The trends in recruitment marketing for 2012.
So the end of 2011 is nearing and it’s certainly been a really interesting year in recruitment with agencies and employers in certain sectors doing better out of the economic climate than others. One thing that has been clear is that’s it’s a tougher market for nearly all than a few years ago and quality of service and delivery has been more important than ever to win and maintain business. We’ve seen some great advances in the quality of marketing and technology including bespoke recruitment Facebook pages, automated Twitter feeds for news and jobs, truly multi lingual recruitment websites and even the much debated QR Codes.
So what does 2012 have in store?
Here are the thoughts of Alex Charraudeau, Gareth Jenkins, David Johnston and myself:
Mobile
Mobile is something we’ve long been touting as a huge part of the future of recruitment and, as Matt Alder correctly predicted, 2011 probably wasn’t the year of mobile in recruitment. Although we certainly saw some significant development. Our recent report shows the significant growth in the medium within recruitment and breaks it down into some very interesting and useful granularity.
4MAT feel that in 2012 mobile recruitment will continue to grow exponentially. Better devices and storage in the cloud means mobile websites are becoming faster and more efficient to use. In 2011 the adoption of mobile specific websites and apps has been much slower than retail and other online businesses. In 2012 the adoption in recruitment is likely to grow significantly (we’ve seen a huge interest and demand from our clients, particularly those with a large contract base of their business). Remember the reality is you have a mobile website whether you like it or not and it’s up to you whether you want to have a website that is very difficult to navigate or apply for jobs on. If your competitors have one that works better than yours then this certainly helps candidates make their mind up over whom to apply through on their mobile.
Content
The quality of content has improved dramatically on many recruitment websites, with fantastic examples of high quality content from the likes of Red Commerce. Importantly people are beginning to realise the pitfalls of writing poor quality content or writing it with only a focus on the SEO.
2012 will see a steady increase in the use of content and more intelligent use of building engagement and employer branding. This will be much more than just relying on job transactions. Content will need to be more relevant, interesting and engaging to drive traffic and increase engagement and credible association with your brand. Visibility through social media will become the norm rather than just for the trendsetters for those in recruitment – rather like LinkedIn has for a long time now. At the same time this all needs to be done with an eye on SEO optimisation to help build rankings.
Jobboards will steadily add more content to their sites and look to use to engage more with their users. Gareth Jenkins notes:
“The longer term trend here is: jobs, jobs + content, jobs + content + user generated content, jobs + content + User Generated Content + community (jobseekers and potentially employers communicating with each other via comments and forums)."
Professional Profile applications
2012 will see growth in the use of the online Professional Profile (mainly LinkedIn but also Xing and others) as a starting point for an application. The introduction of a candidate to an employer/agency will grow slowly but steadily via this medium. The static CV document will shrink in use, slowly but steadily.
Video
Henrik Ottosson/Mats-Hakan Lundhag - Lundhags from Fusion Associates on Vimeo.
Video will continue to growth as recruitment promotional tool. This use of this medium will advance in that it is also used in video interviewing. We’ll see it used for one to one live interviewing as well as a tool for filtering: Where candidates answered pre-recorded questions or records answers themselves and send them to the agency or employer.
Growth of the referral
Finally the use of referral schemes will grow as tools in social networks help facilitate this. Some of the main ATS providers are adding this functionality as we speak.
Bring on 2012...
