Want to Win the War for Talent? Enlist your Marketing and BD Team

There’s no denying that the pandemic has introduced a new era of scarcity into our lives. From toilet paper to microchips, there seems to be a shortage of nearly everything these days. The AEC industry has not been spared from this challenge, and now most firms are facing the prospect of increasing workloads combined with a shrinking number of job seekers. You may think you have checked all the boxes when it comes to attracting talent – you have excellent benefits, competitive salaries, happy employees, and a pleasant corporate culture. Maybe you even have a stellar recruiting team. Yet your open positions remain unfilled. How can you flip this script?

As Sun Tzu says, “make your way by unexpected routes.” In other words, when all of your competitors are offering roughly the same benefits, you must do something creative in order to win the war for talent. Enlisting the help of Marketers and Business Developers is a great way to inject creativity and a unique form of expertise into your recruitment efforts. Here are some ways that we can help.

Refreshing Your Recruitment Messaging
At their essence, marketers are communicators. We are professionally trained to analyze an opportunity and “spin” your firm’s strengths into key differentiators that make someone choose you over your competitors. Recruiting is simply marketing, but to a different audience. Many marketers have excellent writing skills and can help you freshen up your recruitment messaging, make job descriptions more appealing, and help target specific demographics.

Amplifying the Message
Typically the marketing department controls a wide array of communications channels that the firm uses to communicate with the world. This can include things like your website, social media, email marketing, blog, internal intranet, and more. Many of these channels which are traditionally used for marketing can also be used for recruitment. Additionally, marketers are trained in how to use these channels to further amplify the message – for example, paid social media campaigns on LinkedIn or a social media content strategy that leverages your employees’ personal networks can dramatically increase the number of people you are reaching.

Cultivating Your Employer Brand
Just like your company has an external brand that you showcase to the world, you also have an internal “employer brand” that is based on your reputation as a place to work. In a perfect world, your external brand and your employer brand align and complement one another, but they are not the same. Your employer brand is heavily reliant on your culture and how your employees feel about the firm and the experience of working there. Just as marketers work diligently to build and maintain your external brand, we can leverage those same skills to enhance your employer brand.

Sourcing Candidates
People are far more likely to come to work for you if they know someone at your company – so long as that person has good things to say! In fact, LinkedIn data shows that up to 70% of people go to work at a company where they already have a connection in place. Guess what? We marketers and business developers know people. It is our job to know people. And it is our job to seek out people we don’t know and get to know them. You can see where this is going. Tap into your marketing and BD team’s professional network to supplement your recruiting team’s efforts. They likely have relationships with those passive job seekers who are so difficult to find and win over.

These are just a few ways that Marketing/BD can contribute to your recruiting effort and put you one step ahead of your competitors. There are many other ways that Marketing, BD, and HR can work together to raise the bar within an organization. Stay tuned for more on this subject in the future.