Performance Recruiting - New Ways to Attract Suitable Candidates

1. What is Performance Recruiting?
2. How does performance recruiting work?
3. Why is performance recruiting so important for personnel recruitment?
4. What benefits does performance recruiting offer for companies?
5. How can companies use performance marketing recruiting to recruit employees?
6. Which performance marketing tools support recruiting?
7. Conclusion

In this article, our guest author Tobias Asam explains what performance recruiting is and provides you with suitable tips and examples.

What is Performance Recruiting?

Specialists and talents are in high demand, as in IT for example. The number of vacancies in some sectors is now far higher than the number of potential applicants. If companies want to continue to attract well-trained staff, they need to take new paths: "It's not the companies who choose their employees, the employees choose the companies".

This was an unthinkable approach for many employers a few years ago. Nowadays, however, it is already a reality - and this will not change in the future.

An established method of attracting new applicants is performance recruiting. In this article, you will learn what performance recruiting is and how you and your company can benefit from it in the long term.

The term Performance-Recruiting generally describes measures that analogously apply the data-driven methods from performance marketing to personnel recruitment and follow similar patterns in the search for suitable candidates for companies.

The recruitment process is therefore more like a marketing channel, with appropriate methods and messages. The evaluation of whether one's own recruitment is effective should therefore also be based on the standards known from marketing.

How does performance recruiting work?

Performance recruiting primarily refers to the use of personalized and data-driven methods to specifically attract certain individuals with suitable qualifications to open positions.

These ads are typically placed via paid social channels, as this is where a large number of potential candidates can be found and the ad parameters (which determine who, when, where and how often an ad is displayed) can be precisely tailored and adjusted to the needs.

Paid-Social-Channels

Why is performance recruiting so important for personnel recruitment?

The main reasons for the increasing importance of performance recruiting are primarily:

• Shift from an employer's market to an employee's market:Many sectors, not just IT, but also the hospitality industry, the hotel and catering trade, and the care sector, have had a massive problem finding new staff since the start of the coronavirus pandemic at the latest. There is a lot to suggest that this trend will continue in the coming years.
• Changed media usage behaviour in job search: The daily digital use of applicants via different touchpoints, such as smartphones and job platforms, leads to more potential on the new channels - and much less potential on classic channels that used to be used for recruiting.

Companies, especially in the HR department, are still very traditionally structured and continue to serve channels that were used decades ago.

What benefits does performance recruiting offer for companies?

To understand the benefits of recruiting, you need to take a closer look at how (especially young) applicants behave when searching for a job.

The classic option is headhunting via Xing or LinkedIn. Anyone who has a profile on one of the two platforms knows how little effort many headhunters put into contact requests these days. Hardly ever does a job really fit a person's needs and objectives.

It feels like headhunters operate on the principle: the more people are contacted with the same message, the higher the probability of finding suitable applicants. Often, a certain resignation sets in, to respond to requests at all.

Job portals remain. Job portals are usually not accessed directly, relevant positions are simply entered into the Google search line by job seekers. The first visible search ads among the competitors of the largest job portals (and Google itself for several years) are split via SEA, which can offer much more per click than a single company for a certain job.

So as a company, it is possible to place job ads on all job portals at the same time, but this can become very expensive. Alternatively, a company can decide on a certain portal, but must accept that there is accordingly less probability per search query to be found at all.

The big potential for recruiting companies lies one or two stages further. Performance marketers call this the awareness or consideration phase. In the image of a funnel: "Mid of Funnel / MOFU" and "Top of Funnel / TOFU".

Here, people who are not currently looking for a new job, but are basically toying with a change and also want to gather information in this regard, can be addressed specifically. These people must now be addressed with messages to create initial attention for the company - or, in the best case, to already enable contact.

This strategy goes hand in hand with an employer branding strategy that places the value on improving the image among both employees and potential applicants.

How can companies use performance marketing recruiting to recruit employees?

At the beginning of a recruiting campaign, three key things must be considered.First, Define the target group, i.e. the applicants. Think about which skills, experiences and characteristics you consider important for the position advertised.

Secondly, and this is probably the challenging task here: How can you motivate the users to take action. That they, contrary to your expectations, do not overlook your ad, but react to it, click on it and register on your applicant landing page.

Thirdly, Afterwards, make sure you contact your applicants immediately and bring them into a corresponding application process. It leads to great dissatisfaction among job seekers if contact details are left and there is no response. You can use automation tools like Zapier to export leads and integrate them into the desired software. Especially for the field of recruiting, tools like Recruitee have suitable interfaces for you.

Which performance marketing tools support recruiting?

Whether performance recruiting delivers the desired results shows up in a subsequent analysis of the most important key figures and metrics, the KPIs of performance recruiting.

A central aspect is the creation of creatives and appealing content. This includes ad texts, image or video material and the placement of the ad. Be it in the stories or in the regular feed of the respective social media channel. The creation of content is primarily a question of time. Therefore, it should be an ongoing task, rather than a one-time event. For quick creation of creatives, the tool Canva Pro is suitable, for example.

Ideally, try to implement different ideas within a campaign and test them regularly. The more tests you conduct, the better you can optimize your content based on the KPIs.

To know whether your recruiting campaign is successful, it is appropriate to know the most important KPIs of performance recruiting. These are key figures that express something about the performance, i.e. the performance of your ad campaign.

• Clickrate: Here refers to the number of users who have actually interacted with the ad and clicked on buttons, links or similar in it. This gives an indicator of how well you have hit the right message in your target group with the ad.
• CPC: The level of the CPC will ultimately play an important role in how much you have to pay for suitable applicants. The higher the CPC, the smaller the target group might be on the one hand, and on the other hand it gives an idea of how your creatives appeal to your target group (→ see click rate).

The most important aspect from experience, and very often underestimated, is a well-functioning landing page or even a first landing page experience in the form of an interactive test or questionnaire.

Here you can categorize the user after the click on the creative and build first "hurdles" for the user. A helpful tool here is a tool like the mobile landing page of Perspective Funnels. Well-conceived funnels lead to the next KPI, namely the...

• Conversion Rate: Essentially, this is the most important parameter for you in performance recruiting. It says who, in the end, not only saw the ad, but also showed interest in your job offers and comes into consideration as a potential candidate. It also shows who has registered with your company as a contact for further discussions on the corresponding landing page, according to your specifications (for example in the form of a questionnaire for applicants).

Conclusion

With performance recruiting, you reach people where they are: on social networks, in search engines, on publisher pages etc.

Fast, mobile and direct. You also address professionals who are not currently (yet) looking for work. Especially in sectors that struggle to recruit new staff due to a shortage of skilled workers. Thus, people can be addressed who are not currently actively looking for a job, but are still looking around and open to attractive offers or a change in career perspective.

However, experience shows: The more specialized a desired profile is, the more media budget must be spent and the more difficult it becomes to filter out potential candidates. Here, too, analogies can be drawn to B2B performance marketing, where marketing automation and the creation of lead funnels are very important.

You can analyze performance campaigns, taking into account the mentioned KPIs, at any time for their results and progress. You don't have to wait long for the applicants to call or write to you.

The results can be evaluated at any time based on the data. You can even adjust and change ongoing campaigns to new conditions.