10 Tactics for Inbound Recruitment with HubSpot

Inbound marketing is something organizations have now been using for years to attract visitors to their website, drive website conversions, increase their online presence and sell more products and services. According to HubSpot, 89% of marketers are maintaining or increasing their inbound marketing budgets. Gartner states that skillfully executed inbound marketing is 10 times more effective at conversion than traditional outbound methods.

Here at InfoTrust, we are big proponents of HubSpot and use the tool for our inbound marketing. Recently, we began using HubSpot for recruitment purposes. In this blog post, I will share 10 inbound recruitment tactics and how HubSpot can help you with the execution. 

1. Just like inbound marketing, inbound recruitment is all about content. Your target market is your ideal candidate, so create a profile of that person. What is that person interested in, what does that person care about, what type of information is the person interested in? Then look at your own culture and begin building content to tie your culture to your ideal candidate.  Create videos about your company culture, interview people on the job, share your social outings, write posts and e-books on the state of jobs in your industry etc. Content brings people to your site – this is the first step towards getting anyone to apply. HubSpot can help you suggest keywords and with long-tail keywords themes for the new content. 
   
2. Think of your content as a team of explorers – your content has to travel all around the world, otherwise it has no value. Recruiters often tell us that social media is not their area of expertise, and they do not feel comfortable to actively use all the available social channels. HubSpot has a social media dashboard that will help publish and track Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn posts all from one dashboard and increase content distribution and engagement. HubSpot also has a bookmarklet to help you publish interesting information easily online. 
3. Work on SEO and link building. People rely on Google, and job applicants rely on Google and search engines to look for a job. More and more people go to Google to search for a job orlearn about a company and where they are growing or what they provide, rather than research using career-matching sites. HubSpot’s built-in search engine optimization makes it easy to find link-building opportunities that increase your website’s search rank.
4. Build landing pages to test job descriptions and application forms. Do you know a recruiter that uses an A/B test to see what job description copy works best? Probably not, because recruiters do not always have access to the IT team that can do the implementation. However, with HubSpot, A/B testing is quite easy and can be accomplished without technical training.  . HubSpot already has well-designed  responsive templates that have been tested across browsers and mobile devices, and all the analytics you will need to improve the page performance and to get more people to apply. Get more people to apply to the jobs that you have on a site by testing page layout, job description, form and call to action.
5. Nurturing is the key to building relationships with sales prospects. Most of the organizations that take their marketing seriously utilize email marketing and customized content to build relationships. A person might not be ready to apply for a job, but might be interested in receiving an HR newsletter from your team. On the other hand, people might be looking for a job with your company but you might not have immediate openings. Begin building an email list. HubSpot will allow you to target specific segments based on the job interests.
6. One of the challenges with email marketing is the lack of personalization. You do not want to continuously send out all of your subscribers the same email each month – here are our job openings. The emails should change based on the interests of job applicants, based on the content job applicants download on your website and based on the recruitment events they attend. HubSpot can simplify this with Smart Lists and Workflows to help you build an easy nurturing process that will deliver relevant triggered emails to your marketing list, again with customized and personalized content. 
7. Connect with applicants who visit your website. One of my favorite HubSpot features is getting an email when a person who is in my HubSpot database is currently visiting my website. At times, I just want to pick up the phone and call them. The same can apply to your job applicants – you can get alerts every time an applicant is visiting your site. 
8. Track your competitors. Chances are, you are not the only who is actively looking for awesome people to join your tem. It is very important to monitor how your completion is performing, how their website is ranked and the social activities they engage in. HubSpot has a built in ability to monitor your competition.
9. Integration with Salesforce. If you already have a CRM, there is no reason not to use it. We integrated these two solutions in order to build a robust platform to manage our applicants and track our recruitment pipeline.  Plus, customization can be built to organize your job candidates into different categories, lists, and lead types based off what type of applicant they are (such as a “developer” or “marketer”).
10. The most important part in any marketing campaign whether you are trying to get sales leads or job applicants is measuring ROI. You can use the robust HubSpot analytics platform to see what channels bring more applicants, what blog posts generate more email subscribers and what job descriptions get the most applicants. Coupled with Google Analytics, the granularity of web traffic data you can get can give new insights and ideas for better inbound recruiting campaigns.