For the growth of any business, increasing the number of employees is as essential as increasing the number of customers. Recruiting the best talent has therefore become a priority for HR professionals. However, this task is proving increasingly difficult due to the war for talent. Traditional methods of recruitment and personnel management have given way to more innovative approaches adapted to the digital age. Among these, inbound HR is emerging as an indispensable new tool in the toolbox of business leaders. What is it? Why is this strategy essential? How to implement it? Find on this page the answers to these various questions.
Inbound HR: what is it?
Still called inbound recruiting, inbound HR is a recruitment method that consists of applying the principles of inbound marketing strategy to the field of human resources. Indeed, inbound marketing is an approach that aims to create quality content to attract potential customers, rather than aggressively soliciting them. Similarly, inbound HR seeks to attract and recruit the best talent by creating an attractive environment for potential candidates. The main goal is to create a positive relationship with them and encourage them to engage with the company proactively.
The institution must therefore offer informative and engaging content to engage talent instead of simply posting job postings and passively waiting for applications. These can be blog posts, infographics, videos, or webinars that showcase your employer brand and offer useful information about:
- the sector;
- the company;
- corporate culture;
- the benefits offered;
- career opportunities;
- topics related to industry and professional development, etc.
With the inbound HR approach, it is possible to create, manage, and optimize your pool of qualified candidates by sharing your values and positioning. To this end, employee testimonials collected via a trusted platform of employee reviews can also be very useful. When they are positive, they testify to the qualities of your company and complement or support your information.
Why adopt HR inbound within your company?
Abandoning outbound recruiting in favor of inbound HR is a solution that more and more companies are adopting. This enthusiasm is due to the many advantages of this new recruitment method. Here are a few.
Recruiting the best talent on the market
This is one of the main advantages of inbound recruiting: developing a company’s brand image to recruit the best talent. Indeed, with this new recruitment technique, you can easily attract profiles that meet your needs and respect your values. It presents you to candidates as a unique employer by highlighting your values, your benefits, your working conditions, etc. These various elements highlighted will appeal to candidates who:
- are interested in your business;
- have taken the time to get to know you;
- have the ideal profile as well as the skills you are looking for.
Inbound recruiting or incoming recruitment allows you to have more qualitative applications.
Creating an exceptional candidate experience
Inbound HR looks at each stage of the candidate’s journey, from awareness to application, interview, and integration. Based on the principle that each employee is unique, it offers a personalized approach to meet the needs of workers individually.
Companies can therefore offer tailor-made development opportunities, tailored training plans, and evolving career paths. By ensuring a smooth, personalized, and engaging experience at every stage, they strengthen their reputation and appeal to candidates. On the other hand, inbound HR promotes employees’ sense of belonging and engagement, which contributes to increased productivity and overall job satisfaction.
Save time and resources
Traditional recruitment methods can be expensive, especially in terms of advertising job offers and outsourcing. On the other hand, inbound HR, by naturally attracting motivated and interested candidates, reduces the costs related to sourcing and sorting applications. In addition, recruitment based on referrals from existing employees, which often results from implementing this approach, can significantly reduce costs.
In addition, with HR inbound, you develop a base of qualified candidates that saves you time during sourcing and acquisition. This results in an acceleration of the recruitment process, which is a huge advantage.
Building a strong employer brand
Inbound HR is intrinsically linked to building a strong and attractive employer brand. It allows companies to actively shape their image in the recruitment market. By sharing employee testimonials, workplace videos, and success stories, you authentically demonstrate what you offer as an employer. This transparency and authenticity attracts candidates who feel aligned with the company’s vision and values. You can find more information on Google by searching topics like: “Employer branding: the challenges for a company” and “The interest of employer branding“.
Conversion of passive candidates
Inbound HR is an excellent way to reach so-called passive talents, those who are not necessarily looking for a job. With outbound recruiting methods, such as posting ads on job boards, it is almost impossible to reach these talents. Among them, however, are the ideal profiles for your company. On the other hand, with the relevant content of inbound recruiting, you can easily get passive candidates interested in your professional opportunities.
Growing visibility
Setting up an inbound recruiting strategy allows you to use several channels to reach your targets. Among other things, you can:
- participate in or organize professional events;
- launch a communication campaign on social networks;
- produce SEO-optimized content, etc.
With your candidate persona, you will know your target candidate better and identify the channels that can reach them to develop your presence. This will help you increase your visibility. In addition, this strategy attentive to the candidate’s experience can create a snowball effect. Satisfied candidates will share their positive impressions with others, which will increase awareness of the company.
How to implement Inbound HR in your company?
The implementation of an inbound recruiting recruitment strategy is a long-term task that nevertheless ends with a very satisfactory result. Just like inbound marketing, inbound recruiting involves several major steps for talent management in business: identify, retain, and value.
Attracting visitors
The objective of this stage of the HR inbound campaign is to attract the attention of potential candidates by creating relevant and attractive content. To begin, you need to define your candidate persona, that is, the ideal profile of the candidate you want. Identify the skills, personality traits, and values you’re looking for. The definition of your target will allow you to know it and identify the appropriate channels to use to reach it.
Then, think about working on your employer brand, because any company wishing to attract and retain its employees must return an attractive image as an employer. After that comes the implementation of the content marketing strategy. It consists of producing engaging content that you will publish on your various communication channels (website or career, blog, social networks, job boards, mailbox, etc.).
This may include:
- educational content on relevant topics;
- employee or project presentations;
- employee testimonials;
- interactive online events on current topics, etc.
These various types of content should address topics related to your industry, your institution, and your company culture. Enrich them with relevant keywords to improve their visibility in search results.
Convert
In this phase, the goal is to convert leads into potential candidates by collecting their contact information. You can therefore offer premium content that you will offer as exclusive resources (white papers, webinars, case studies) in exchange for the contact details of interested visitors. Another solution is to embed capture forms on your website to collect their information. Also, place relevant calls to action (call-to-action or CTA) on your site and content. This will encourage visitors to take specific steps like signing up for a newsletter or applying for a job.
Recruit
This step aims to evaluate and select the most suitable candidates among the visitors who have expressed interest. Schedule and conduct interviews with candidates to assess their technical skills and cultural fit. With the data collected in the previous phase, you can personalize the experience of each of them during the recruitment process. Set up nurturing workflows that will allow you to send personalized content to your prospects and keep them engaged over time.
To select the best talents, use tests, evaluations, or scenarios as well as scoring grids. Thus, you will assess the behavioral skills and personality traits of the different candidates.
Retain
After recruitment, it is essential to maintain a positive relationship with new employees and integrate them effectively into the company. Provide them with a solid onboarding experience to help them become familiar with your company culture, processes, conditions, etc. Provide opportunities for professional development and progression within the institution to encourage talent retention. Regularly collect the opinions and suggestions of your employees while involving them in the company’s life. As for unrecruited candidates, keep them in the pool by maintaining contact with them through regular exchanges or communications about your job offers.
