According to 63% of marketers, generating traffic and leads is their top challenge in 2018.

More and more, recruiters are observing this trend, alongside the now-inevitable convergence between digital customer acquisition strategy and sourcing 2.0.

The reasoning is simple: if a company's website becomes the best generator of business opportunities, why shouldn't the career site become the generator of application opportunities?

Lead generation, the new avatar of Marketing

Lead generation is a process of stimulating and captivating the interest of prospects in a product or service in order to develop one's sales pipeline.

This translates concretely into the registration of qualified sales contacts called leads.

In the old days, not experienced by anyone under twenty, the web as a mass marketing tool did not exist. The only way to generate leads was by attending trade shows, cold-calling or door-to-door, hand-filling newsletters, etc.

The old world, really!

Today, things have changed somewhat.

Previously, salespeople had to rely on methods such as door-to-door sales to gather leads

Now, the first step to generating leads is to get traffic to your website.

For this, you can rely in particular on " paid " or " natural " referencing.

SEA (Search Engine Advertising or paid search) can be an effective way to generate traffic quickly to one's site.  Nevertheless, it has some limitations and needs to be underpinned by an effective SEO (Search Engine Optimization or natural search engine optimization) strategy.

Beyond SEO, to increase qualified traffic to your website in a sustainable way, you can turn to a holistic strategy of Inbound Marketing - a strategy based in particular on the creation and distribution of premium content.

Getting a lot of traffic is not an end in itself: you then need to generate and qualify your leads through contact forms accessible on Landing Pages via Call-to-Action.

Recruiting in the age of the "Lead Gen"

Your career site is the hub of your employer-brand - an invitation to discover and share your values and history, a source of information, a place for exchange and interaction with your employees, etc.

It is also a major reference for candidates.

According to Potential Park, " 34% of candidates decided not to apply to the company they were interested in following their visit to the career site ".

Your career site is the cornerstone of your reputation as an employer and has the potential to become your primary candidate magnet, ahead of even the job boards.

The objection I often hear is:

"Why would I set up lead generation on my career site when I already have a ATS that picks up my applications?"

The answer is simple:

An ATS is meant to record and process the specific action of applying for a specific job, whereas lead generation is meant to build a community around the employer brand, a pool from which you can draw later.

With career site lead generation, you're no longer looking to optimize your application repositories, but to grow your talent pipeline.

How to implement lead generation on your career site

To do lead generation on your career site, you can adapt Marketing methods to your recruitment strategy.

This can be classic " Outbound " advertising solutions, such as paid search, or (and this is what we are concerned with ! ) you can apply the Inbound Marketing strategy to your recruitment or Inbound Recruiting.

Capture the attention of your future candidates with your career site

What is Inbound Recruiting ?

The 'Inbound Recruiting is an Inbound Marketing strategy, applied to recruitment.

It's all about capturing the attention of candidates (especially passive) by creating and distributing premium relevant and regular content. It involves the use of a multitude of tools and communication channels : not only written content, but also video, social networks, podcast, quizzes, etc.

In this example, our client BPCE has set up a quiz to determine their profile. Beforehand, the candidate must fill out a form to identify himself as lead.

Quiz on BPCE Group career site to generate candidate leads

This varied content is targeted to well-defined Candidate Persona - you're creating content that your target audience is actually interested in (rather than just relaying job postings).

Thanks to the traffic generated on your career site by this quality content, you can generate and qualify candidate leads, build a trusting relationship with them, and lead them toward an application.

It is, ultimately, a way to move towards Slow Recruitment - a strong employer brand is built over time, choosing a company is the gradual adherence to an authentic identity.

By curating your career site and leveraging an Inbound Recruiting strategy to generate leads, you don't hustle candidates.

You get into their rhythm, build lasting, trusting relationships with your " candidate leads " and move toward quality hires.

This way, you unearth the profiles that fit you and who you fit!"