Achieve Your Recruitment Goals in the New Year
Ms. Pomerantz has served as the Chief Executive Officer of Mary Pomerantz Advertising for the past twenty five years. She was formerly the Chief Executive Officer of Pomerantz Staffing, which grew to be one of the largest privately-owned staffing companies in the US under her leadership.
As a new year begins, Mary Pomerantz Advertising stands ready to provide your organization the most cost-effective help with recruitment possible. However, to get the best return on your investment, you need a proactive strategy that is designed to meet your company’s specific recruitment goals. That makes defining these goals a critical first step in the process. This is an area where our experienced staff can help you, but it often begins with your own answers to some basic questions, such as:
- Do you expect your business to grow over the coming year?
- What level of staff turnover or “churn” seems likely at your company?
- Do the skills of your current staff match what you’ll need in the short term? – the long term?
- Have you noticed a change in the quality of recent job candidates?
- What level of resources do you expect to have available for recruitment?
The answers to these questions can go a long way toward helping you define your company’s recruitment goals for the upcoming year, and, once you have these goals defined, we can work together on devising a strategy to achieve them.
The Importance of Being Proactive
Oftentimes, companies approach recruiting employees in a purely reactive way; when business needs change or employees are fired, quit or retire – a mad scramble ensues to fill newly opened positions as quickly as possible. This is almost never the best approach in terms of the quality of the staff hired or the cost-effectiveness of the hiring process. By being reactive instead of proactive in your recruitment efforts, time pressure can lead to hiring individuals with questionable expertise or qualifications and spending more than is necessary in a “brute force” attempt to fill the open position rapidly
Finding the Right Help with Recruitment Strategy
However, it can be difficult to take this kind of proactive approach when you only have access to “in-house” resources for your company’s recruitment needs. This is where a recruitment advertising agency like Mary Pomerantz Advertising can make a critical difference; our outside perspective and extensive expertise can provide the help with recruitment planning and budgeting that makes your efforts truly proactive and strategic. After you have defined your company’s recruitment goals, we can work closely with you to craft a proactive strategy to meet them in the coming year.
Effective Recruitment Starts With an Employer Brand
Once you adopt a proactive approach to recruitment, you can plan ahead, enabling you to use your resources much more efficiently. One of the best ways to do this is to make sure that you have a clear and coherent “employer brand” for your company. This is a consistent message that communicates what your company offers as an employer to potential candidates. It is also something that is best built over time through multiple media options. Even if you are not currently actively recruiting candidates for open positions at the moment, building this employer brand will help with recruitment when you do. The best employer brands will even help you to amass potential candidates during the periods that you aren’t actively recruiting, giving you a pool of talent you can draw from when you are.
Elements of an Employer Brand
Your employer brand needs to clearly define what your company brings to the table for potential employees. This could be a specific type of company culture or values; it could also include more specific elements such as pay, benefits, or opportunities for advancement. For some organizations an employer brand might also focus on the impact an employee can make on their communities or in the lives of others. Each organization will be different in these respects, but the one important constant is that this brand must be communicated clearly and consistently across all company communications to make the maximum impact on your recruitment efforts.
Where to Build Your Employer Brand
So, where’s the best place to start building your employer brand? For many companies their career website or career section of their company website as a great starting point. Does your online presence convey an accurate and compelling reason for candidates to want to work for your organization? If not, MPA can help you get it there quickly and cost-effectively. Once you have accomplished this, we can also help you ensure that all of your employment-related materials and communications share the same consistent employer branded message. This can range from recruitment advertising in print and online to your social media presence on platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Other areas include recruitment-themed brochures and displays for open houses or job fairs, press releases, and even employment applications. At MPA we can help you build a consistent and persuasive employer brand to help with recruitment across a diverse array of media options.
Taking Advantage of Media Contracts
After building up your employer brand on multiple fronts, where else can a proactive approach to recruitment help you succeed? One area in which we have found great success for our clients is in negotiating advertising contracts with different media. If you have a long-term plan and budget for your recruitment, you are poised to take advantage of the variety of cost-saving contracts that different publications and websites offer to frequent advertisers. The savings from these contracts can be quite extensive, and MPA can help you to identify which contract levels at which sites or publications best meet your needs. This is an area where an objective outside partner like MPA is critical, as many of these media options will (understandably) try to sell you on “putting all of your eggs in one basket” (with their company), instead of spreading your recruitment advertising message across the best mix of venues. We can help you develop a balanced plan that targets all segments of the audience you want to reach.
Analytics and Flexibility
By now, you should see the advantages to a long-range approach to meeting your recruitment goals. However, how do you really know that strategy you employ is working as effectively and efficiently as possible? This is another area where partnering with a recruitment advertising agency like Mary Pomerantz Advertising can be particularly important. By using cutting-edge analytics of all of your recruitment efforts, we can identify which elements of your strategy are performing the best and help you adjust your planning and execution “on the fly” to make sure that you are getting the best return on your recruitment investment. In practice this can mean shifting resources from one type of media to another, “tweaking” taglines or advertising copy for maximum effectiveness, or employing any number of Search Engine Optimization techniques in response to real-time data collected from the behavior of your online audience. At MPA we have experts in all of these areas who can track each element of your strategy and make changes based upon quantifiable results from your campaigns. This means that every recruitment strategy we help you develop is being constantly optimized to give you the best possible “bang for the buck.”
Start the New Year Off Right
As 2019 begins, we encourage you to tap into the extensive expertise of the staff at Mary Pomerantz Advertising for help with recruitment at your organization. Today’s tight employment market is not the time to treat employee recruitment as an afterthought to your company’s plans for the future. We can help you devise a proactive recruitment advertising strategy that gives you the best return on investment possible, while still being flexible enough to respond to changing conditions. Start the New Year off right by ensuring that your organization has the best possible workforce to help you meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Call us at 732-214-9600 to “get the ball rolling” right after it has dropped in Times Square.
