How To Run A Recruitment Campaign For Tech Talent

Knowing how to run a recruitment campaign in a successful way is something we hear clients discuss and worry about a lot. Long gone are the days when a recruitment campaign just involved a job advert and an interview.

Establishing a creative recruitment campaign strategy is now standard for businesses that care about attracting excellent tech candidates. Employees are your best asset and in this tight labour market, you need to fight to secure the best ones.

Even if you have launched an effective recruitment campaign in the past, there are always things you can build on and optimise, especially when hiring IT professionals in the current challenging market conditions.

What is a recruitment campaign?

A recruitment campaign is a business strategy which often has the aim of encouraging more suitable candidates to the roles you want to fill. Ideally, it will help you access both active and passive candidates and boost your brand to potential hires. With the skills shortage plaguing a huge variety of companies and sectors, a creative recruitment campaign can help you stick out from the crowd.

You can think of it as similar to a marketing campaign. It is geared towards a specific target audience, communicates a crucial message, which is then published through multiple channels – usually online. An effective recruitment campaign will speak to the desired potential candidates and entice them to apply.

The most successful campaigns will also build and make the most of your employer brand. Your employer brand is distinct from your corporate brand. You may be used to promoting your corporate brand to clients and customers to get them interested in your services or products. However, your employer brand is about what you as a company are like to work for and how you are perceived as an employer. Having a strong employer brand and capitalising on it in campaigns is a key way of attracting candidates to your company.

How to run a recruitment campaign: Before a job advert goes live

Set clear objectives

This should be your first step. Setting out clear goals will help you to track the campaign’s progress and assess what needs to be changed.

For example, ask yourself what you want to achieve in your next recruitment campaign.

• More applications to your role
• Higher quality of applications
• A wider range of applications from diverse backgrounds

Whichever goal you set for your campaign will affect how you proceed.

Define the target audience

Have you thought about what specifically you are looking for in your next hire?

Defining exactly who you need is the next step in running a recruitment campaign. If you know who you want your candidate to be, you will be able to market your campaign around them.

Consider:

• Experience level
• Sector experience
• Qualifications (specific or general)

For example, do you want a graduate straight out of a top university? Or are you looking for someone who has years of experience, so specific qualifications are less important? If you optimise your job description and promotional tools around the person you want to attract, you have a much better chance of finding them.

Other considerations for your ideal candidate might be their skillset. For software development specialists, you will probably want them to have experience with a specific framework and software. Or, with cloud specialists, you may require skills in a specific cloud environment such as VMWare. Understanding what you and your IT team needs and communicating it throughout the campaign will be crucial to your success.

Determine your EVP (Employee Value Proposition)

In essence, your EVP  is your employee experience. By understanding exactly what your EVP is you can use it to attract candidates effectively, as the star part of your recruitment campaign.

An EVP covers aspects of employee experience such as compensation, benefits, and career progression as well as more abstract things such as company culture and values.

The statistics below highlight the percentage of tech talent that already enjoy these key benefits with their current employers:

• Remote or flexible working options (82%)
• Training opportunities (86%)
• Health benefits (95.6%)

However, it’s not all about benefits. With the ability to be more selective over who to work with, we often see tech talent choosing one company over another due to their culture and strategic goals. For example, 61% of tech professionals want their companies values to align with their own. Sustainability and commitments against climate change are some of the main areas tech professionals want to see their employers becoming actively involved in.

Choose the best channels to promote your company

How and where you raise awareness about your company and your employer brand will affect your ability to attract tech talent. This is connected to defining your target audience. If you know who your preferred candidate may be, you can find out how to best capture their attention.

Consider the following:

• Would you find your ideal candidate through LinkedIn campaigns directed at your network?
• Could company content on your social media showing company socials, trips out, large conferences and thought leadership events entice your future hire?
• Could you create a page on your company website dedicated to internal hiring, promoting company values and benefits which links to your job adverts?
• You may like to consider placing your advert on specialist job boards to get the right candidate’s attention

By being clever about how and where you promote your employer brand, you can formulate a much more creative recruitment campaign and attract a much wider talent pool than if you just post your advert on a general job board.

How to run a recruitment campaign: The recruitment and selection process

Keep candidates engaged

Once the job advert is live on your website and the specialist job boards you’ve chosen to use, the campaign strategy isn’t over! The recruitment and selection process is long and there are risks of highly sought after candidates, especially experienced IT professionals, being snatched up by competitors.

Regularly updating candidates on the process can help keep interested candidates excited about your company. IT recruitment specialists like VIQU, can handle all communications for you. With their sector knowledge, a recruitment consultant will be able to gauge how the candidates are feeling and encourage any extra information out of them you might need.

Assess the process

Is the recruitment and selection phase over? Fantastic! However, before you give yourself a rest and start your next campaign, now would be a good time to refer back to your goals.

Have you achieved what you needed to? Did the campaign improve your recruitment processes? Or is there something that needs to be changed for the future?

And when all else fails… use a specialist IT recruitment agency!

I’m not here to pitch my skills to you – but if you want to work with experts who understand the ins and outs of how to run a recruitment campaign – an IT recruitment agency like VIQU could make a big difference!

If you’re struggling to handle the process yourself, we have extensive experience in supporting and advising on our client’s recruitment campaigns. Creating a recruitment campaign specific to the tech talent requires a lot of work. So if you don’t have the resources to do it yourself, please get in touch. Through a detailed scoping call myself or my colleagues will be able to help assess what your current strategy is and how you might be able to improve it.

We are also able to assist in helping with every aspect of the recruitment and selection process. Some of the ways we can help you save time include:

• Sifting through candidates
• Searching job boards for active and passive candidates
• Booking interview times that work both for you and the candidates
• Conducting and recording first stage interviews you can view at your convenience
• Distributing skill and technical assessments and collecting results
• Requesting and chasing references

If you think that specialist support could help you to take your creative recruitment campaign to the next level, please contact us today.