Recruitment Marketing Platforms: What Tech is Emerging for 2023?

Recruitment marketing platforms are showing increasing signs of sophistication and capability. And in Australia’s current talent-short market where unemployment has hit a record 40-year low, hiring managers need all the help they can get.

Today we’re reviewing the various options in the recruitment marketing platform space, including the emerging technologies that make this category of HR tech, truly exciting.

Just keep this in mind: no recruitment marketing platforms are going to operate at optimum potential, without the strategic support of:

• A strong and relevant employer brand
• A powerful and consistent candidate AND talent communications plan
• The deployment of timely and applicable activity across the right marketing channels, suited to your target candidates and job families
• Internal talent marketing activity that engages and stimulates your existing workforce

Recruitment Marketing Platforms: What Do They Do?

The top-end recruitment marketing platforms, offer HR and hiring managers a strategic partnership to boost the power and efficiency of their recruitment efforts. Essentially, recruitment marketing platforms are software solutions that you can use to market your open jobs and your organisation (that is, your employer brand) to help attract the right candidates for your business.

If you’re familiar with marketing automation platforms like Hubspot, Pardot, or ActiveCampaign, then recruitment marketing platforms will be a breeze. They’re comprised of similar ecosystems, just targeting different audiences.

The better platforms (because we’re not going to go there on the ‘lesser’ players), allow your business to attain key strategic advantages:

• A centralised advertising portal, so you’re always aware of your paid activity and spend across every advertising environment in which you’re active (including Google, social media sponsored activity, and jobboards)
• A centralised platform to place ads across all digital environments suited to your recruitment marketing campaign/s
• The ability to simply and accurately determine the real cost of hiring via a single-source data environment
• Be able to recognise those advertising environments that perform better for your hiring needs, or by job type or by job family

Key Functionality of Recruitment Marketing Platforms

From our research, we uncovered the following key features of the best recruitment marketing platforms on the market today:

1. 🎯 The candidate content management system is a hugely powerful tool that can dynamically personalise the candidate experience based on your knowledge of them. From job listings to the website content presented to the candidate, it feels like the experience was created for them
2. 👩🏼‍💻 Sophisticated job marketing This will allow your job listing to get promoted on jobboards. Integrations with LinkedIn job listings, SEEK, and Indeed are key
3. 🙌🏽 Candidate relationship management functionality where you can both house candidate data, and create multi-step communications workflows that are automated, and AI-powered
4. 🗣 A talent network allows potential hires into a community where they can learn about and engage with your organisation and your existing employees
5. 📃 Rich job descriptions provide the option to enhance job descriptions, with more contextual detail
6. 📣 Social media sharing from a single source to all your nominated platforms
7. 💬 Recruiting chatbots are a great time saver in the early stages of the hiring process, walking candidates through your company’s job application process
8. 📧 Job alerts to your candidate database when relevant jobs open up, suited to their skills
9. 📱 Text messaging to reach candidates on your database immediately
10. 🎤 Event management features that will help you organise or attend recruitment events for your business

The Must-Have Features

Recruitment marketing platforms perform optimally when integrated into your HR tech stack. So, to be a truly powerful hiring partner, from the above list, we recommend you select a platform that can provide the following, at a minimum:

1. A content management system (like that powering your company website), which hosts your career site, and is the central destination for candidates. As mentioned above, this is also the key to personalisation and contextualising of your content, for specific candidates
2. The candidate relationship management system. This serves both as a talent database for your business, and a communications and engagement tool
3. Marketing and distribution of your job listings

Platforms without these basics aren’t worth considering.

The other factors to look out for when selecting the right platform for your business include:

• 🚨 Ease-of-use: if the user interface is complex or overwhelming, your HR or recruitment staff won’t use it. I’d even go as far as to suggest this is arguably the #1 selection criteria
• 🚨 Efficiency: the platform needs to perform under pressure, especially in larger, more complex workforces. So look for features that enable your HR team to get the job done efficiently and effectively
• 🚨 Value for money: do your comparisons of platforms on a per-user basis. Affordability for both large and small organisations is available in the market today
• 🚨 Native integrations with your applicant tracking system and HRIS are important selection criteria. Your endgame needs to be about creating a single, trusted environment for managing your recruitment marketing and hiring activities

Which Recruitment Marketing Platform is Right for Your Business?

There are several highly credentialed recruitment marketing platforms for you to consider.

We think the following platforms stack up (please note, we don’t have any commercial relationships with these technology providers):

💡 Jobvite: known for great AI capability, especially when matching jobs to candidates.

💡 Teamtailor: a recruitment software that leans heavily on the amplification of the employer brand.

💡 Freshteam: impressive intelligent job marketing, including referrals functionality and leading the way on customisation.

💡 Manatal: a recruitment software with an impressively easy-to-use interface.

💡 Symphony Talent: better known for its capability for programmatic advertising solutions, combined with your careers site and CRM.

Keep in mind, many of the platforms on the market today, offer an integrated solution of applicant tracking, recruitment process management, and candidate database management. So, when assessing your company’s needs for recruitment marketing, make sure you’ve identified the gaps in your existing HR tech stack, where a recruitment marketing platform can seamlessly integrate.

Also, please do contact us if you have any feedback or comments.

As one of the world’s leading providers of contingent worker management solutions, CXC is well-positioned to optimise all elements of your contingent workforce strategy.

With operations in more than 50 countries across five continents and decades of experience, we can assist with every aspect of your program.

If you are interested in discussing recruitment marketing platforms, please don’t hesitate to contact us.