While not quite at a level considered “full employment” by most economists, the unemployment rate is down to 5.1%, and the job market for most types of skilled labor is considered by-and-large a “buyer’s market” in most HR and Human Capital Management (HCM) circles. Indeed, in many discussions and writings on the subject of talent acquisition these days, the most common word that keeps coming up is “marketing.”

Renowned HR analyst and blogger Josh Bersin may have put it most succinctly in a piece he wrote nearly two years ago about coming HR trends for 2014: “The war for talent is over. The talent won.”

Many chief human resource officers (CHROs) and talent acquisition (TA) professionals are now speaking, as well as thinking, the language of traditional product marketing, with concepts like “branding,” “relationship-building,” “brand awareness,” data analytics and “metrics” dominating the conversation.

Another prominent HR columnist and innovator, Michael Hennessy, now refers to “the ‘consumerization’ of the candidate experience.”

Elaborating on this concept, Hennessy talks about the evolving role of recruiters and TA professionals into “talent advisors” who need to cultivate longer-term relationships with experienced talent in the marketplace than ever before. The challenge of meeting the talent requirements of the business is today a far cry from what Hennessy refers to as the “one-and-done” permanent placements of the past. Now, TA professionals are charged with identifying and growing relationships with skilled professionals long before any opportunities that may be appropriate for them are even available.

From Outsourcing to Team-building

HR and TA professionals have long been accustomed to the talent selection and screening processes, while opting for years to outsource HR marketing functions. As Hennessy asserts, recruiters now have to build internal teams to handle the demands of recruitment marketing – i.e., professionals with demonstrable skills in capabilities like branding, messaging, content delivery, digital marketing, social media and data analysis.

But it’s not just on the recruitment side that the business of attracting talent has changed. In addition to an improving job market, job searchers and potential candidates have a world of information at their fingertips at all times, thanks to the Internet and the explosion of social media, job boards and networking sites. The net/net results are that, if candidates have to work less hard to find a new opportunity virtually anywhere in the world (or, arguably, perhaps even harder to find the right opportunity to suit their level of skills and experience in a bigger field), recruiters have their research and work cut out for them in order to attract the best available talent to their organization.

Robin Erickson, Josh Bersin’s colleague and director of talent acquisition research for Bersin by Deloitte, is all too aware of the need for recruiters to become more proactive, and effective – when candidates can find out more about a potential opportunity at virtually any company from the firm’s website than they can from even a recruiter.

In a blog post from this past April, she cites recent research her firm’s done on ways to help TA leaders do their jobs better: improve the campus recruitment process and the overall “candidate experience;” recruit the long-term unemployed; implement better initiatives for hiring veterans; as well as cultivate stronger relationships with hiring managers.

Erickson cites some interesting statistics to back up her findings:

• TA costs for U.S. companies rose 7% from 2013 to 2014, with the average cost per hire up to $4,000 last year.
• Professional networking sites jumped from 4% of the recruiting budget in 2011 to 12% in 2014, while agencies and third-party recruiters took a nosedive from 38% to 18% of the budget over the same period.
• Higher spending on professional networks notwithstanding, company websites are responsible for the most hires, followed by job boards and internal candidates. 

B2B? B2C? How about R2C?

Yet another HR blog, this one from PeopleFluent, compares the challenges of TA and recruiting professionals to those traditionally associated with Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer marketing practices (hence R2C, or “Recruiter-to-Candidate”). This particular piece discusses the emerging importance of content marketing and video to the TA process and identifies “3 New Rules of Recruiting and HR”:

• Content, particularly online video, rules the day for Millennials and GenXers. Citing the explosion of online video users to an estimated 16 billion by next year, the author advocates video recruiting for any and all aspects of conveying an organization’s brand and culture, and to create a more memorable recruitment experience.
• Deliver interesting, compelling and, most important, mobile-ready content. Engage candidates in real time, e.g., with company information, press releases and news, product introductions, recent additions to the team. Research indicates that 68% of 18-to-25 year-olds search for job openings via their mobile devices.
• Social sites are not just for “networking” any more. While LinkedIn still commands a huge audience for job seekers and recruiters, HR professionals now have to navigate the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Glassdoor and other social media sites. Most important, collaborative communication among recruiters, hiring managers, candidates and internal employees must play a key role in any TA social strategy.

As the pace of our daily world continues to grow at warp speed, and technology just makes everyone and everything more inter-connected with the “Internet of Things,” HR job functions continue to evolve accordingly. With the market for skilled labor continuing to expand, it’s no surprise that TA and recruitment professionals charged with attracting talent to make their firms more competitive now have to think as much like marketers as they do recruiters.