles with reduced job applications and their recruitment marketing strategy.
“Our usual methods in talent acquisition were seeing a decrease in job applications and quality visits to our recruitment portal, as measured by the amount of time a user spends on the web page. Furthermore, cost-per-application (CPA) — which measures how much money it costs to get a job seeker to apply — was rising due to national market trends.
For our next recruitment campaign, a new tactic was needed.”
If you find yourself nodding in agreement, then it is clear that you need a new approach to recruitment marketing.
Fortunately, we are witnessing the early stages of AI-driven disruption in the recruitment marketing space. These technologies continue to evolve. So, there’s never been a better time than now to leverage artificial intelligence in your recruitment marketing efforts.
Read Also: Why Recruiters Should Take A Page From Marketing’s Book
No better time than now to use AI in recruitment marketing
According to a Mercer report, incorporating AI in People functions ranks as number 5 on the list of HR professionals’ top 20 priorities.
This tells you that organizations globally are recognizing that AI has become essential to attracting, engaging, and securing qualified candidates ahead of their competitors.
But don’t just take my word for it. There are already moves in the recruitment marketing space that indicate the growing relevance of artificial intelligence.
Take, for instance, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, where Sheena and Claudia use AI algorithms to identify the value of each application and optimize conversion rates. By leveraging AI, they not only increased the number of applicants engaging with job listings. But they’re also improving the overall quality of hires.
LinkedIn has also released Generative AI features to help hiring managers come up with better candidate lists. Much like ChatGPT, you’ll be able to use conversational language to hone in on your ideal candidates.
If you’re still hesitant about adopting AI in your recruitment marketing strategy, consider this: organizations that fail to embrace AI risk falling behind in the race for top talents.
Don’t want that? Here are some ways you’ve probably never thought of using AI in your recruitment marketing.
Read Also: Top Recruitment Marketing Podcasts
6 ways to use AI in recruitment marketing
Determining Compensation
AI can solve pay-related challenges in ways that humans can’t.
How? This is due to AI’s ability to assess large amounts of data, detect patterns in the data, and make predictions based on these patterns.
These capabilities make AI a very useful tool for HR managers and Payroll professionals when optimizing their compensation packages.
Determining the right compensation package for a new hire usually involves the following elements:
- Salary
- Bonuses and commissions
- Overtime pay
- Stock options
- Vacation, e.t.c.
The right package also depends on the employee’s experience, the industry you work in, and the employment laws in your jurisdiction.
Without AI, it’s difficult to keep track of all these variables and create a compensation formula that factors all of them.
Luckily, you don’t have to do this without AI. There are AI tools that help you ensure that your compensation packages are competitive and attractive to your best candidates.
One example?
Payscale’s HR Market Analysis Data is an AI-powered tool that helps organizations build their compensation strategy with the right data. With over 5000 benchmarked jobs and more than 250 industries, hiring managers can use this tool to make better compensation decisions. This will also help them gain the upper hand in the talent market.
Rerouting Candidates
Sometimes, you come across a candidate that doesn’t meet your needs for a current role but is perfect for a soon-to-be-announced one.
What do you do then? Do you let that person go while hoping that they’ll find their way back to you? Or find a way to keep the talent in your community so you don’t lose them?
You’d probably go with the second option.
You can improve your candidates’ job experiences by using AI to direct candidates who aren’t fit for a role to other suitable roles. This is called candidate rerouting, and it could be the key to your talent pool optimization.
How does AI help in this instance?
The most common use case here is AI-powered skill matching.
AI-powered ATS can analyze a candidate’s skills, experience, and qualifications, as well as the requirements of various roles in the organization.
This way you can identify potential matches between a candidate and alternative positions that they may be better suited for.
Enhancing Diversity And Inclusion
DEI initiatives have been trending in the recruitment industry for a couple of years now.
One big reason for this is that an inclusive and equitable workplace is a major attraction for the younger generation of candidates.
Many organizations are now finding that they can scale their recruitment processes with AI without discriminating against any group of people.
How?
Hiring processes are often riddled with unconscious bias. It’s the human element. But, it also means that you could miss out on a perfect candidate because you “had a feeling” that another candidate might be THE ONE.
An AI-powered recruitment software has no such problems. It can perform blind screening processes to ensure that hiring decisions are free from unconscious biases. It also helps you focus on the skills and experiences of your candidates.
Optimized Job Advertisements
AI has also found a very useful use case in the area of job advertisements.
A very good example of this in action is Nederlandse Spoorwegen using AI to track the effectiveness of their ad campaigns.
And how did their campaign do?
They recorded a:
- 25% increase in applications
- 52% decrease in Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA)
- 32% increase in quality sessions on their website
Using AI algorithms to optimize your job advertisements will allow you to analyze trends, find patterns in the performances of your ads, and identify the most cost-effective channel for delivering those ads.
Real-time Candidate Engagement
Candidate experience is an integral part of the recruiting process.
The smoother and more engaging your application experience is, the stronger your employer brand becomes in the eyes of job seekers.
But when you receive and manage communications with hundreds or thousands of applicants annually, how do you ensure that each candidate receives timely and personalized attention?
Again, AI can come in handy here.
Imagine chatbots that can interact with candidates, answer their questions, provide recommendations, and even schedule interviews – all without human intervention.
Not only do these AI-powered chatbots enhance your candidate experience, but they also offer a new level of scalability, effortlessly handling large volumes of candidate interactions.
This frees up time for your recruiters to focus on what they’re good at, like candidate assessment.
Social Media Listening
It’s not uncommon to find organizations on social media platforms screening their candidate’s online presence. In fact, you could even say it is now expected.
As you can imagine, AI is changing the way social media listening for job applicants is done.
AI’s capacity to minimize bias that is so common in humans allows social media listening to be more equitable and inclusive.
Then there’s also the fact that using AI in recruitment can efficiently dive into each candidate’s online presence and gauge their personality traits and cultural fit, regardless of the size of your candidate pool.
This is something that can’t be done at scale with just human efforts.
Why I Wrote This:
AI undoubtedly holds promise for improving your recruitment processes and driving efficiency via automation.
As you explore the various use cases of AI in recruitment discussed here, you mustn’t lose sight of the basics of successful recruitment marketing strategies.
- Define your objectives clearly.
- Understand your Unique Selling Proposition (USP).
- Put candidate experience at the center of your activities.
Also, monitor the performance of your AI-driven tactics and get feedback from your candidates and stakeholders.
Now is the time to seize the opportunities offered by AI in recruitment marketing. To learn how Ongig can help, request a demo today.
