What HR can learn from product marketing and e-commerce

Imagine an online purchase: You click on a product, move it to the shopping cart, pay for the shopping cart including shipping - and then nothing happens. You receive no confirmation email about the purchase, no tracking number and no follow-up email about the status of the shipment. After days or, in the worst case, weeks of nothing happening, a parcel eventually arrives without comment. This may have been OK in the days of physical mail order catalogs and postcard orders, but what would you think of a company like this today? Probably not much. Would you order something from them again? Probably not. Exactly. The same expectation applies to candidates applying for a job.

The employee market is also a MARKET

What is simply unacceptable in online shopping today is unfortunately still all too often common practice for job applications. Not only do many companies ask for an application by e-mail with attachments instead of a handy form (just imagine if there was no shopping cart in an online store, but you had to write an e-mail and attach pictures to order something!) Keyword form: Recruiting can also learn from e-commerce here: every additional field requested costs conversion - to put it another way: The more data I ask for and the longer the process takes, the higher the probability that applicants will drop out. This also means that it works best without registration, just like an online store, where I can also order as a guest. One in four people in Germany have already abandoned the application process because they had to register; 30% because the process was too complicated. This was the result of a nationally representative survey conducted by the Persona Institute (n=3,000).  

Once I as an applicant have managed to enter my data, often nothing happens: with luck, I receive a confirmation of receipt, anonymously á la "Thank you. We have received your application for job XY".

61.1% of 3,000 people surveyed by the Persona Institute in Germany want something else - just like when buying online: quick feedback. In the context of the application process, they mean a confirmation of receipt including a precise announcement of how the process will continue - preferably personalized and with the following content:

• Thank you for your application,
• information on when the application process is still open,
• an indication of when the first screening, the pre-selection, will take place and by when you can expect initial feedback on your application status
• and who will get back to you - i.e. the contact details of a contact person.

If an interview has taken place, there should also be feedback with information on how exactly (and when) it will continue, whether the candidate is still in the running and if so, in which position or among how many others. Applicants expect maximum transparency. Just like when buying online: on the day of delivery, I find out exactly how many stops DHL's parcel delivery man Marco still has to make before he rings my doorbell between 12:33 and 13:11.

This may sound exaggerated compared to the approach at the turn of the millennium, but for people who have grown up with e-commerce and in an environment with a shortage of skilled workers, this is not "pampering", but standard practice.

Today, HR is a counterpart to sales: the company tries to bring jobs to applicants, ultimately it is not the candidate who applies, but the company. It therefore makes sense to also use sales methods.

Just as advertising for products or services is not only aimed at people who are ACTIVELY looking for something, but often creates needs in the first place according to the AIDA formula (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), it is no longer sufficient for recruiters today to place job advertisements for people who are actively looking for a new job. Most people today are not actively looking, but passively, i.e. they have a job and don't necessarily need a new one, but would be open to a change if it brings them advantages.
There are many figures to back this up - one of the most recent comes from the "Techumanity" study conducted by the Trendence Institute in collaboration with EMBRACE: only 14% of skilled workers and academics in Germany are actively looking for a job. But: 70.1% of academics in Germany and 65.9% of skilled workers in Germany are willing to change jobs - even though more than 80% of them are rather satisfied to very satisfied with their employer.

The job portal is dead. Long live the job portal 4.0

Traditional job boards only serve people who are actively looking for a new job. Furthermore, advertisements can get lost in the masses and attract people that the company is not looking for. Active sourcing, the targeted search, approach and recruitment of new employees and the automatic display of jobs in the form of advertising banners (programmatic job ads, similar to product advertising) work much better with passive searchers. This means that the advertising touchpoints for creating awareness for your own company and the advertised position are completely different from job boards: social media, streaming platforms, classified ad portals, online media, apps, communities - in other words, places where passive job seekers spend their (digital) free time anyway. The decisive factor for companies: good targeting, for traditional job boards: a change in their business model.

Dr. Sebastian Dettmers, Managing Director of Stepstone Continental Europe, therefore considers traditional job boards to be a relic of the past. He believes they need to transform themselves into high-tech HR service providers with intelligent search functions and detailed analysis and offer "the perfect match". To this end, Stepstone already uses intelligent search technology and a team of linguists and data specialists to identify people via Google and social media who would be willing to change jobs. The responsiveness of job portals and the inclusion of social media, as well as the ability to send an application very easily, with just a few clicks and ideally via smartphone while on the move, will become increasingly important in the future. Gone are the days when every application took hours or days and you often had to wait in vain for feedback.
Targeting is also the key success factor here: Who sees my job ad and where? Who likes to be addressed and how? Who trusts whom? Who finds which benefits important in a new job (more money/more free time/more flexibility/more training/more promotion opportunities/flatter hierarchies/different corporate culture...)?

Targeting with personas = perfect match

This is exactly where candidate personas help to gain an authentic understanding of the ideal candidate. If a desired candidate has a face, name, demographic details, interests, behavioral characteristics, goals, details on motivation, worries, fears, everyday problems and media consumption habits, it is as if the recruiters know this person personally.

Instead of standard phrases, you can then use wording, design and imagery in your job advertisements in such a way that the desired candidates recognize themselves in them and feel understood with their wishes and expectations. Almost more importantly, you can place the job ad in specifically suitable media - for example on social media or in blogs (Attention). In this way, you can attract people who may not even know that they are ready to switch (Interest). If not immediately, they first generate the idea in the right minds, for example thanks to storytelling formats with insights into the company (Desire) - which will eventually ignite and lead to an application (Action). Just as with performance marketing, the HR version allows you to measure which measures have generated the best reactions and where there is still room for improvement.

Data-based candidate persona sedcards also help with active sourcing on social media: you can use the sedcard data to search for profiles that match your data-based candidate personas on LinkedIn or Xing, but also Instagram and other platforms, depending on where the target group is located - and then send them a perfectly tailored HR campaign or write to them directly with a text that is perfectly tailored to their needs, i.e. exactly matches their tone of voice. Once a real person has taken the bait, data-driven persona also provides information on how the desired candidate envisages the rest of the process: Online application with just a few clicks via WHICH medium? Interview online or on site? Onboarding tutor rather Mr. X or better Ms. Y? Which brings us back to the scenario mentioned at the beginning: Candidates today are not necessarily looking for jobs, but companies are looking for employees. Those who respond the fastest, offer uncomplicated processes and put people at the center of everything have the best cards in recruiting.