Keeping your employer’s brand and opportunities top of mind for students, new grads, and early career talent is paramount in today’s recruitment landscape. In our work with our clients at TalentEgg, we have found employers experience the greatest success in this regard when they:
- Give candidates a real look at “what’s behind the curtain” in your industry and organization
- Commit to Investing in skill-building, early career development, and well-being of your workforce
- Target and show up often in the digital sphere of Gen Z talent
- Help candidates stand out and demonstrate their skills
- Share compelling stories that candidates can see themselves reflected in
- Take a multi-faceted and high touch approach during peak recruitment periods
Last month, we explored approach # 2 – Commit to investing in your workforce’s skill-building, early career development, and well-being and marked the launch of the TalentEgg e-Learning Academy!
In this edition, we will take a deeper dive into approach # 3 – Target and often show up in Gen Z Talent’s digital sphere.
Before the pandemic in March 2020, thought leaders in campus recruitment often talked about “boots on ground” approaches and a need to “show up” often in students, new grads, and early career talent’s environments as parts of an effective campus strategy. To some extent, this also involved having a strong social media presence.
In the age of virtual recruitment and hybrid learning, frequent engagement and “showing up” where the talent you need is already spending time is an even more vital ingredient to campus recruitment and employer branding success. An established social media presence has proven essential but is rarely enough on its own. So, what are some of the other effective ways you can engage students and new grads digitally?
One of the most powerful tools you can have in today’s recruitment toolkit is the ability to tailor your messaging and target your engagement to the audiences you most want to reach. Whether it is those in a specific program or area of study, particular geography or demographic, or those with a certain set of interests, or even speak an additional language, digital engagement enables you to be as targeted in your outreach as you like.
Many of our clients have successfully promoted their brand and opportunities using targeted e-mail blasts and mobile marketing campaigns. This blend provides vehicles for telling their career story, driving traffic to their digital content (e.g. videos, blog posts/editorials) and building awareness of their events and opportunities on a large scale but also a curated audience based on their recruitment needs.
Mobile marketing ads appear where your target audience is already spending time online. And students and new grads have been shown to click these ads at twice the average industry rate. This tells us they are paying attention and engaging with content that appeals to their career interests.
Here are some examples of these marketing tools in action:
Evolution Mining is newer to the Canadian campus recruitment space. They have effectively used e-mail blasts to introduce themselves to students and new graduates with backgrounds in science, mining, geology, environmental science, technology, and engineering, promote their virtual information sessions, and encourage candidates to apply to their new graduate programs.
They have also leveraged mobile marketing to ensure they reach potential candidates from communities close to their mine site, studying at their target schools, or actively interested in a career in mining.
EF Tours needed to find talent for their bilingual sales team based in communities around Montreal. Mobile marketing enabled them to engage a broader pool of candidates with the skills, language profile, interests, and experience they were looking for.
In addition to targeting, consistency in your digital engagement and keeping your brand front and centre with candidates during key recruitment periods are also highly effective. Several of our clients have found leaderboard and pop-up ads to be excellent vehicles for this type of engagement.
Rogers utilizes pop-up ads on TalentEgg’s main pages to drive students and new grads to their open opportunities and to discover more about what it is like to work at Rogers via their employer profile.
Chick-fil-A invites top student and new grad talent to explore their leadership development program and learn more about their distinct workplace culture.
Leaderboard ad
Pop-up ad
Finally, think about ways you can take a few chances and engage Gen Z on other platforms that are a big part of their digital sphere. Recently, TalentEgg has been experimenting with content creation and engagement on TikTok. Over the last few months, we have been steadily increasing our followers and have seen some solid engagement with the career content our team has been sharing on the platform.
If you’re feeling brave and want to pilot sharing some of your own branded content via our TikTok account, reach out to us! We’d love to collaborate with you!!
In summary, target your audience, be consistent with staying top of mind, and don’t be afraid to take a few chances and experiment. These are three tactics TalentEgg has found to be very useful in engaging with and recruiting top students, new graduates, and early career talent in a virtual world.
Until next time…
