I once read that the biggest compliment you can give a teacher is to create something new with what they taught you, and that’s what I did with Adele Revella’s Buyer Persona framework. I learned Revella’s process for talking to buyers to find out about their decision-making process from reading her book and taking her Buyer Persona Masterclass. I synthesized what I learned into the framework that I use to talk to employees and find out what they value.

As I was writing my online course - Better Message. Better Talent Pool. - I became aware that there were three main influences that have guided my approach to recruitment marketing. One of them was “They Ask, You Answer” by Marcus Sheridan. In his book “They Ask, You Answer,” Sheridan tells the story of how he brought his swimming pool business from the brink of collapse to thriving success by using his blog to answer all of the questions that prospective buyers might have.

As I was creating my online course – Better Message. Better Talent Pool. – I had to think hard about the process that I was using to interview employees and turn what they say into compelling recruiting messages. The challenging part was taking what I did intuitively and distilling the process so I could teach other people how to do the same thing.

It’s generally less expensive to sell more to your existing customers than it is to go out and find a new customer. What if you could add a category to your marketing consulting or agency business that could increase the amount of work you do with existing clients and open the door for new business too? You can with recruitment marketing.

Everybody’s hiring right now and doing what you’ve always done with recruiting is just not getting the results that you need. Part of the problem is the employment landscape and the economy as we come out of a pandemic, but for some industries the low labor supply was already anticipated before the pandemic. Whatever the reason for the current situation, competition for talent is fierce and it’s putting stress on businesses, making it difficult if not downright impossible for them to meet their goals.

If the only way that people can respond to your recruiting messages is by applying for a job, you’re missing a big opportunity to build a recruiting pipeline. Not everyone who’s interested in a position at your company is ready to apply when they become aware of you. And you might not have an open job that’s a fit for a potential candidate at the exact time that they made their way to your website.

If recruiting for your company has been tough and you’ve started to explore how you can change your approach, you’ve probably come across Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding. If this is you -- Congratulations! You’re onto something! But when it comes to deciphering exactly what these two disciplines are and how they work together, it can be a bit confusing.

Once you’ve recognized that you’re not going to get the recruiting results that you want by doing the same thing you’ve always done, you need to communicate how a new approach - recruitment marketing - is going to serve your company and meet your business goals. You’ve never done recruitment marketing before, so you’ve never had a budget for it. Even though everyone knows something has to change, you’ve got to help people get over their feelings that change is the bigger risk than staying stuck.

HR professionals aren’t the only people thinking about recruiting. Recruiting is on the minds of business owners and executives who are tasked with implementing business strategy because they know that their ability to meet their business goals depends in large part on their ability to attract and retain the right talent.

If you have been involved with hiring for your company, you probably know how this scene plays out. You have a position to fill, and you post the job. Applicants come in and you screen the candidates to get a shortlist, and so on. You end up with a hire that may or may not be a good fit. Time will tell, and hopefully you don’t find yourself filling the same job again in a few months or even a year or two down the road.

No one has to tell you that it’s difficult to find the workers you need. That’s stating the obvious. A low unemployment economy, however, isn’t the only challenge that you need to overcome in order to swing that situation around. Chances are good that if you’re still doing recruiting the way you’ve always done it, that your process is broken. The time to fix it is now and here’s why.

We’re getting quite predictable, you and me. We use our consumer behaviors to shop for just about anything, be it a new dishwasher for our home, a software tool for work, or even our next job opportunity. Don’t believe me? Answer these questions. What do you do first when you need to buy a product or service? You go to the internet to research the problem that you need to solve, and you learn about the options available to solve it.