There are several recruitment methodologies, but one of them combines actions that come from the marketing world, and specifically from digital marketing, with recruitment strategies. What is it called? Inbound recruiting. 

In this article we will explain what inbound recruiting is and give you some useful tips for its implementation.

What is inbound recruiting?

Inbound recruiting is a recruiting technique or methodology that seeks to make the applicant interested in joining the company, since it presents an interesting, attractive and different scenario for candidates. This implies shortening the process time and improving its effectiveness. 

This type of methodology prioritizes the search for the most suitable talent for a job vacancy. This involves using specialized media where the candidate who wants to be part of the company is found, which tends to be digital: it is not for nothing that a study conducted by PageGroup in 2023 showed that 44% of Mexicans get jobs on social networks. 

In addition, the focus is to be able to fall in love or seduce the candidate, in order to capture their attention (even if they are not looking for a job), and this involves the creation of a brand image that “employs” that is solid and carefully worked by the human resources area.

Origins of Inbound Recruiting: How it was started and how it relates to inbound marketing

To talk about the inbound recruiting methodology we must first talk about inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is an attractive and seductive strategy that combines different digital tools and strategies, such as content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization to attract customers.

But how does this tie in with inbound recruiting? If inbound marketing aims to attract and retain precious customers thanks to material that is interesting to that audience, this would be the basis for inbound recruiting: attracting the interest of the most talented and potential candidates through different tools, almost “falling in love” with them so that they become part of the company for their own motivation.

The importance of the candidate persona

If inbound marketing has the buyer persona as an axis in its strategy, i.e. a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers that you want to reach (but by seducing and not aggressively invading), inbound recruiting follows from this to establish its candidate persona.

The candidate persona refers to a profile or even a semi-fictional idea (like the buyer persona) of an ideal candidate for a specific job, thus increasing the likelihood of attracting suitable candidates while saving resources.

Defining candidate persona profiles is crucial, as this will help you know who you want to reach and correctly target your talent recruitment strategies to the people you really want to hire.

Differences with traditional recruiting

The arrival of inbound recruiting changed the axis of traditional recruitment methodologies, such as outbound recruiting. Here are some important differences: 

• Proactive vs reactive approach: inbound recruiting focuses on being proactive in generating content that is useful and interesting for potential candidates and thus attracting them, while outbound recruiting involves an active search for candidates to fill vacancies, which involves publishing job offers and reviewing database.
• Person vs. company focus: While outbound recruiting tends to put the company at the center, in inbound recruiting the person is at the center and the recruiting experience is designed to meet the interests and needs of the candidates.
• Medium/long term vs. short term: Inbound recruiting seeks to generate medium and long term relationships based on a high level of work commitment, while outbound recruiting, as its objective is to fill vacancies quickly, does not necessarily focus on generating medium and long term links. 
• Communication focus: While inbound recruiting makes use of social networks with different strategies, its own employment pages, referral programs, email personalization and the use of audiovisual resources in a close way, for example, outbound recruiting resorts mainly to job portals and job boards. Recruiting, as its objective is to fill vacancies quickly, does not necessarily focus on generating medium and long term links.
• Positioning of employer branding: One of the main focuses of inbound recruiting is to make the company appear as an attractive place to work; on the other hand, the outbound method may only echo the general reputation of the company in the market.

How does inbound recruiting work and what are its objectives?

Inbound recruiting works hand in hand with the HR area of a company and pursues several objectives, and some of them are: 

• Capture the right talent that will also be committed to the company’s culture.
• To make the recruitment and hiring process faster and more agile, avoiding or reducing the number of candidates who disappear from the process without notice. 
• Reduce the costs of recruitment and selection processes.
• It seeks to have a base of highly qualified profiles. 
• It seeks to give humanity to the selection and recruitment processes. 

Benefits of inbound recruiting

The fact that inbound recruiting has become popular as a recruitment methodology goes hand in hand with its various benefits or advantages (which, as we shall see, are directly related to its objectives), among which we find: 

• It attracts applicants committed to the brand.
• It attracts candidates from different areas, which broadens the focus.
• The candidate experience is positive compared to traditional methodologies. 
• It puts empathy and affinity between the candidate and the company first, which builds loyalty from the first contact. 
• It helps the image that candidates have of the company.
• It increases the success rate of the hiring process.

How to create an inbound recruiting strategy

While digital tools are pillars to implement inbound recruiting, you must have clear points before starting to implement a strategy that makes use of it. Therefore, you must:

• Know who the candidate persona is in order to reach them and ask yourself questions such as what they are looking for or which social networks they use the most. 
• Know the image that is transmitted to the collaborators and to the outside.
• The previous point implies that you must be clear about who you are as employer branding (values, mission, vision, brand objectives, etc.).

Stages of an inbound recruiting strategy

There are 4 phases or stages of an inbound recruiting strategy, take note: 

• Attract: This stage seeks to attract traffic to your job page and to the job offers you have; and, clearly, a quality traffic composed of your candidate person, because that is where the effort is focused. It is recommended to generate content that provides value and makes clear what it means to work in your company and thus attract the attention of the candidates you are looking for. This can be done through the corporate page or employment page, social networks, external channels and more. 
• Convert: If the right candidates have reached you, it’s time to turn this into a conversion, for example, that they apply for one of your vacancies through the digital tools that you consider most suitable, such as an attractive and clear digital job offer, forms, use of responsive mobile tools, etc. 
• Hire: You already have the candidates, some of them applied and it is time to hire. In this phase the selection process is closed and you reach those who will finally work in the organization. This must be achieved with a quick management of the candidacy and a constant and personalized communication. Having an IT platform for recruitment such as Talent Relationship Management, automated emails to respond, review of the database that already contains talents and analysis of the information and the results of the recruitment process.
• Engaging: This is not the final stage of the process, but rather something that must occur in each part of the process, and take into account that all candidates (whether they are finally hired or not) can be great promoters of your company. You can achieve this by constantly taking care of the candidates’ experience, having a referral program for current employees to refer candidates, conducting surveys to find out what your company’s employees and those who have participated in the company’s selection processes think of your company, for example.

Tips for your inbound recruiting strategy

There may be several tips when it comes to carrying out an inbound recruiting strategy or methodology, such as:

• Worry about designing a clear, transparent and easy-to-access job offer. And throughout the process the candidate should receive an attractive experience that reflects the corporate culture and image (employer branding).
• There must be a value proposition that represents the culture and values of the organization and disseminate it properly so that the candidate knows what the company is really like. 
• Develop a contextualized selection strategy, and this implies not only having a clear idea of the candidate, but also detecting how many candidates are responding to the offer and if they are really the ideal candidates, for example. Analyzing this allows you to develop a contextualized selection strategy with the right message, to the right candidate and at the right time.
• Establish fast, agile, fluid and proactive communication with candidates, which is a good sign for candidates and strengthens the company’s employer branding.
• Consider onboarding as a fundamental part of inbound recruiting, especially in terms of accompanying and speeding up the internalization of the employee who joins the organization. 

As an epilogue to the tips or advice, consider also performing an analysis of the inbound recruiting strategy on an ongoing basis to detect possible failures, find the successes and thus adjust the talent recruitment strategy based on the results.

Examples of companies applying inbound recruiting

As we said at the beginning: inbound recruiting is a growing trend when it comes to recruiting personnel. Well-known companies such as Marriot, Tesla, McDonald’s, Casio, Google, Suzuki, Decathlon and more follow this methodology when recruiting candidates for their vacant positions. 

In this new context of digital and seductive recruitment, Kilpatrick and its HR services can be of great help to companies wishing to implement this methodology, contributing to the identification of the best talent thanks to a correct inbound recruiting strategy.