Digital Marketing & HR: The Benefits And The Role Of HR

In order to find quality employees, recruiters and staffing agencies need to rely on digital marketing techniques and online tools to speed up the process and find the best candidates with the most relevant skill sets.

Traditional recruiting processes take too long, cost too much money, and don’t always provide enough relevant data to accurately make informed decisions about applicants. Digital marketing offers a variety of benefits that can improve your business’ recruiting efficiency and save you time and money in the long run.

Want to learn more? Keep on reading!

We will start this article by giving a quick introduction to digital marketing. We will follow it up with a discussion on “Why HR needs digital marketing”. We will then talk about the various benefits and roles of digital marketing in HR departments. Let’s begin.

Introduction to Digital Marketing

Digital marketing encompasses a variety of online strategies that are used to connect with consumers. Through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and blogging platforms like WordPress, businesses can engage with potential employees in many different ways.

Digital marketing also refers to marketing services like Google AdWords and search engine optimization (SEO). As digital tools make it easier to reach out to more people with less investment of time and money, they’re helping transform recruitment into an efficient process.

Why HR Needs Digital Marketing

With recent advances in internet marketing services, it’s easier than ever to help an HR department increase recruitment. With targeted job boards and tailored advertising campaigns on popular sites like Facebook and Twitter, businesses can easily reach people in specific locations who are interested in their hiring processes.

When paired with sophisticated applicant tracking systems (ATS), these online outlets help streamline recruiting efforts. ATS software helps sift through large volumes of applications and resumes to find candidates who are truly qualified and fit within your company culture; simple Internet marketing services can be integrated into these systems easy to help promote jobs.

According to Dsquared Media, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, and other digital marketing strategies have become mainstays in corporate recruiting departments. A significant number of companies currently use digital marketing to recruit new employees. And if you survey the companies that don’t do so yet, you will find highly encouraging answers today from them as well.

This doesn’t surprise us—online job boards are great at creating brand awareness and increasing awareness about openings. Job boards, when combined with other digital marketing avenues, can supplement the personal outreach and get potential hires involved with your company or inspired about your jobs.

How Digital Marketing Can Help the HR Team

Though many businesses still rely on traditional media outlets to spread information about job openings, some forward-thinking companies are embracing digital marketing as a cost-effective way to find and attract top talent.

Successful recruitment depends on creative approaches to connecting with candidates and one effective tactic in digital marketing—which includes social media advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.

Effective use of these channels can improve engagement with potential employees by ensuring that jobs are visible when candidates look for them online. It’s also important to understand how digital media can help your business grow by enabling you to capture more data from job applicants—data that is crucial in accurately evaluating each candidate’s worth as an employee in the long term.

Benefits of Digital Marketing for HR

Here following are some of the major benefits of digital marketing for HR:

Makes it easier for candidates to apply

Online applications and online job boards make it easy for candidates to apply. While fewer applicants mean that hiring managers spend less time on each application, having tools at their disposal that help them find quality candidates more quickly also allows managers to review numerous applications efficiently.

Online applicant tracking systems (ATS), as mentioned above, allow employers to search resumes by keyword and then rank and sort candidates according to whatever factor they choose—such as degree earned or years of experience.

Just like job seekers can do more research before applying, thanks to modern technology and digital marketing, hiring managers have a similar advantage. Before they even sit down with an applicant face-to-face, they have more information about them than ever before.

Saves time on low-quality applications

The high volume of applications from job seekers these days is overwhelming. It’s estimated that companies receive more than 2 million resumes each year in North America alone—that’s more than 200 resumes per opening.

Clearly, there are benefits to using digital recruiting tools to streamline your staffing and hiring process. If you use them correctly, you will be able to identify candidates who possess relevant qualifications and traits that match your company culture.

You can then pre-screen them based on personality and intelligence level through video interviewing. This allows you to weed out unqualified candidates before they even apply, saving both time and money.

Social media channels are more effective than email

Social media channels are more effective than email when it comes to finding and hiring top talent. While email is still a viable way to communicate with candidates, social media offers instant connection and quick communication. Today a majority of millennials turn to social media channels when searching for new job opportunities.

Therefore, if you want to improve your company’s ability to hire top talent, use digital marketing tools to reach out to potential candidates via social media over the traditional email route. This allows you not only to filter your potential hires by skill and experience level but also offers greater transparency in your recruitment process.

If you connect directly with potential applicants using digital marketing channels, you can make job postings personal. In this way, you can do away with sending just one generic job posting into cyberspace that can get lost amid all the noise online. Instead, connect with those who may be interested in applying for available positions on LinkedIn or other online forums.

To ensure transparency in your application process, post any updates about open positions on social media so that candidates know where they stand throughout their recruitment experience.

Influencer outreach works better than cold calling

If you can connect with thought leaders in your field—or even top-tier industry names—you might be able to strike up a mutually beneficial relationship. You can ask these influencers to spread the word about your recruitment drives and upsell your company as a great place to work.

Building relationships with influencers can only help to further your brand’s following and popularity. Moreover, influencer outreach will be more beneficial than simply cold calling when it comes to attracting top talent to your company. The same can be attributed to the growing impact of digital marketing and the proliferation of social media.

Reach out to prominent experts in your industry or niche via social media. They’ll likely have large followings that can be roused with a simple tweet or Facebook post. If your brand is solid and you align with their values and mission, they may even share it on their own feed and become an organic advocate for your brand. For this, you can tweak your content marketing strategy to attract the influencers that you think will make a solid impact.

Be strategic and deliberate about who you target as an influencer and always, always take an authentic approach when reaching out. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and introduce yourself. If you need help connecting with that person, search Twitter or LinkedIn and use their contact info in your outreach emails.

However, you choose to approach it, building lasting relationships is key when it comes to influencer outreach.

Identifying the Industry’s Hidden Talent

An HR Manager is crucial in selecting the team member who is the most qualified and competent and ensuring that they are utilized to the organization’s advantage. The relevance of this to digital marketing may be a mystery to you. If so, you are heading in the right direction. A company’s core goal is to reach the intended audience.

Recruiting doesn’t only involve publishing a few job listings on social media in the realm of contemporary digital marketing. It all comes down to thoughtfully crafting a story that resonates with current job applicants. The HR Manager’s contribution will enhance the value of the content in digital marketing.

Role of HR in Digital Marketing

Recently, it has been noted that the human resource manager in a firm performs an important role in digital marketing in addition to their many other duties. Below is a discussion of a few of them:

Employee Motivation Through Company Culture

HR Professionals are aware of the necessity for and significance of a company’s worth and prospects. Motivating the workforce to uphold the corporate culture for the sake of the company’s image and individual employees becomes a crucial responsibility of an HR Manager.

Although advances in digital marketing assist businesses in reaching their target markets, developing a respected culture that values honesty and openness toward the firm requires the help of the HR Manager.

Building the brand of a business

A company’s human resources manager is also known as a brand builder. An HR Manager can become a brand builder by using efficient digital marketing as a tool as opposed to just being a job poster.

HR Managers need to pay an additional duty in addition to one of the Internet marketers, given the dominance of digital marketing. An HR department assists companies in enhancing employee satisfaction and the company’s online identity.

In addition, by using Digital Marketing Strategies for the HR Department, HRs can manage the personnel in a manner that is more focused on results.

Taking Training and Education Needs Into Account

The responsibility of a Human Resource Manager also includes identifying the digital marketing team’s need for training and development. This is due to the continuously changing nature of digital marketing, which necessitates keeping up with new developments in technology.

The advancement of the organization can only be assisted by people who are already aware of this. As a result, everyone on the team must devote themselves to continue investing in their training and growth.

Creating policies and compliance rules

As long as it is done correctly, digital marketing is a large field with many changes and benefits. An HR Manager must establish the policies and norms following the requirements of the business to ensure effective use of social media and digital marketing tools on a professional level.

The HR department is in charge of not only developing the policies but also educating the staff about them and seeing to it that they are rigorously adhered to.

Using Social Media as a Recruitment Tool

We are all aware that millennial workers are a reality for today’s businesses. Numerous adjustments have been made in terms of strategy and attitude toward work. It’s primarily due to the abundance of technology and the internet, which makes everything convenient and easily accessible.

As was already noted, many job searchers are using social media regularly to look for employment and are having success doing so. To find the best candidate, an HR Manager can also employ digital marketing as a recruitment strategy.

Connect HR and Marketing

Regardless of whether it is an employee or prospect, for many people, HR is the first reference point when it comes to businesses. The HR Manager also makes sure that the marketing team of the business is in agreement about the various aspects of job listings, such as the mission statement, corporate evaluations, and company descriptions.

As a result, the alignment prevents mixed signals from being sent when comparing a brand with its rivals.

Updating the company’s website

It’s vital to keep the company profile up to date when utilizing digital marketing to expand the firm’s reach and level and to the widest possible audience. Most of these inputs are determined by the HR Manager, who also gathers them from other departments, compiles them, and relays them to the digital marketing team.

If an organization doesn’t have any digital marketers, the HR Manager is required to fill in for them or voluntarily does so. As a result, the human resource manager’s task of building brand equity has been partially completed.

Conclusion

HR and digital marketing are more similar than you might believe, whether it’s obtaining data from digital analytics or analyzing and contacting potential employees through social networks. HR departments can greatly enhance their recruitment strategy by using digital marketing technologies in a more sophisticated way.