It’s still early in the year, but the reimagining of Recruitment Marketing is already a big topic for 2021. This has been clear in several conversations I’ve had with talent acquisition leaders and in the results of the audience survey I currently have running.
Many employers are looking to transform their recruitment marketing to meet the new challenges they have and leverage emerging techniques and technologies.
So what is cutting-edge thinking in recruitment marketing and what steps do talent acquisition teams need to take to unlock the power of what is possible?
To give us some insights to answer these questions, I’m delighted to welcome Allyn Bailey, Global Recruitment Marketing Leader at Intel, back to the podcast. Allyn is one of the most progressive thinkers in our industry, and this is genuinely a must-listen interview.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ Why and how recruitment marketing is transforming
▪ Data decision mapping
▪ Collecting target audience data via automation
▪ Segmenting audiences by behaviour and motivation
▪ Candidate data infrastructure
▪ Predictive modelling in recruitment marketing
▪ Building purposeful engagement plans
▪ Providing genuine value with content
▪ Advice to talent acquisition leaders on how to start their transformation
▪ What does the longer term future look like for recruitment marketing
▪
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:42]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 331 of the Recruiting Future podcast. It’s still early in the year, but the reimagining of recruitment marketing is already a huge topic for 2021. This has been clear in several conversations I’ve had with talent acquisition leaders and in the results of the audience survey that I’m currently running. The link to take part in that survey, by the way, is bit ly recruitingFuture21, all in lowercase. Many employers are looking to transform their recruitment marketing to meet the new challenges they have and leverage emerging techniques and technologies. So what is cutting edge thinking in recruiting recruitment marketing and what steps do talent acquisition teams need to take to unlock the power of what’s possible to give us some insights. To answer these questions, I’m delighted to welcome Allyn Bailey, Global Recruitment Marketing lead at Intel. Back to the podcast. Alin is one of the most progressive thinkers in our industry and this is a genuinely must listen interview. Hi Alin and welcome back to the podcast.
Allyn Bailey [00:03:01]:
Hi, I am happy to be here.
Matt Alder [00:03:03]:
Well, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you back on the show. For those people who didn’t hear you last time or have not come across you before, could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Allyn Bailey [00:03:14]:
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Allyn Bailey. I work with the Intel Corporation in their global talent acquisition team. I wear two hats, one focused on kind of low Looking at our talent acquisition global strategy and transformation. How do we kind of move forward to create the sort of talent acquis organization that we need in order to be successful? And then the second hat, and the one I’ve been really focused on lately is looking at how we advance the practice of recruitment marketing and so really building and coordinating our global recruitment marketing strategy across our different regional teams.
Matt Alder [00:03:53]:
Now, on the topic of recruitment marketing, you’ve, you’ve recently written a sort of a five post series of some really sort of deep thinking about recruitment marketing on LinkedIn and I was really keen to get you back on the show to, to talk about that. Really now with the time constraints that we’ve got, we’re probably only going to scratch the surface. But there’s so much that I want to, so much that I want to ask you about it. I suppose the first question, just to just give a bit of context is why do we need to transform recruitment marketing? Obviously lots of things have happened in the last few years and lots of things have happened in the last year. Give us your context about why it needs to be transformed and what that transformation needs to achieve.
Allyn Bailey [00:04:36]:
Yeah, absolute. Here’s what I think has happened to us. I think that really five years or so ago we started to understand this concept of recruitment marketing as a discipline inside our organizations and it was really focused on two key lenses. The first was how do you make your brand appealing and engaging and enticing? And the second was how do you then gather individuals who are interested in your brand and start converting them into people who want to apply and to have jobs? Right. And we did that through a variety of different marketing capabilities and tactics and we built a practice around that. But there was something happening simultaneously while we were building up this idea of what recruitment marketing was. The talent acquisition ecosystem was changing underneath our feet. What was the way in which we attracted, managed and even selected and matched people to jobs and opportunities has dramatically changed with the inclusion of new technologies. Right. I remember sitting in HR tech 4 years ago maybe and people were like, everybody’s talking about AI, is this thing ever going to take off? Is it real? Is it important? And then the next year we went back and all sorts of companies were starting to shoot up who were going to produce some sort of great matching technology or AI based technology. And then the next year there was this conversation around is this about conversational AI or this is about machine learning or is this about using algorithms to do predictive modeling? And so while all this stuff was happening, recruitment marketing kept focusing on how can I attract and attract and attract more people. But what talent acquisition and what sorters and recruiters were starting to function and think about was, can I make sense of all these people that I have using this technology and match them most effectively to these opportunities? The biggest gap was and has been and continues to be, not only do we know who these people are, but do we have enough of the right data about them to be able to let these algorithms and machines and ecosystems we put in place from a technology perspective actually do the work of matching and connecting people to opportunities. What that means is recruitment marketing has to transform. It has to shift. No longer to be just about how do I attract people and engage them and get them interested. My job as a recruitment marketer now is to build a relationship with these people, to get them to trust me enough so that they will tell me more and more about themselves. And so that data can be used in the talent acquisition process. It’s a very different dynamic.
Matt Alder [00:07:19]:
Talk us through some of the logistics of this, because I know that you did your content in LinkedIn, in sort of, in sort of four different, well, five different sections. I think there’s an introduction and then there’s kind of four different key sections. Let’s sort of talk, talk through them. So the first one was data decision mapping. Talk us through that.
Allyn Bailey [00:07:40]:
Yeah. So the first thing that we have to be able to do before we can start understanding how we can get people through the power of marketing and engagement to tell us more about themselves, we need to get really specific about what is it that I need to know? I don’t need to know everything, and I need to know very specific things. And what are those specific things? And the approach I’m proposing that we do to understand this is what I’m calling data mapping. Right. Which is taking and sitting down and saying, what are the decisions that you, as a talent acquisition organization, need to make about candidates throughout the lifetime of their experience for you? Right. Decisions about how you categorize them, how you prioritize them, decisions about what you match, who you match to what jobs, who you choose to interview, etc. Right. Each of those decisions are based on data. Right. What is that data? So we need to map that and then we need to turn around and say, at what point does that data need to be refreshed based on the experience of people? People evolve and change and their careers alter the cadence at which I need to update and manage data. For example, for somebody who I bring in as an early, as an early career individual, maybe during an internship program, I have more touch points where I need to update as they evolve and change over time. I need to map that in some way, some sort of basic framework that allows me to look at this as a recruitment marketer and say, ah, here are the places and touch points that I need to engage candidates to get them to provide me X information. Once I know that, then I can start to figure out what I can provide to those candidates to entice them to want to give me that data.
Matt Alder [00:09:19]:
And give, I suppose give us a way that data might be collected. Is that through things like chatbots?
Allyn Bailey [00:09:26]:
Sure. Right. We can use technology like chatbots or using conversational AI. We can, you know, leverage leveraging some of this technology we have in recruitment marketing platforms around automations. Right. The ability to build workflows with if then statements to be able to generate. Say if I know this then go and ask somebody for X. And then I have the right technology that absorbs that. Right? And I can absorb it in a lot of ways even without some of the new technology. I can absorb it through talent forms, I can absorb it by asking questions through a chatbot, I can absorb it by pushing out a form. Right. There’s lots of different ways today that we intake information. The question is how do we apply those to get the information we want?
Matt Alder [00:10:09]:
The next thing that you covered is something that anytime anyone asks me questions about recruitment marketing it always comes back to this, which is understanding the target audience. But I’m not sure everyone really understands what people mean by that or if they do, perhaps they don’t have the tools or the strategy to be able to do it. So talk, talk us through your approach to understanding the target audience.
Allyn Bailey [00:10:36]:
I will. This is the thing that often gets me kicked out of conversation circles because I have a very distinct point of view about it. But here’s what I think has happened to us. We have been so focused on that lead generation component of recruitment marketing that we have started to define our audiences based on the skills or the way in which we’re looking to, to match them to opportunities. So we’re kind of like thinking about the output. How am I going to. I need a list of X number of engineers in Barbados during this time. Right. So we’re very, we’re looking for these kind of. This is how I need to output it so people can find them. The, the problem statement with that is, is that audiences are really groupings of people and people are not. Are what drives them, what motivates them, the things that will influence their willingness to engage not to engage is not necessarily based on what job they have, necessarily. Or what skills they have. It’s much more based on the set of life experiences that they have up to that point that create these mental models. And so what I’m proposing is that we need to reshift our thinking and separate out the distinction between how we sort and organize people for sourcing, which we can do through a variety of mechanisms, and automate that through list structures and workflows and etc. In our recruitment marketing platforms and our ATS systems. And as we’re thinking about audiences from a recruitment marketing perspective, we start thinking about groupings of people based on how their experience creates like behaviors or like motivators, because those are the things that are going to allow me to target them and to trigger them with specific things that are of value to them. So let me give you a classic example. Somebody who is a career professional, who, you know, this is, you know, somebody who’s been in the workforce for a while, who’s a software engineer, is going to want and going to need very different things from you in what you market and you provide to them than somebody who is a recent college graduate and just got their software engineering degree and is looking for their first job. What life is asking of them and what they need from a company are two very different things. And the types of questions they’re going to have are different. And if we segment our audiences based on the fact that they’re software engineers, we miss that nuance and we miss the ability to provide real value. So when I talk about audience segmentation, I really talk about this idea of thinking differently about how people think about their behaviors and their needs as different from how we source.
Matt Alder [00:13:21]:
I can’t see why that would be controversial. Because at the end of the day, we’re talking about marketing, we’re talking about marketing communications. We’re talking about persuading people to do something, to trust us, to make a decision. And human beings don’t make a decision unless they have that emotional connection. And you won’t get that emotional connection with someone unless you kind of, you understand them. So I don’t know, it just seems, it seems obvious to me. What sort of pushback do you get against it?
Allyn Bailey [00:13:51]:
Well, I think the major pushback I get is that, you know, particularly when resources are tight in talent acquisition teams, the need to be able to prove your value or demonstrate how you’re connecting very directly to the bottom line makes it hard for recruitment marketing teams to show or to build measures or metrics around these audiences and demonstrate how that’s valuable to talent acquisition team who’s looking at, trying to look at their conversion rates against a specific job. Right. So part of this is about how we’re articulating our value, how we’re connecting the dots for people. But that’s really where the challenge comes in, right? What I end up with is recruitment marketers on one end who say, listen, I get it, but the truth is nobody cares about whether I’m building a marketing campaign for early career or for alumni or for internal candidates. What they want to know is am I building a marketing campaign that I can get the business group to pay for, for software engineers? And I need you to show me how you built that campaign and how it attributed to me getting more softw engineers. And this is just part of the, part of the challenge of being able to demonstrate the value of marketing, which honestly is a very top of the funnel activity. And it’s. Even though I think our, when our value is connected to how many leads I generate and not to how much data I manage, it becomes very hard.
Matt Alder [00:15:22]:
And I suppose digging into that data point, that brings us to the next area that you covered, which was candidate data infrastructure. I mean, talk us through that and does the technology that’s available on the market at the moment is that fit for purpose in terms of achieving what we need to achieve with this?
Allyn Bailey [00:15:42]:
So my answer is yes and no to that. I am becoming comfortable with the fact that I think that technology exists today to do all the key things that we need to do, to collect data, to interact with people like we’ve talked about, chatbots and conversational AI and good capabilities and tools that are in that space, sms, other great ones to parse that data, meaning to cut it and organize it and to take structured and unstructured data and make it usable in constructs that I can search and find with. We have the ability through recruitment, marketing platforms and CRMs and ATS and just basically databases in general to organize. Right now the challenge is are we getting smart enough to understand how to build the right integrations or to think about where we house that data so that different systems and tools can pull upon it effectively? That’s, I think the technology exists. Are we building architectures to do that yet? Probably not. I think it’s, it’s challenging and it’s hard for us because we have isolated siloed teams that function differently and then end up with their own technology solution with their own databases and aren’t connecting correctly together. We need to be able to connect that data. And that’s where I’m talking about being able to have architecture structures that understand how you connect one piece of data in your CRM to your ATS, to your matching algorithms, to your sourcing tools and etc. And on top of that, you need some sort of artificial intelligence layer today which does exist, that allows you to extrapolate from all of that data the meaningful insights, the connections, the matches, etc. Then the last thing you need, and I think the one that is the hardest for us today, is you then need the ability and tools on top of that that allow you to analyze that information, to make sense of it and to start using predictive modeling. And that’s where we’re going to get really super valuable as recruitment marketers is when we’re able to start applying predictive modeling to our data sets and it can start to tell us ahead of time what our future pipeline needs are going to be, for example, or what the likelihood of somebody is to engage with X type of content interaction versus yes, we’ll start to understand that when we’re starting to look at predictive modeling tools that I think the capability exists. But are we using them in that way yet? Probably not.
Matt Alder [00:18:18]:
Interesting stuff. And I’ll pick up on that again in a minute. But before I do, I just want to talk about the way you mentioned sort of the engagement with content, because it’s kind of the next section about what you’re writing for in terms of building purposeful engagement plans. What do you mean by that and how does that work?
Allyn Bailey [00:18:38]:
So I think the big takeaway for this for me is as recruitment marketers, we now need to take all this information. If we’ve done all these steps that we’ve gathered, we understand what data we need to collect, we understand these audiences at a very kind of root level and what motivates and drives them. Now we need to start thinking about our content and the way we’re. And the work we’re doing with them, leveraging that content in a different way. Today we usually think about recruitment marketing as two on two levels, right? First, the level where we are attracting them so we’re using kind of advertising based sorts of content. And then the second, the level where we’re keeping them warm, right. And housing them and using content to keep them interested enough so when we’re ready to source them, we can do that. What I’m saying is we have to change that paradigm now and understand that content, yes, should help from an attraction perspective. But we should be putting more of an emphasis now not just on keeping people warm, but using that content to provide value to the population that’s inside our database. Because when I provide them value, I can then ask them in return to give me information about themselves and data about themselves when I get that information. Now I am the purveyor of candidate data, which makes me valuable in the larger organization content. And by content I mean really specific value add, engagement and interaction. Content is going to allow me to get there, but that’s hard to do because that means we have to switch our paradigm from producing content that talks about the cool ping pong tables and what the benefits team wants us to talk about and start looking at our audience segmentation data and understanding what drives them and motivates them and realize that maybe what I really need to be building is content that provides skills to my candidate database, that makes them want to continue to engage with me because they’re going to get something out of it. And instead I should be building just like vendors have learned in the marketing space, providing webinars and education and engagement content that is different. So that’s the frame that I think we have to change.
Matt Alder [00:20:58]:
How close are we? How close are we or how close are some employers to getting, getting to this? Is it a long way off? Is it something that’s being achieved already? What, you know, what’s your view on that?
Allyn Bailey [00:21:11]:
I think that we’re seeing shining lights in different aspects of this. I honestly have yet to see us and I’m sure there are probably examples of this. I just not have, I’m not aware of it yet. I have not seen a company or, or an entity pull it all together, right. To connect all the dots together. Which is part of actually why I wrote this series. It almost became a cathartic kind of manifesto both for myself and what I think I need to focus on and what I think we as an industry need to focus on, which is how do we start to connect all these elements together and by doing so it starts to transition how we think about the work and where we provide value. Do I think there are people doing great things with audience segmentation? Yes. Do I think there are people doing great things with, you know, really purposeful engagement plans? Yeah, I do think so. Have we, have I seen it connected yet to how we are thinking differently about recruitment, marketing as a candidate or contact data mining operation versus a kind of advertising framework? Not quite yet. So I think that’s probably the biggest opportunity is connecting the story.
Matt Alder [00:22:21]:
Everything that I’m seeing so far this year is really pointing to the fact that this is going to be Crewman marketing. Transformation is going to be a very, very big topic. And I know that there are lots of acquisition leaders out there looking at their strategy, trying to work out how they can transform what they do and take it to the next level. What would your advice be to someone who’s sort of looking at this for the first time and thinking about how they can move their strategy forward?
Allyn Bailey [00:22:51]:
So this is a lesson learned for me because I frequently want to take things and take everything in one big fail swoop and just make it happen. And I’m learning that that’s particularly in our current environments for most of us, not something that’s possible. So what I recommend is really taking a step back and figuring out what are the components that you need to put in place and how can you start to narrow the path to allow you to get there. If you do nothing else this year but really understand what is the contact data that you need to collect from candidates over time, that’s huge because once you have visual and realization of what that is, you can start to organically start taking actions that allow you to do a better job of capturing that information. Right. Or if you feel like you understand that, then maybe you’re really just picking that one piece to focus on. This year is thinking about how do I translate this into building a purposeful interaction plan for one core audience and see what it gets you in terms of results. So my biggest advice right now is look at the ecosystem kind of measure where you think you are on these big four components. And then if you start anywhere, start with data and once you understand that, start building up from there.
Matt Alder [00:24:20]:
Final question. A lot of what we’ve been talking about is aspirational. And for the sort of short to medium term future, if we look out into the slightly longer term future. So say, you know, I don’t know, three to five years time. We sort of talked about technology, we talked about AI. You were mentioning about predictive analytics. Where do you think we’re going to be sort of three to five years out when it comes to recruitment marketing? What’s likely to be possible?
Allyn Bailey [00:24:48]:
So I think the biggest opportunity on the horizon is the ability to start to automate our engagement decisions. And here’s what I mean by that. I’m seeing some really cool technology out there that allows people to build complex workflows that can really start to trigger very specific engagement paths. And they can automate those. Right. But it always requires today A person to have knowledge about kind of what’s kind of the marketing know how that’s going to allow you to know which direction to send somebody based on their behaviors and actions. I think as we start to apply some of the AI capabilities and predictive modeling into the recruitment marketing space, just into content leveraging and the impact of content execution, and it starts to be able to web together what the potential predictive outcomes are for leveraging different types of content or different types of experiences. What that will allow companies to do is to start to build basically automated algorithms that will create marketing strategies or marketing executions for us based on our strategies. To me, that’s going to be a big win and I’ll tell you why. I think that recruitment marketing and marketing in general is a very complex, complex capability. And most companies do not have the ability to have enough resources to execute at the level that they need to. And so the more we can do to start to move the, to move the predictive modeling, the predictive capabilities to actually automate actions and tasks up the funnel, I guess, kind of further into the marketing space, the more it’s going to allow us to leverage our resources more effectively on the strategy side. So I think that’s what’s going to happen. I think just like we saw a few years ago, more and more people starting to apply AI to matching people to opportunities, and now that’s starting to become more and more mainstream. I think we’re going to start seeing technology starting to match solutions or engagements, interactions to results and that will start to become something that’s programmatic.
Matt Alder [00:27:17]:
Thank you very much for talking to me.
Allyn Bailey [00:27:19]:
You are welcome. Thank you for the opportunity. It was great to, to kind of put it all out there and I’d love to hear what people have to think about this as well.
Matt Alder [00:27:27]:
My thanks to Allyn. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com and on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
