“We’re especially busy right now. Executing and delivering proposals, staffing new contracts, and the majority of our programs are hiring for vacancies,” Casey Talley, Integral Consulting Services recruiting manager says.
Now that so many people are teleworking, phone screen interviews are actually easier since potential candidates are outside of SCIFs, free to discuss new job opportunities, and are not worrying that nearby colleagues will overhear their conversations.
However, these challenging times through the COVID-19 pandemic present other issues in cleared recruiting. Candidates might feel more secure if they are gainfully employed and don’t want to make any waves on their team or with their customer by switching job opportunities. Maybe they feel loyal to their employer for their support, and simply for still having a job during an economic recession.
Given the challenges, now is an excellent time to step up a specific aspect of the cleared recruitment game: recruitment marketing.
ClearanceJobs Recruitment Marketing Guide
Recruitment marketing is the process of cultivating and attracting talent to your company using marketing strategies, methods and tactics. This phase in recruiting happens before candidates apply for a job, also called the pre-applicant stage of talent acquisition. It is now a must-have recruiting strategy.
The four main goals of every recruitment marketing campaign are to make potential candidates aware of your company mission and programs, generate their interest in your organization, give them the opportunity to consider you as their next employer, and funnel talent to apply to the open positions your company has available.
If you are sourcing top talent in such a saturated candidate market like the defense industry, you need to start thinking like a marketer. Standing out as a preferred employer in a labor market like national security is essential in securing billets, filling openings with cleared personnel, and building a talent pipeline. This means that you need to develop a well-rounded methodology to recruitment marketing and the full lifecycle of recruitment .
Developing your company and personal brand will allow you to attract the right candidates based on your reputation in the industry. With a brand strategy in place, recruiting teams should also invest in high-quality career pages, produce blogs and video resources, polish off new job descriptions, schedule virtual hiring events, and communicate with candidates to see the full return on investment. Email outreach is a crucial component of any recruitment marketing strategy. Busy talent professionals need well-crafted email templates to engage passive candidates, grow their talent pool and represent their employer brand positively.
You are going to be engaging with passive candidates, also known as the first touch. Passive candidates aren’t actively looking for new opportunities, and they may not be in your pipeline yet. Odds are that they won’t respond to your emails or broadcast/direct messages right away. They’ll start to research your company, or mull things over if you make a positive first impression with a post or status update.
FOUR recruitment marketing tactics
Status Updates are messages you create yourself and live on your ClearanceJobs recruiter profile. This user generated content can be text, links, articles, photos, videos, etc. You have unlimited availability to disseminate this information to your potential candidates on the ClearanceJobs career marketplace. Has your company recently won a contract? Share the press release with your ClearanceJobs connections. Have a funny photo/video of a team virtual happy hour? Share it with your network to show that your team is weathering the storm through the pandemic. This advertising allows you to engage with passive, happily employed candidates with content that is going to potentially drum up interest.
Learn more about crafting the perfect Status Update.
Broadcast Messaging allows for targeted bulk messages to candidates at one time that are not necessarily personalized and these messages are an effective way to nurture a candidate in your talent pipeline, while also ensuring that candidates know who you are, where you work, and why they should trust you.
Learn more about building intriguing Broadcast Messages.
If your company or the customers your company works with don’t have the bandwidth to implement teleworking policies or virtual onboarding, maybe your hiring for defense has come to a halt. If this is the case, or if programs are not expanding/being awarded, make your focus networking and pipelining for the next few months. Talk with your project managers about potential contract awards or proposals your company might be bidding on. When a surge finally hits after COVID-19, you’ll have a warm candidate list to reach out to! Regardless of whether you are staffing 50 fully funded opening or if your company has one billet to fill, spending some time on pipelining moves your recruiting team from reactive to proactive.
Learn more about creating the perfect candidate pipelining strategies.
For recruiters, working remotely is probably nothing new with the tools and processes that were already in place, but it is the norm now for talent acquisition in its entirety. Since recruiting is losing out on in-person job fairs, in-person interviews, and other networking events, staffers need to get creative.