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To tap into this, one of India’s largest online recruiters, Naukri, offers corporate clients a feature by which they can send an SMS to prospects to gauge interest levels in a position. According to Naukri, this will help prospective employers draw up shortlists that are more “real” while not losing valuable lead time in reaching out to potential hires.
Mobile job portals can also be set up by companies who do a substantial amount of in-house recruitment. Mass media campaigns can effectively direct traffic to these sites. WAP , XHTML applications running on GPRS offer palatable speeds and offer new ways to connect with prospects. One such neat little trick is called “click to call”. On selecting the “click to call button” on the portal, the application engineers a call from the mobile to the recruiter. This is then directed into IVRS channels that ensure immediate call back from the company to the job seeker.
Tools for the new age recruiter
• SMS to prospects
• Mobile job portals
As the ubiquity of media in general and mobile media in specific increases, corporate marketing campaigns will get many such creative tools to lure customers, partners and certainly potential employees. Keep in mind that overall ambient noise in the medium–direct marketing over-kill, unsolicited mobile messaging, surfeit of media options– is bound to go up. Creativity in the marketing approach will be needed to stand out in the clutter of billboards and buzzing wireless signals. Lest your message perish like one more dropped call in congested cellular networks!
When a global consumer electronics firm that was setting up its telecom operations in India zeroed in on few senior executives they wanted to hire, they came up against a likely problem. The executives, who were being head-hunted, likely did not know much about the prospective employer, since the company at that time had no base at all in India. How was the company to ensure that they received a positive response to their overtures?
The resulting solution that the Company’s advertising agency came up with was nothing but unusual. Weeks ahead of the calls from the headhunter, the company rolled out billboards running a corporate campaign near the homes of the executives targeted and along work commute routes. With the campaign literally “in the face”, the execs were familiar with the company within the positive context created by the ads, by the time the headhunter's calls actually went out.
Recruitment is not so much about operations as it is about marketing and strategy.
In today’s supply biased recruitment environment, no strategy, it seems is too far fetched or unusual. Recruitment is not so much about operations as it is about marketing and strategy. Employers need
to stand out in the information clutter created by the clamor of an overheated recruitment market. Which is why several companies opted to appear in a reality show where they proceeded to interview and hire prospects! While no data is available about how successful the recruitments were, harnessing unexpected media has shock value that provides differentiation.
Recruitment advertising, since it reaches out to a larger audience, has potential for more play using mass media, as against corporate campaigns. New channels suchas mobilemedia also offer creative opportunities for recruitment advertising. With most organizations blocking popular recruitment sites, prospective employees remain firewalled for most of the day. However companies (as yet) do not have rules for mobile phone usage, particularly use of silent applications running on SMS and GPRS, and this presents a real opportunity.
