Are you a recruiter or a brand manager?

Today we are leading hybrid lives as our traditional boundaries become more and more blurred. We complement our “real” selves with “online” personas for our audiences on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and countless other social channels. The 9-5 working day is becoming a distant memory, thanks to smartphones and tablets that allow us to be in constant contact no matter where we are.  And just as work and home, online and offline, increasingly overlap, organisations are realising that their recruitment process is an important part of their marketing strategy.

Because in today’s online-offline world, your candidates may be today’s or tomorrow’s customers. This means that their experience of your recruitment process can have long-lasting and often unforeseen consequences for your brand and your reputation. We all have stories to tell about our own jobhunting experiences – and  human nature far prefers to share the nightmares than the fairytales. We talk about a job application that was never acknowledged, a first interview that was never followed up or the interviewer who took an instant dislike to us. Our experience becomes a story shared in the pub with close friends. But today, those stories are shared, not with one person but with thousands, instantly and around the world. So recruiters have an increasingly important role to play in managing corporate reputation. Thinking like a marketer is a good place to start.

So ask yourself the marketer’s question: what will my candidates feel about our brand after going through our recruitment process? Then ask yourself the recruiter’s question: what are my overall recruitment objectives? Do I need to reduce our cost of hire? Am I losing great candidates because our time to hire is too slow? Do we need to reach a wide pool of candidates? Or a very specific skill set?

Whatever your recruitment goals, harness marketing tools and techniques, particularly in the fast-evolving areas of social media and video, and you’ll do both your recruitment process and your brand a favour. Here’s why:

Grow your customer candidate base: large organisations with a regular and high volume of vacancies can pro-actively build a pool of engaged prospective employees on social media. The North American arm of food services giant, Sodexo, is a trailblazer in social recruitment and has a large and popular presence on several social channels. Since launching their social recruitment strategy, over 45% of candidates consult at least one Sodexo social channel when jobhunting, traffic to its Careers webpage increased 182% and annual recruitment advertising spend had, at the last case study, reduced by $300,000.

Give your brand a human face: the explosion of video into almost every area of our lives continues, and recruitment is no exception. While there’s nothing new about the corporate recruitment video, with video recorders now built into almost every mobile phone, tablet, laptop or desktop, we all have the potential to be actor-directors. At no cost and little time, recruiters, better still, the hiring manager, can record a video-selfie for prospective applicants, giving them a powerful opportunity to describe in a more approachable way the role, the ideal candidate, or an average working day. Your jobseekers will be better informed from the beginning and it will help them to pre-qualify or even eliminate themselves from the process.

Identify high potential customers applicants: many job openings attract a huge volume of applicants, thanks to the reach of job portals. Screening those applications is time-consuming and not always accurate. How often has the promising on-paper candidate become a definite no, within minutes of meeting them in the flesh? Using automated video interviewing you can screen your candidates with far more accuracy, get a strong insight into their personalities and core skills and more easily find strong candidates who stand out from the crowd.

Treat your candidates like your customers: name a consumer business that doesn’t have a customer service function! Can you? But is your company one of the almost 25% that doesn’t even acknowledge an unsuccessful application? Whether you use an applicant tracking system, the automated communication processes offered by video interviewing providers, or even a simple bulk email, communicating with your unsuccessful candidates is essential. A little respect goes a long way.

If you’re still not inspired to marketise your recruitment process, here’s a powerful example of the impact of this hybrid approach: Heineken’s now-viral of its unconventional 2013 campaign to recruit an intern to its sponsorship team. The result? A 279% increase of visits to its HR website, a 317% increase in CVs submitted to the company and well over 5 million views on YouTube . Wins all round for brand Heineken!