As your organization embarks on budgeting, workforce planning, and strategy development for 2025, it’s essential to address the critical factors that will position your company for success. To plan and progress for the future, you need to understand where you’re starting from. Crafting a 2025 strategy involves auditing and evaluating your strategy and tactics and then using those insights to define clear goals. This may sound straightforward, but these steps can become complex when put into practice. Let’s quickly break down each component.
Auditing Your Current Recruitment Marketing Strategy
Auditing goes beyond simply identifying the products, channels, and vendors (PCVs for short) you’re currently utilizing to achieve your hiring goals. While compiling this list is a key first step, it’s equally important to:
- Identify inefficiencies in how these PCVs are being used, which might involve automating manual processes or modernizing outdated practices.
- Ensure these PCVs are aligned with your overall goals and that they are being deployed effectively.
The process of auditing your PCVs is closely tied to assessing their ROI. However, it’s important to recognize that not all PCVs serve the same purpose, attract the same audience, or generate the same KPIs.
Evaluating ROI of Your Recruitment Marketing Tactics
When assessing the ROI of your tactics, ensure you’re comparing the right metrics. For instance, job boards and social media serve different functions and cannot be evaluated by the same standards; It’s like comparing apples to oranges if you use the same metrics, so to speak.
Expanding on that example, at Appcast, programmatic job advertising on job boards is focused on generating applications for specific positions. Here, the ROI can be measured by the number of applications, qualified applicants, and hires produced—along with metrics like cost-per-application, cost-per-qualified-application, and cost-per-hire.
This differs greatly from how social media channels should be evaluated. Job boards are designed for active job seekers, while social media users engage with content for very different purposes. This difference in user intent leads to distinct objectives and, consequently, different outcomes. Take a look at the graphic below for a better understanding of how we measure success between different channels.
Defining Your Recruitment Marketing Goals
After auditing your strategy and evaluating ROI, it’s time to look ahead and establish your goals. Before developing a new strategy or budget, these goals should form the foundation of your planning.
At Appcast, we simplify this process by focusing on a few core elements:
- Volume of hires – broken down by job type and location when possible.
- Timeline – the timeframe in which these hires need to be made.
- Budget – if a budget hasn’t been defined, we can assist by leveraging data to guide you in setting one.
Lastly, consider your overarching objectives. Are you aiming to generate leads and applications, or is building brand awareness your primary focus? These goals aren’t mutually exclusive and can vary depending on factors such as time, job category, or location.
Clearly defining your goals is a critical step in developing an effective strategy. Different PCVs will support different objectives, but they can complement each other to help achieve your overall hiring goals. It’s just important to ensure they are being leveraged and judged the right way.
Building for 2025:
As you can see, the planning process can be complex—but when done correctly, it can make all the difference in the year ahead. Additionally, these steps build a foundation of data-driven decision making that can be iterated year after year. In short, leaning on the data, understanding your metrics, and clearly defining hiring goals sets you up for success in not only the year ahead, but for years to come as well. We can’t plan for everything, but we can set ourselves up to make better decisions no matter what comes our way.
Do you need help strategizing for the year ahead? Reach out to Appcast to learn more about how we can assist.
