By: Neil Costa
https://hbr.org/2023/11/creative-strategies-for-recruiting-talent-during-a-labor-shortage
While the unemployment rate and available job openings in the U.S. are inching up, labor shortages continue to plague industries like health care and retail. On top of that, 10,000 Baby Boomers reach retirement age every day, causing a mass exodus from the workforce that creates knowledge-transfer challenges for industries like technology and manufacturing.
While some state government officials have explored unusual labor shortage solutions, such as relaxing child labor laws, unique untapped talent pools still exist. For example, while flexible and remote work policies have improved the employment rate among people with disabilities, the recruiting process still continuously overlooks this valuable demographic. Additionally, despite the rise in second-chance hiring, workers with criminal records are another underutilized cohort of the modern workforce. Regardless of these relatively niche opportunities, the need for innovative recruitment approaches to bridge the gap between job openings and the available workforce has become increasingly evident as the labor market evolves.
Overcoming the Limitations of Traditional Recruitment Efforts
The tried and true, traditional means of recruiting new talent haven’t changed in years. Most companies still rely on job fairs, job listings on the company web site, and staffing firms to reach job seekers. While these are still vital to many recruitment efforts and can contribute to an effective strategy, a few limiting factors remain. For example — and possibly the most limiting — these tactics only reach active job seekers who have expressed explicit intent to search for these opportunities. This gap can make it very difficult to engage with the entire potential workforce, including underrepresented demographics, which are critical for hiring a more diverse workforce.
In a hypercompetitive labor market, these traditional recruitment efforts are table stakes, and organizations need to add creative strategies to showcase their employer brand and target job opportunities to the right people.
Fortunately, the solution to this recruitment conundrum is something companies have done for years within their marketing departments. Companies can solve this HR problem by leveraging existing consumer advertising tactics and applying them to recruitment efforts.
Creative Recruitment Advertising 101
Recruitment advertising involves marketing an organization’s values, benefits, and overall draw in order to recruit new team members. Effective recruitment advertising strategies attract applicants for open roles (direct response marketing) while also generating brand awareness for their organization as an employer of choice. This notion of employer branding incorporates tactics to effectively target and engage with candidates away from the traditional means mentioned above and is often referred to as targeting passive candidates. This can mean showcasing the company’s value as an employer, specific job types, or even individual job openings as advertisements on more popular consumer media channels, such as Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.
While some might argue that the recruiting industry lags behind consumer marketing tactics, the challenging labor market is forcing advancement. The need to find the right talent is becoming more pressing, and finding ways to close the gap is critical to creating a competitive advantage in hiring.
Unlike traditional efforts, recruitment advertising via consumer channels allows companies to get more targeted in how they reach prospective candidates by strategically placing employer brand messaging in front of specific demographics. For example, as the semiconductor race between the U.S. and China rages on, the big limitation stateside is available talent. These companies need to attract young people to careers in semiconductor development and engineering. For this reason, they should consider aggressive on-campus advertising to get their brand in front of students and influence them to pursue a career in this type of engineering earlier in their college experience. In this technical talent marketplace, employers can also tap into sites like Reddit, marketing employer brand and specific jobs ads to its extensive audience of technical minds.
With a targeted and innovative recruitment advertising strategy, companies can go beyond conventional job boards to leverage popular platforms such as Hulu, Spotify, TikTok, X, and Threads.
Tapping into TikTok and Beyond
While job boards like Indeed and LinkedIn still reign supreme for job ads and applications, a recent HireClix survey shows consumers are increasingly exposed to employer branding on sites like YouTube, Amazon, and TikTok. This is a smart move, as most consumers spend limited time on job search sites, compared to the countless hours they spend on consumer media sites. Activating paid placements on these sites allows companies to reach a larger pool of active and passive candidates. For example, to aid in the pilot shortage, an airline might target content and interests on sites like YouTube, Steam, and Instagram.
However, ads aren’t the only way to leverage the viewership of these platforms. Many organizations are leveraging current employees and Gen Z social media managers to activate recruiting messages. In doing so, they develop their own influencers that can give them a competitive advantage in a hypercompetitive job market. One example is Duolingo’s social media manager, Zaria Parvez, whose representation of the language learning platform’s iconic owl mascot, and workplace stories on her own TikTok account, have viewers commenting that they don’t know whether they should download Duolingo or work for it. Marketers have realized the power of influencers on social media platforms for many years, but now, recruiting and HR leaders are cashing in on the trend, leveraging these powerful and unexpected workplace authority figures to attract top talent.
In fact, these organizations don’t need to tap employees with large followings to execute this strategy. Thanks to ever-evolving social media algorithms, leveraging an employee with an authentic, relatable online presence that emulates their organization’s culture will reach talent based on their local market or industry interests. However, representation is important, so organizations should consider what kind of talent they want to attract. As women who departed the workforce during the pandemic return in droves, innovative companies looking to capitalize on this newfound — or rather rediscovered — talent pool may want to leverage employees who identify as women to show the benefits specific to their demographic to further inspire reentry. While these recruiting tactics remain niche, it’s only a matter of time before they become more mainstream.
Incorporating TikTok and other consumer media channels into your strategy is a must for any savvy recruiter. Yet, there are other imaginative recruitment marketing tools making their way into the mainstream. The most forward-thinking recruiters are also setting the stage for AI-driven recruitment.
Using AI in Recruiting: Complications and Opportunities
In fact, 88% of companies globally are using AI in HR, but the truth of the matter is there are limited guidelines and only emerging use cases for its successful deployment in the recruitment process. AI is being used to help automate tasks related to interview FAQs and scheduling, freeing recruiters to make more personal connections and put more effort into moving candidates down the pipeline to be hired. The most common use case might be to quickly help write job descriptions.
However, there are valid concerns about the potential for inherent bias in using AI models for recruiting. Companies should pay careful attention to the data used to fuel AI algorithms; these data sets should have broad and diverse representation. Companies can also ensure the AI engineers working with these algorithms are trained to spot and correct bias in their training data. Minimizing bias in working data sets is essential as the future will allow creative recruiters to deploy AI assistants to track and target prospective candidates and draft more personalized content tailored to their specific experience, preferences, needs, and skills.
The future will also allow for AI modeling to follow candidate decision trees based on stage of life factors. For example, AI might help determine whether a candidate would be willing to relocate, or if they’d be effective at performing at the level required of a particular role. Could AI begin to model out potential interactions with a job seeker’s future manager or future team members? Imagine the idea of engaging with candidates within targeted recruitment advertising campaigns and showing them their potential employee experience and career path as a part of the recruiting process, versus simple text-based job titles and descriptions.
Reaping the Rewards of Targeted Recruiting
Targeted recruitment advertising can also open your workforce up to the myriad of benefits that a diverse workforce brings. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in June to strike down affirmative action in college admissions, the onus falls on corporate America to prioritize DEI. By adopting strategic recruitment advertising efforts, companies can better diversify their available talent pool to promote a more inclusive and creative workforce. This can be achieved by developing thoughtful targeting strategies across the varying roles within an organization and ensuring that the best talent sees the opportunities available within the organization.
The potential for organizations to develop more creative recruitment strategies is truly endless. By reaching untapped talent pools, diversifying talent pipelines, and aligning company values with purpose-driven candidates, companies can find the talent needed to edge out competing firms and sustain growth and success over the long term.