Tips for Becoming a Talent Marketer

As our culture’s dependence on technology continues to expand, the need for HR professionals to evolve their skillset to include being a talent marketer is ever-present. Becoming a talent marketer is even more vital now that the economy has started to level and the number of job available to job seekers continues to increase. If you want to attract the highest quality applicants to you, you’re going to have to familiarize yourself with how the online hiring landscape works which includes shedding your outdated HR skin and adopting more of an all-encompassing scope in favor of becoming a talent marketer, so you can not only survive, but thrive in today’s fiercely competitive job market.

What exactly is a talent marketer anyway?

Becoming a talent marketer means that you are essentially driving quality job seekers to you in the same way that your marketing team brings in customers.

A talent marketer is an HR professional tasked with hiring that adopts a marketing driven approach to draw top talent. Because the Internet is the primary channel for driving job seekers to apply to your open positions, a talent manager should expand his/her horizons to mirror much of what marketers do when they are trying to navigate the sometimes tumultuous world of creating a solid online presence that draws in quality clients. Becoming a talent marketer means that you are essentially driving quality job seekers to you in the same way that your marketing team brings in customers.

A talent marketer treats applicants with just as much weight (if not more) than customers.

Now that we spent some time creating some definitive guidelines for what a talent marketer actually involves, let’s discuss how to become a high performing talent marketer because this process isn’t just about incorporating a few new steps into your hiring process, it’s about redefining how you perceive your responsibilities as an HR professional. Affirming that a well-rounded talent marketer knows that his/her job of recruiting and hiring the right people for openings is the lynchpin of business. The better foundation your company has in terms of staff, the more likely it is that your organization will flourish. So, your job as a talent marketer is to dedicate yourself to hiring the best possible applicants with as much resolve as your marketing team reserves for seeking a high caliber client pool.

As a talent marketer, you should create a positive job seeker experience.

If your primary goal of becoming a talent marketer is to view your organization’s hiring process through the lens of marketing, then you’re going to need to isolate and analyze every step of that process and identify ways to optimize it or make it more “user friendly.” Part of your work as a talent marketer is to assess wherein you experience the highest drop off for applicants during your hiring cycle. You should be asking yourself strategic questions like: how many applicants am I attracting per job opening? Are they compelled to apply? If you are frustrated because you feel like you aren’t drawing enough applicants to you, then you’ll probably need to rethink your job ad. If you’re simply copying and pasting the same tired ad year after year, then you’re taking your job as a talent marketer seriously. Marketers spend hours poring over the language they use because the majority of the time, that initial ad or event is going to be a potential customer’s first exposure to the company. You don’t need to have a PhD to know that first impressions carry a lot of weight. Similarly, as a strategic talent marketer, you should opt for positively influencing potential applicants by emphasizing what’s in it for them.

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